Andrew Weinreich ( ) is an American

serial entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

. He is a pioneer in the field of social networking and has been starting and building businesses since 1997.

Education & career

Weinreich graduated from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

in 1990. He also holds a J.D. from Fordham University. After graduating from law school, Weinreich practiced law as General Counsel and served as Vice President for the Hertz Technology Group. He had also worked as a financial analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. Weinreich has served as Chairman of Xtify, Founder and Chairman of MeetMoi LLC, Director of AskIt Systems, Director of Drop.io, Inc., Chairman of Board of Organic Network Inc., and Director of Organic Network Inc. He has also served as Member of Advisory Board at Visible Path Corporation and at SNAP Interactive, Inc. since September 2012.

Entrepreneurship

SixDegrees

In 1997, Weinreich launched

SixDegrees Six degrees may refer to: * Six degrees of separation, the theory that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries * Six degrees of freedom, motion in ...

. The online company was the first of its kind to allow users to identify relationships with people they know and then query for people they didn’t know through established connections, based upon the

Six degrees of separation Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also k ...

theory by Stanley Milgram. Though other services existed with similar features, SixDegrees was the first social media network to allow users to create a profile, show their friends list, and search through their friends list. Weinreich authored the first patent on social networking, “Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system,” commonly known as the Six Degrees patent, which secured the social media network's software code. At its height, SixDegrees had close to 100 employees and 3,500,000 fully registered members. The company was sold to YouthStream Media Networks in 1999 for $125 million. The site was closed in 2000. Weinreich later said, in reference to SixDegrees preceding the advent of widespread digital photography, "We had board meetings where we would discuss how to get people to send in their pictures and scan them in. The real difference in 2002 was that by then people had digital cameras."

Joltage

In 2001, Weinreich founded Joltage, an infrastructure services business devoted to building out a global network of

Wi-Fi hotspot A hotspot is a physical location where people can obtain Internet access, typically using Wi-Fi technology, via a wireless local-area network (WLAN) using a router connected to an Internet service provider. Public hotspots may be created b ...

s. The company was considered "slightly ahead of its time", hoping to "spread Wi-Fi's footprint one base at a time to neighborhoods, office parks and campuses." Joltage was forced to shut down in 2003 when the company ran out of funding.

I Stand For

In 2003, Weinreich started I Stand For, Inc., a technology solution to transfer political fundraising online with content management and community solutions. He said about the venture: "My vision five years ago was to revolutionize social networking (...) Now, it’s to revolutionize building member and constituent bases for political campaigns, not-for-profit organizations and other member-based businesses.” He sold the company in February 2006.

MeetMoi

In February 2006, Weinreich co-founded MeetMoi with Jeremy Levy. MeetMoi offers “the first location-based mobile dating service,” combining Xtify's persistent location discovery and push notification technology. The site currently has over 3 million users. When asked about MeetMoi's push-notification based platform, Weinreich responded, “There is intelligence in the cloud and it should follow you wherever you want to be followed.”

Xtify

In 2008, Weinreich and Jeremy Levy spun off the persistent tracking technologies of MeetMoi into a separate company called Xtify. Xtify was "the first geo-notification API that powers 'persistent location,' allowing a user’s location to be extracted from a mobile device on a periodic and continuous basis." Xtify was acquired by IBM on October 3, 2013. The ‘Location-based services platform' patent, invented by Weinreich ''et al.'', is a platform providing location-based services and location data to third-party service providers, currently utilized by Xtify.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Weinreich, Andrew Living people American technology company founders American technology chief executives University of Pennsylvania alumni Fordham University alumni American inventors People from Brooklyn Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people)