President and founder of Teleshuttle Corporation, and now Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, Richard Reisman has been a very successful inventor in the media space and has varied experience in digital content industries over many decades. He has managed and consulted for corporations of all sizes, developed a variety of pioneering online services, and holds over 50 patents now licensed by over 200 companies to serve billions of users.Reisman’s recent work has been on complementary pro-bono projects to better align on human values -- aiming to better apply our media to augment human wisdom and democracy, and to re-center commerce on human values.
The most currently active pro-bono project relates to policies and architectures for "social" media platforms and other collaborative media that seek to augment human discourse and reverse current harms. This work has been cited in an FTC Report to Congress on Combatting Online Harms Through Innovation. Pro-democratic logics for reforming social media are explored in the Delegation of User Choice series in Tech Policy Press (with coauthor Chris Riley), and in The Internet Beyond Social Media Thought-Robber Barons also in Tech Policy Press, A core innovation for augmenting the wisdom of crowds based on an advanced, multi-dimensional and multi-layered reputation and filtering systems is presented in The Augmented Wisdom of Crowds: Rate the Raters and Weight the Ratings. This grows out of interest in collaborative augmentation since around 1970 (based on interactions with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Murray Turoff), a foundation for his 2002 patent disclosure that has been released into public domain. Reisman is now focused on urgent relevance of these strategies to correct how our social media now de-augment human wisdom and spread disinformation. This work has led to participation in NYC Media Lab’s Fake News Horror Show, the US State Department Global Engagement Center NYC Workshop at the UN (both 2018), The German Marshall Fund's Debate Over a New Digital Platform Agency (2019), and the Tech Policy Press mini-symposium Reconciling Social Media and Democracy (2021), and to his Lincoln Network fellowship (and panel session) . Details are on the Smartly Intertwingled blog, where Reisman also writes on broader issues of technology and media. (See also The Roots of My Thinking on Tech Policy.)
Another ongoing pro-bono project, FairPay, is a radically innovative framework for relationship-centered, “customer-value-first” revenue strategies for the digital era. Its varying forms can be adapted across a wide spectrum of business contexts, both for-profit and non-profits. It has generated interest from major businesses, startups and VCs, and academia. It has strong foundations in behavioral economics, and sheds light on many knotty issues and perverse incentives that are poorly understood by businesses. Reisman's 2016 book, FairPay: Adaptively Win-Win Customer Relationships, was praised as “an innovative and visionary methodology,” "groundbreaking," a "radically new perspective," "promises to transform business." He co-authored articles in Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, and Australasian Marketing Journal (winner of Best Paper and Industry Relevance awards) with leading professors of marketing, and has written for Inc. and Techonomy. Reisman worked on a pro-bono basis with industry and academic partners on research, trials, and applications of FairPay. Details are on the FairPayZone blog.
These two projects have intersected to suggest market-driven remedies for the crisis in our social media (most notably Facebook), as introduced in An Open Letter to Influencers Concerned About Facebook and Other Platforms, and a summary of regulatory issues and proposals, Regulating our Platforms -- A Deeper Vision, that includes a simple "ratchet" strategy for shifting business models incrementally.
Reisman’s inventions have led to fundamental patents advancing varied aspects of digital services. A series of inventions dating from the early 2000s include advanced services related to the now common simultaneous ("coactive") use of TV and the Web using multiple screens/devices, including services like Apple AirPlay, Google Chromecast and Amazon X-Ray. Others relate to aggregation and analysis of Big Data from the Internet of Things, and “wisdom of crowds” approaches for exploiting user ratings and usage data. Earlier patents dating from 1993 relate to advanced online services, including automatic software updates, content subscriptions (such as RSS and podcasts), e-commerce, and app stores, and to social search.
Reisman served during the dot-com boom as founding CTO for HealthSCOUT.com, a widely syndicated news and health management service. In the early `90s, Reisman developed the original TV Guide Online in a joint venture with News Corp, and consulted for Dow Jones. At BASELINE, he developed pioneering consumer online services, as well as online information services to the film and TV industry. Prior to that, he directed electronic distribution operations for McGraw-Hill / Standard and Poor`s, and managed strategy, planning, and operations (including pricing models) for major computer and telecom services at Mobil Corporation and AT&T, starting out as a software developer.
Reisman has spoken and written widely. He is an active member of the New York Angels (one of the top 10 angel investor groups in the world), a Fellow of the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), an emeritus board member and program committee chair for the MIT Enterprise Forum of NYC (and co-led their popular Think Tank Series: The Future of X). He was an ACM National Lecturer, a finalist for the Multi-Media Entrepreneur of 1995 award from the Silicon Alley Initiative, and a judge for the Advanced Media Emmy Awards in 2005 and 2006. He has an AB in Applied Math from Brown University and an MS in Operations Research from Lehigh University.
(revised 6/25/23)
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