Tristan Louis
Principal, TNL.net

Web site

Tristan Louis is an Internet veteran, having worked in the Internet industry since 1993. Throughout the years, Mr. Louis has been known as the founder of Internet.com, a co-founder of Earthweb’s developer.com, the interim CTO for Boo.com, and has held many other roles at start-ups during the first dotcom boom.

A journalist by trade, Mr. Louis has written extensively about the Internet, first in industry publications like Internet World, Business 2.0, the Silicon Alley Reporter, and on his popular weblog, TNL.net. Many of the pieces he’s written on his blog have led to interviews in mainstream media both in print (Business Week, the New York Times, the Financial Times, etc…) and broadcast (the BBC, NPR, CBC, etc…) and to speaking engagements around the world.

A pioneer in Internet development, Mr. Louis has been involved in several important developments in the industry:

• He established some of the models for industry-specific advertising with Internet.com
• He was among the first people in the industry to work on roll-up plays, through close to 100 acquisitions during his tenure at Internet.com and Earthweb.
• An active believer in the rights held in the American Constitution, he worked as a member of a coalition to help secure free speech rights on the Internet.
• He worked within the Word Wide Web Consortium to establish standards to merge television and the web in the mid-1990s.
• In 2000, He worked within the RSS community to help amend some of the specifications to support date elements in every items and provide a theoretical framework to distribute data files over an RSS channel, allowing for the development of what is now known as podcasting.

Born in France but living in the United States, Mr. Louis believes that globalization is now a fact of life and that companies or governments which believe it can be stopped or averted are fooling themselves. He has led development teams on multi-national projects involving development and project management across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.