Speaker Preview: Heath Row

, our speaker this week, is currently  a research manager at Google and the namesake of the UK’s  largest airport. (Okay, okay, the latter part isn’t true.)

Row began his career as a journalist, writing about business and technology. He worked as an editor for the first newsstand magazine about the Internet, Online Access. Later, while working for the magazine Fast Company, he helped create Company of Friends, which was one of the first social networking sites and a predecessor to sites like Linkedin.

He also worked on the launch of a website called Squidoo that lets users generate pages on a variety of topics.

He is now a research manager for Google’s North American sales organization. At Google, he manages a multi-million dollar budget, trains the sales team, coordinates with Google’s partners and is in charge of syndicated data services (i.e. the content that Google sells for use by other companies).

He also keeps an industry intelligence blog and sends out a weekly newsletter about the latest trends in digital marketing. Last year, he taught a course about blogging at NYU.

Stay tuned next week when our speaker will be Mr. Gat Wick. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)