Leadership

Bookshare™ is led by a highly motivated team of engineers and professionals, all committed to working collaboratively to bring critically important technology to social applications. Bookshare benefits from leaders with strong Silicon Valley experience, and close connections with technology leaders who share the enthusiasm for the mission of using technology to better serve humanity.

Jim Fruchterman

Founder and CEO

A technology entrepreneur, Jim Fruchterman is a former rocket scientist who has founded two of the foremost optical character recognition companies and developed successful social enterprises. Jim co-founded Calera Recognition Systems in 1982. Calera developed character recognition that allowed computers to read virtually all printed text.

In 1989, Jim founded Arkenstone, a nonprofit social enterprise, to produce reading machines for the disabled community based on the Calera technology. Following the sale of the Arkenstone product line in 2000, Jim used all the resulting capital to fund Benetech®, with an explicit goal of using the power of technology to serve humanity.

Jim has also been active in public service, with two stints on U.S. federal advisory committees. He received the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. Jim was named an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur in 2003 by the Schwab Foundation and continues to participate in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Benetech received the Skoll Award for social entrepreneurship under Jim's leadership. Jim also received the Robert F. Bray Award from the American Council of the Blind in recognition of his outstanding efforts to make literary works accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired.

Jim believes that technology is the ultimate leveler, allowing disadvantaged people to achieve more equality in society. "I'm an advance scout for social applications,” notes Jim. “I find exciting technology waiting to be turned into non-commercial tools for disadvantaged groups."

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Betsy Beaumon

Vice President and General Manager, Benetech Literacy Program

Betsy Beaumon has served for more than twenty years as a technology executive and entrepreneur. She is a former Senior Director for BEA Systems, Inc. and managed international e-business initiatives for Cisco Systems, Inc. In 1995, she founded Social Online Service, the first web-based information and referral service for social service organizations. As Executive Director of the company, Betsy was an early supporter of Web accessibility standards.

Betsy was also one of the founders of TradeBeam Inc., a provider of global trade management software services. She began her career in engineering, then moved into product management for GTE and Lam Research Corporation.

Betsy brings an extensive background managing high growth organizations to her leadership of the Benetech Literacy Program. Her past experience in operations, marketing, product management, services, training and strategic partnerships supports the ongoing expansion of Benetech’s Bookshare and Route 66 Literacy projects.

Betsy earned a BSEE from Northwestern University. Active in volunteer work, Betsy has taught English classes to adult students in Tanzania.

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Betsy Burgess

Director, Marketing

Betsy Burgess joins Benetech with a combined background in both education and high tech marketing. She has over 15 years of experience in various marketing and public relations capacities for software startups, most recently serving as Senior Director of Marketing Communications. A former teacher herself, she has developed and taught computer and Internet training seminars, and delivered those seminars to educators around the country.

In the early days of the Internet, Betsy launched a small business focused on helping schools and educators use the Internet in the classroom. She also published two books and six CDs designed to help educators integrate the Internet into the curriculum.

After completing her BA at Wellesley College, Betsy earned a Master’s degree in Education with a specialization in Learning Disabilities. “In recent years, one of my most rewarding experiences was helping a 5th grade student with severe learning disabilities learn to read. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about Benetech and Bookshare at the time. My student would have greatly benefited from the Bookshare library.”

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John Crossman

Director, Engineering

John Crossman has a decade of experience working in the Internet industry, serving as both a senior engineer and technical manager. At Benetech, he provides tactical leadership to the engineering department.

Before joining Benetech, John was Director of the Systems Integration group at CNET Networks, a global Internet media company that serves in excess of 100 million page views per day.

John has a B.S. in Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara, and graduated from the Masters and Credential in Science and Mathematics Education program at U.C. Berkeley. Prior to his career in the high-tech industry, John worked as a high school teacher, a curriculum specialist at the Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose, CA), and an exhibit engineer at Zeum, an art and technology museum in San Francisco, CA.

At Benetech, John is able to combine his expertise in software engineering with his passion for social causes in order to build technology solutions that serve humanity.

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Lisa Friendly

Director, Bookshare Operations

Lisa Friendly has a strong background in technology management. She was the director of software technical publications for the Java project at Sun Microsystems where she began as an original member of the 25 member Java team which began its work in 1993. She remained with the Java project for over 10 years, designing their first public website and going on to create and manage the highly successful Java Series books published jointly by Sun Microsystems and Addison Wesley.

While at Sun, Lisa designed the user interface for the well-known and broadly utilized JavaDoc tool which is used to publish API documentation directly from Java source code. In 1995 she presented a seminal paper on the development of the JavaDoc tool at an international conference on hypermedia design. (L. Friendly, The design of distributed hyperlinked programming documentation. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Hypermedia Design, Montpellier, France, pages 151—173. Springer, 1995.) For all of these achievement she was recognized in 1999 as one of The Top 25 Women on the Web by www.women.com and ZD.net.

Lisa holds a BA in Psychology with honors from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Behavior Research from Adelphi University's Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies in New York.

Lisa's philosophy of software management is to tightly integrate the engineers, testers, writers and operational staff who support a software project. In her leadership role for Benetech's literacy programs, Bookshare and Route 66, Lisa sees a rare and exciting opportunity to bring the experience and discipline she has gained working with large and successful software products at Sun and Macromedia to the world of social entrepreneurship. "I am honored to have this opportunity to contribute to the greater needs of our society and will work very hard to see that our projects are successful in meeting their goals."

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