Farewell Karen Myers, W3C Business Development Leader Extraordinaire
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
-
-
J. Alan Bird
-
- Published:
It is with bittersweet emotions, that I share that Karen Myers’ time as W3C Business Development Leader for the Americas and Australia is ending.
After 18 years, Karen has chosen to retire from the World Wide Web Consortium to pursue personal endeavors. We want to take this opportunity to thank Karen and to reflect upon her contributions to W3C over her many years of service.
We welcomed Karen Myers in 2004 to assume the role of Acting Director of Communications, and we were fortunate to later gain her help with marketing and business development for memberships. In both areas, Karen’s technology marketing experience, her positive energy and love of learning were strengths which enabled her to accomplish the challenge to create business value propositions that made clear both the power of the Web and the value of Membership so that organizations would consider joining W3C.
Karen’s achievements over the years, allocating her time between marketing, media coordination, and business development were numerous. To name only a few:
- coordinating the communications of our Director Tim Berners-Lee’s knighthood by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 2004.
- planning the W3C ten-year anniversary events and gala.
- working with Tim on some of his speeches —including his first TED talk.
- putting together international W3C events at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas (USA) and Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona (Spain), the first Web and TV W3C Workshop in Hollywood (USA) where we began the work to “make video a first-class citizen of the web”, which in turn led a few years after to W3C receiving one of 3 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) technical Emmy® Awards.
- coordinating with W3C Evangelists and Chapters in publishing, media and entertainment, automotive and accessibility, and supporting global outreach and educational events.
- recruiting and onboarding hundreds of new members to participate in W3C standards activities and more.
Going forward, I, Alan Bird, Global W3C Business Development Lead, will resume Karen’s day-to-day responsibilities immediately. Naomi Yoshizawa, Global W3C Member Relations Lead, will handle member relationship and other administrative questions. And Philippe Le Hégaret, W3C Project Management Lead is the contact for operational questions regarding W3C groups charters, W3C process, and participation in work groups.
Farewell and best wishes to Karen in whatever new adventures she chooses to pursue next!
Prior to Karens move to W3C I had the honor to work with her on marketing branding and advertising clients. I have worked with so many professional account managers in 16 years as an advertising art director in NYC and 5 years in Boston and Karen was by far the most intelligent, most engaging and forward thinking marketing minds I ever worked with. In 2004 I also changed my direction to go into real estate taking with me some of what I learned from her. Thank you.