Zenophon Abraham: Chief Executive Officer Zennie62Media
Zennie62Media consists of a coordinated network of 98 blogs and hundreds of online and social media platforms created for various purposes, then remade into a network in 2012, and further formed to be the operational heart of our smartphone-based media creation and distribution approach. All of this was created by Zenophon “Zennie” Abraham.
An urban planner with degrees from Texas-Arlington and Cal, and programming language training in everything from FORTRAN to JavaScript and php, Zennie has what one Berkeley planning professor called an “eclectic mind.” After working for the City of Oakland's economic development department out of grad school, Zennie established his own economic development consulting firm.
Then, after working on such issues as military base closures, he was invited to join The Montclarion Newspaper as an economic development columnist. That led to a position in the Office of Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, where he scored a number of accomplishments, including creating the Oakland Downtown Coalition, paving the way for the reformation of 14th and Broadway as a bus transit center, and restarting the San Francisco 49ers vs. Oakland Raiders Preseason Games. Zennie represented the Mayor of Oakland on issues ranging from, as Mayor Harris put it, “redevelopment to the Raiders.”
Zennie then headed the effort to bring the 2005 Super Bowl to Oakland between 1999 and 2001. From 11 cities, Oakland emerged to be one of three finalists, competing against Miami and Jacksonville – Jacksonville won on the third ballot.
As part of his Super Bowl work, Zennie was determined to build a tech-focused approach. He built the Super Bowl: Oakland website, and single-handedly created the Super Bowl Oakland Host Plan: the basis of the bid book that was made by GMO Hill-Holiday. He also created the Oakland-Alameda County Sports Commission, which achieved non-profit status in just four months.
From this, Zennie created Sports Business Simulations. The online company made simulations of sports organizations for use in the classroom. At its peak, the firm was in 40 high schools and colleges worldwide. To feed traffic to the Sports Business Simulations website, Zennie created a network of blogs, including Oakland's first true blog: Oakland Focus. That formed the basis for the Zennie62Media system of today.
Thanks to Mayor Harris, as Chairman of the Peralta Community College District, and Jeffrey Heyman, the Executive Director of Peralta TV, Zennie was invited to attend one of the first video-blog conventions in history: Vloggercon San Francisco in 2006. There, Zennie discovered Blip.tv, the iReport, and was already on YouTube. In that year, he started Zennie62 on YouTube, which became Oakland's first YouTube Partner Channel in 2008. He also joined Twitter, and attend the startup's launch party at Mighty SF Nightclub, and many other platforms that are now part of web history, from TubeMogul to Brightcove.
That year, Zennie was also one of 128 bloggers to become the first ever to cover a Democratic National Convention: the historic event in Denver where then-Senator Barack Obama became the first African American to be named Democratic Nominee for President of The United States. With Obama's win as President, and Zennie62's pioneer status as user of “new media” platforms, he was on national television many times. In 2009, CoLours TV produced “The Blog Report With Zennie62”: the first TV show made only with YouTube videos. It ran from 2009 to 2011.
In 2010, Zennie formed the Zennie62Media brand, and continued to make blogs and video-blogs. He also gained clients like Bauer's Intelligent Transportation in a new approach to something called “online reputation management”. By 2012, Zennie62Media was on the press list for WonderCon, San Diego Comic Con, TechCrunch Disrupt, The Night Of 100 Stars Oscars Party, as well as The White House. Zennie62 on YouTube gained notice as part of a new form of news reporting.
In 2015, Zennie became interested in the possibilities offered by smartphones as the basis for news content creation. After a number of experiments, Zennie launched the smartphone based system of news creation and distribution in 2018.