Full Name Colin Needham Name Col Needham Nationality British Education University of Leeds | Occupation Managing director TV shows 3 News Employer Amazon.com | |
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Born 26 January 1967 (age 57) ( 1967-01-26 ) Manchester, England, UK Known for Founder and CEO of Internet Movie Database Website www.imdb.com/name/nm1000000 | ||
Organizations founded IMDb.com, Inc. | ||
What movies mean to me imdb founder col needham
Colin "Col" Needham (born 26 January 1967) is an English entrepreneur who is best known as the founder and CEO of IMDb. He has served as general manager of IMDb since its acquisition by Amazon.com in 1998.
Contents
- What movies mean to me imdb founder col needham
- Interview with imdb founder col needham how imdb began
- Early life
- Career
- Personal life
- References
Interview with imdb founder col needham how imdb began
Early life
Needham was born in Denton, Greater Manchester, and grew up on Stockport Road. He attended Audenshaw School and Hyde Clarendon Sixth Form College. He graduated from the University of Leeds with a BSc(Hons) in Computer Science in 1988.
Career
IMDb was started in 1990 while Needham was working as an engineer in Bristol at Hewlett-Packard (HP). The site evolved from what was initially his personal movie database, which became an internet bulletin board made from simple records, kept on a succession of early computers, and contributed to by several persons, all of whom Needham outlasted.
Needham continued adding information to this early IMDb by including every film he had seen since the age of 13, and with the help of many volunteers, IMDb grew exponentially. By the summer of 1996, thanks to IMDb's first film-related advertising campaign (for Independence Day), Needham had quit HP to work on IMDb full-time as a paid employee. In 1999, he collected two Webby Awards for IMDb. In February 2017, Needham decided to remove the message boards from IMDb, stating that the message boards "are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide".
Personal life
Needham married Karen in 1989. They have twin daughters and live in Stoke Gifford, Gloucestershire. He is also a notable fan of early 20th-century classical Russian composers, particularly the works of Dmitri Shostakovitch.