Chris Crabtree's Accomplishments

Technology entrepreneur and software developer Chris Crabtree is best known for his creation of SpeakU, a topic-driven social network that would allow users real-time access to shared web-based information. He had earlier been chief technology officer at Mozenda, a company that tried to find more efficient ways of capturing data posted in blogs and online forums. This work led him to introduce SpeakU at the DEMO conference in the spring of 2011.

Rationale for SpeakU

Shortly before the conference, Crabtree published an article on CMSWire entitled "Why Quality Web Engagement Takes More Than 140 Characters." He argued that "most social networks were not designed with customer engagement in mind," citing the example of Twitter, which might refer customers to a phone number or email without exposing them to the rich, interactive content found in blogs or other forums.

Accessing rich content

Crabtree designed SpeakU to permit "an open social customer engagement" via a network that allowed customers to find real-time data more quickly and efficiently. "The most effective customer web engagement will take place," he wrote, "when we learn to move the rich discussions of a forum into the real-time global reach and interactions of a social network."

Launch plans

In the spring of 2011, Crabtree announced that he would be demonstrating an alpha version of SpeakU. He was hoping to raise additional capital to permit its further development, arguing that his approach would not merely aggregate content from Facebook or Twitter, but would allow users to share original, rich content.