Chris Ravenscroft
In 1990, he was in the process of launching his first company, Prism Interactive. However, his friend Nicolas Gaume was also launching his own company and Chris was quickly faced with a choice and ended up instead helping with the launch of the game company Atreid Concept (later known as Kalisto), which was sold in 1994 to the British group Pearson and become an arm of Mindscape Inc. The company created successful video games such as Creatures Nigthtmare, and franchise-based games such as The Fifth Element.
Immediately after this, he joined a company publishing a magazine dedicated to the Atari ST Computer and several video games magazines as head of IT - generating about $60,000 monthly revenue through the company's online entertainment services. He also became managing editor for ST Magazine.
After three years with the company, he moved on to write a BBS software, including an internal DSL, for a start-up; being a start-up and start-ups having fluid job definitions, he took stakes in the company and ended up being in charge of a voice-based forum software.
In 1994, he quit the company and helped a friend's company make the transition to Internet-based community products. This company, Ness, was subsequently sold to a big publisher (LFM).
In 1996, he took a day job with a major Telecom company, developing Network Management Software. He moved to Southern California and was promoted to Manager of Software Development.

In July 1999, he founded VoilaWeb, LLC, based in Southern California.
The company sold virtual hosting and dedicated servers for several years, popularizing brands such as HostingGroup (hostinggroup.com) and ReadySetHost. He eventually sold the company's hosting assets to Kwikhosting, allowing him to focus on the emerging Web 2.0 promises.
In 2003, he launched Clic!Dev. The site's original purpose was testing mass-comunity hosting and building. As such, Clic!Dev was one of the pioneer web sites that offered stories and profiles sharing accross communities (http://web.archive.org/web/20040612184512/www.clicdev.com/cachedindex.ht...)
The same year, he started marketing a trading cards web site, which eventually became militate.com. With its active community, the web site became a testing ground for innovative features, such as geo-location, users blogs and reputations and revenue sharing, all these introduced in 2004.
The site's audience responded well to these innovations and Militate became a member of Big-Boards in 2005.
In 2005, in the wake of Invision Power's sudden change of policy regarding free software, he started work on his own open-source community builder, in its first incarnation a message board program that allows system administrators to setup thousands of communities with one install: nextBBS.
Based on his expertise with communities deveopment, he participated in the launch of Zoints 1.0 in June 2006 as IT Director. Zoints is not a social network in itself; it is a federation tool for existing online communities, providing tight user profiles integration. Zoints also provides open-source tools allowing community owners to let their members vote on popular threads, share profiles and tags.
In 2007, he started a Technical blog a http://nexus.zteo.com where he discusses open-source and community management.