Christina Koukkos (TOR)
Christina Koukkos serves as head of product development at Meetup, a company that uses the Internet to bring people with shared interests together face to face. She (and Meetup) believe that a global resurgence in local community will make the world a better place. Before joining Meetup, Christina was managing editor at Release 1.0, Esther Dyson’s monthly newsletter on the IT industry. As editor she worked with such respected thinkers as Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Steven Johnson, Dan Gillmor, JC Herz, Dan Farber and (of course) Esther Dyson. She wrote an issue of the newsletter on the use of technology in politics. She also identified, invited and guided startup IT companies that presented at PC Forum, Esther’s annual executive conference for the IT industry.
Before joining Release 1.0, Christina lived in Budapest, Hungary. She had visited Hungary as a tourist, fell in love with the people, culture and impenetrable language, and decided to move there. She would have taken most any job, but was lucky enough to be hired by Uproar, an online game show and entertainment company. While there she held a variety of positions including director of production for Uproar Europe, where she led a wonderfully creative, multicultural team that developed 15 Uproar websites in 12 European languages.