Jack Smith is an American businessman who co-founded the first free

web-based email Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are 1&1 Ionos, AOL Mail, Gm ...

service,

Hotmail.com Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services. Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...

in 1996. He has been the

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

of Proximex since 2007.

Career

Jack Smith worked at FirePower Systems Inc., a subsidiary of Canon Inc., where he designed integrated circuits for use in high performance

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

workstations, and invented and marketed the first web server accelerator card that boosted server performance significantly. Later on at

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

, he worked on several of Apple's early

PowerBook The PowerBook (known as Macintosh PowerBook before 1997) is a family of Macintosh laptop computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from 1991 to 2006. During its lifetime, the PowerBook went through several major revisions and r ...

computers. He has been the founder and president of EEE.com, building custom Internet web solutions. Smith came up with the idea for anonymous web-based email in 1995, and worked with Sabeer Bhatia, his colleague at Apple, to found the company. The company opened on July 4, 1996 with Smith as its Chief Technology Officer. In December 1997, Bhatia sold Hotmail to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

for a reported $400 million. Smith went on to co-found

Akamba Corporation The Kamba or Akamba (sometimes called Wakamba) people are a Bantu ethnic group who predominantly live in the area of Kenya stretching from Nairobi to Tsavo and north to Embu, in the southern part of the former Eastern Province. This land is ...

and work as its CEO. He had also served as a Director of Engineering of

, first heading its Hotmail engineering division, and then leading a team developing next generation Internet software infrastructure."Executive Profile: Jack Smith"
''

Bloomberg Businessweek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

'' In 2007 he was named CEO of Proximex.

Career

References

Further reading