Joe Byrd President, Co-Founder
6Sight
Joe Byrd initiated the series of executive conferences for the imaging industry with an event held in New York in 2002 which was co-hosted with Forbes Magazine. The next year the events continued with the series of Mobile Imaging Summit conferences held in Monterey, California and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2006, the series was renamed the 6Sight Future of Imaging Conferences and PMA came on board as an investor and marketing partner. After 11 events in 9 years, the executive conference series is the preeminent event of its type on the imaging industry. In 2010, he directed the transformation of the Future Image Report, a venerable imaging executive news service, into the 6Sight Report, an online information service and imaging blog.
His previous endeavor was founding PhotoHighway.com, the first digital photography web portal where he was COO, with responsibility for the overall management of operations, development, finance, marketing and sales. Byrd matured the Photohighway concept over more than a decade. He discovered the power of online communications and community building while creating the first online support service for a software company utilizing CompuServe and the Source in 1983. In 1996 while working for a division of Softbank he extended that concept to vertical market portals for PC OEMs. Byrd presented the next generation of his program at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) trade show in February 1999, as a vertical portal for digital photography. He received overwhelming industry acceptance, assembled a development team and brought PhotoHighway.com to the market in the space of four months when it announced with a live television broadcast on the Times Square Trinitron in NYC and over the Internet.
Byrd's extensive involvement in the technology industry includes developing and launching dozens of software products and Internet programs with such companies as Digital Research, Softbank and Borland over a period of 16 years. His education includes a master¹s degree in Communications Management and Marketing from Michigan State University and a bachelor's degree in Journalism from West Virginia University. He is the author of two books on computer technology and the Future Image section on the Emerging Trends in Digital Photography that was published in the February 2001 issue of Red Herring magazine and the Visual Communication section that was published in October 14, 2002 issue of Forbes Magazine.