Meet Gina Smith: Award-Winning Journalist, NYT Bestselling Author

Written by Tom Ewing

Gina Smith, PhD is a NYT bestselling author and award-winning career journalist. Now based in Hong Kong, she co-founded aNewDomain Media with legendary tech journalists John C. Dvorak and the late Dr. Jerry Pournelle.

Gina Smith, Ph.D. co-founded aNewDomain Media with legendary technology journalists John C. Dvorak and the late Dr. Jerry Pournelle in 2011.

An award-winning syndicated newspaper columnist and investigative journalist, Gina was a constant fixture on network TV in the 1990s. She was ABC News’ first-ever on-air technology correspondent, appearing several times weekly on such shows Good Morning America, World News Tonight, 20/20 and Nightline to explain tech news and trends.

She also co-hosted the award-winning On Computers with Gina Smith and Leo Laporte for a decade,  a nationally-syndicated five-hour call-in radio show that aired every Sunday in 70 US cities and overseas on the Armed Forces Radio Network every Sunday. Later, she hosted Connected with Gina Smith on the ABC Radio Network and penned Inside Silicon Valley, penned Inside Silicon Valley, an award-winning investigative news column in the San Francisco Examiner & San Francisco Chronicle Sunday editions, as well as regular columns in Glamour, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter and Popular Science.

Gina served on the launch teams of Wired and CNET and she played a key role in creating the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show, which she named for Electronic Entertainment magazine (E2), the now-defunct gaming magazine she founded as editor-in-chief at IDG Entertainment.

During the dot-com era, she was CEO of Oracle chairman Larry Ellison’s high-flying internet appliance startup, The New Internet Computer Company (NIC). Afterward, she worked as a private equity investor, as editor-in-chief for BYTE magazine and hosted the SF Appshow, which helped launch both Uber and Angry Birds to Silicon Valley venture investors.

Gina is the New York Times bestselling author of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s biography, iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Doing It (W.W. Norton, 2006/2014) and The Genomics Age (Amacom, 2004), a Barron’s Book of the Year.

In 2018, after earning her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, Gina moved to Hong Kong to work at Hanson Robotics, maker of the robot Sophia. She now serves that AI and robotics company as its director of research.

Read Gina’s bio and watch her film and documentary work via links at IMDb, or check out her bio pages on Amazon and LinkedIn.

She has served on the board of University of Southern California’s School of Engineering and currently serves with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Andrea Weckerle on the non-profit against online reputation bashing, civilination.org.

Gina was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Technology by Upside Magazine in 2001. A graduate of Woodward Academy and Florida State University, she has been named an honored alumnus at both schools.

Update: Gina Smith earned her PhD in cognitive psychology in 2017.

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