Marc Canter

Marc Canter is an American internet entrepreneur, speaker, and "technology evangelist." An early pioneer of online software, he has been called the "godfather of multimedia". Canter is a co-founder of Cola, a company that publishes a messaging application. Previously, he was a founder of social networking tool Broadband Mechanics, as well as Macromind, the company that became Macromedia.

Canter grew up in a political environment. His father was a Democratic politician and organizer of a meat packers union in Chicago, and a mentor to political consultant David Axelrod. His grandfather, Harry Canter, was leader of the Communist Party of Massachusetts, a translator for the Soviet Union, and later, a publisher of communism-related books as well as a leftist weekly, the Chicago Star, that he bought from Frank Marshall Davis. Canter recalls marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. and being heavily involved in Chicago political campaigns as a child.

A singer in childhood, Canter enrolled in Oberlin College intending to become an opera singer, and was exposed there to synthesizers, computer music, and building and coding computers.

After college, Canter travelled to New York City to help his friends build a music studio called "Noise New York." During this time Canter learned about laserdiscs, laser light shows, NAPLPS, pro audio and video equipment, and a then-new technology called videodiscs. Canter has also worked as a taxi driver in San Francisco, California.

Canter dropped out of graduate school to work for Bally-Midway, programming music and graphics for video games. He coded one of the earliest pieces of licensed music content ("Peter Gunn" for Spyhunter).

Canter co-founded MacroMind in 1984, the company that later became Macromedia, and began developing for the newly launched Apple Macintosh. Canter launched MacroMind with the idea of it being a “software rock and roll band”, and the company created the first multimedia player, the first cross-platform authoring system and the world's leading multimedia platform. Partly due to his work with the company, Canter is considered one of the founders of multimedia. In the 1990s, he was the chairman of virtual technology company Canter Technology.

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