Florian Brody

Co-inventor of Voyager's Expanded Books, the first electronic books to be read on a laptop, Brody is an international marketing executive and digital media specialist with over 25 years of experience. He has co-founded several start-ups and raised significant amounts of venture funding, creating multiple groundbreaking digital publishing solutions in Europe and the US.

Brody has been a partner at The Halo Agency, a marketing and communications strategy firm in San Francisco. He has worked with early-stage start-ups like Cimbal and Envizio in the mobile payment space and Visuv and Eyegorithm in the visual search space. He has served as head of marketing at Amazon's A9.com, PaymentOne, YouSendIt and as head of print product marketing at InterTrust.

Earlier, he built the multi-media market for Apple Austria and developed digital media catalogs at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. As a pioneer in the CD-ROM space, Brody developed early projects in central Europe for library information applications and created the first commercially available Kodak interactive PhotoCD.

He has worked with early-stage companies in the Silicon Valley and Europe and taught eBusiness strategies at the Universities in Linz, Austria and Magdeburg, Germany. He has served as a member of the graduate faculty at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and has been professor for multimedia at the University of Applied Sciences, Salzburg. Brody has actively promoted collaboration between European countries and the Silicon Valley and initiated an incubator for Austrian start-ups.

He has served as co-chair for the media and entertainment chapter at GABA, the German American Business Association, advisor to AICSV, the Austrian Innovation Center in the Silicon Valley, and has been founding president at ASCINA, the Association of Austrian Scientists in North America. Brody grew up in Vienna, where he studied computer linguistics, worked at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and worked as a fashion photographer in Vienna. He is an internationally acclaimed speaker, has presented at multiple TEDx conferences, and has been published in multiple languages.

In his 1999 article "The Medium is the Memory," published as a chapter of The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, he analyzes human development from the perspective of memory set in pure orality (ancient times) to machine-enhanced memory (modernity). In the case of new computer-based media, Brody argues that, unlike film, the digital media have the potential to emerge as a new type of book—"a memory machine in and of itself."