Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 10:11:19 -0800 (PST)
From: Sara Winge 
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Jon Orwant joins O'Reilly as CTO

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 1, 2000
CONTACT: Sara Winge, 707/829-0515 x285, sara@oreilly.com
http://www.oreilly.com

       JON ORWANT JOINS O'REILLY AS CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

SEBASTOPOL, CA--Jon Orwant is the new Chief Technology Officer of
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Orwant will lead the company's technology
endeavors in product development, strategic investments, marketing, and
operations.

"Jon is a true Renaissance man," said O'Reilly President and CEO Tim
O'Reilly. "He's a Perl programmer extraordinaire, serious computer
scientist, writer, editor, wickedly entertaining speaker, and all
around big picture thinker. He's the perfect person to lead our
technology initiatives and ensure that we practice what we preach."

"O'Reilly is a unique company," said Orwant. "It produces technology
books of the highest caliber, and at the same time supports emergent
technologies so that there are good things to write about in the
future.  As CTO, I'll have the opportunity to work on both books about
software and software about books, and I can't imagine a more enjoyable
place to do it."

Orwant received his Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory Electronic
Publishing Group, where his dissertation work was in automated program
generation for computer games.  In the course of over ten years at the
Media Lab (including stints as both a Motorola Fellow and an IBM
Fellow), he has spoken widely on topics as diverse as Internet
gambling, statistical methods for personalization, text analysis, image
processing, and the future of news.

Orwant founded The Perl Journal in 1995 and ran it single-handedly
until 1999.  He has served on the technical committee of all of
O'Reilly's Perl conferences, where he is the creator and emcee of the
Internet Quiz Show. He is the author of two books on Perl, including
"Mastering Algorithms with Perl," published by O'Reilly in 1999.  He
invented the world's first Internet stock-picking game in 1994, and his
Markov-model based Rock-Paper-Scissors program has been unbeaten since
1997.

Orwant is on the advisory boards of Focalex, the Perl Mongers, and
VerticalSearch.

ABOUT O'REILLY & ASSOCIATES 
O'Reilly & Associates is a technical information company that is
recognized worldwide for books, technical conferences, and Internet
software. O'Reilly is the definitive independent source of information
on the Internet, open source software, Java, programming, Windows NT,
and UNIX. From their pioneering bestseller "The Whole Internet User's
Guide & Catalog" (designated one of 100 Books of the 20th Century by
the New York Public Library) to GNN (the first Internet portal and
commercial website) to WebSite (the first web server software for
desktop PCs), O'Reilly has been at the forefront of Internet
development. Information about the company can be found at
http://www.oreilly.com.

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