James "Jim" Lanzone is an American businessman and the current president and CEO of CBS Interactive as well as the Chief Digital Officer of CBS, which operates key websites including CNET, CBS.com, GameSpot, CBS News, Metacritic, CBS Sports, Chow, MaxPreps.com, TVGuide.com, and many others. He took over as President from Neil Ashe in March 2011. Prior to joining CBS Interactive, Lanzone was the CEO of Clicker.com, the complete guide to internet television. Clicker launched in beta at TechCrunch50 on September 14, 2009 and was acquired by CBS in March 2011. Lanzone graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1993. He also holds a dual JD/MBA degree from Emory University School of Law and Emory University Business School. In 1997, Lanzone co-founded eTour, an early provider of information retrieval and cost-per-lead services on the Web. By 1998, eTour had become a top 50 website and the Web's #1 ranked site in user frequency. Lanzone continued to serve as president of eTour until it was acquired by Ask.com in May 2001. In addition to Ask.com's purchase of eTour, Lanzone was hired to lead product management, marketing and engineering, as senior vice president and general manager of Ask.com. Ask.com was purchased by Barry Diller's IAC in 2005, and shortly afterward, Jim Lanzone was named CEO of Ask.com. He held this position until leaving IAC/Ask.com in 2008 to join Redpoint Ventures as Entrepreneur in Residence. Upon his departure, Barry Diller credited Lanzone as "the principal executive responsible for Ask.com's turnaround". One of Lanzone's primary achievements as CEO was the overhaul and rebranding of AskJeeves. Walt Mossberg praised the new site as being "richer and better organized than typical Google results", and Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land called it the "Apple of Search". In addition to his role at CBS Interactive, Lanzone serves as an advisor at Gigya and Ustream. He is also an investor in such companies as Tasty Labs and Aardvark |Aardvark.
