Mitch Ratcliffe is a leading commentator on the economy and technology. He is president of Internet/Media Strategies Inc., a consultancy that has worked with America Online, EarthWeb, Audible, Time Warner, ZD Net, Comdex and SoftBank, among others. Additionally, he is co-founder and a principal of Creative Media Partners, a programming development and production company and editorial director of InnovationWorld LLC, a research firm covering foreign direct investment decision-making and best practices. He has served in key positions in the publishing, technology, and financial services industries, often managing virtual workgroups.
Ratcliffe led the development of the ON24 Financial iNetwork, the first streaming news organization, from 1999 to 2001, when he guided the editorial and production teams from startup to producing more than 24 hours of personalized news content each day. Simultaneously, he developed and managed the ZDY2K Web site, a source of Year 2000 information and commentary on the ZD Net supersite.
During the early 1990s, as editor of Digital Media, the seminal publication of digital convergence, Ratcliffe pioneered coverage of electronic commerce, consumer privacy and encryption technology. Prior to Digital Media, Ratcliffe was editor-at-large and networking editor of MacWEEK, the newspaper of the Apple Macintosh industry. He is the co-author of three books published by Random House, and his work has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, PCWEEK, PCWorld, In-Formation, National Review, and Feed, among others. Mr. Ratcliffe is also a widely-quoted commentator on digital technology and the networked economy; he has been quoted in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.
Ratcliffe was an executive at Ziff-Davis Exposition & Conference Co., later known as SoftBank Forums, where he was a vice president responsible for content and business development. He was producer and host of the Digital World Conference and helped to launch the JavaOne tradeshow, as well as representing SoftBank on the board of Electric Classifieds and Match.com. He is a trustee of the Chaordic Commons, an international non-profit dedicated to developing new organizational models.