Laird has been at the forefront of executive and technical decision making with the Internet for more than 15 years. He is the current chairman of the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Authoring Group, founded by Sun, Microsoft, Adobe, Vignette and other industry leaders to establish open standards for content syndication. As the director of digital technology for Warner Music Group he was responsible for P2P and wireless technology, and met Robert Plant but never met Madonna (he doesn't mind). As CTO of 3Path, Inc., Laird helped establish one of the first digital document delivery services, with Goldman Sachs, BRM and BackWeb Technologies as investors. Previously, Laird was the CTO at Sotheby's Holdings, where he was responsible for launching the premier fine art online commerce site, which hosted such notable auctions as the sale of the Declaration of Independence. Prior to Sotheby's, Laird was the CTO at News America Digital Publishing/News Internet Services, the Internet division of News Corporation, which launched and operated hundreds of web sites including TVGuide.com, FOXNews.com, MajorLeagueBaseball.com and LineOne (a UK-based online service). Before that, Laird was with Marble Associates, a technology consulting firm specializing in the design and implementation of distributed, object-oriented systems supporting corporate business process re-engineering. He was also the Multimedia Specialist at Thinking Machines Corporation, in Cambridge, MA, working with the fastest massively parallel supercomputers on the planet to produce scientific visualizations and multimedia presentations, and where he had access to a teraflop before any of his friends. Laird also worked at GCC Technologies, which, he's proud to say, makes really cool Mac products. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, three children, and a fish.