Steven Freedman, MD, MBA, advises startup companies in the domains of software product management, knowledge management, medical informatics, and general business strategy as the principal of Mecando Consulting. Mecando also serves as the umbrella for Dr. Freedman's entrepreneurial activities and interests.

A pioneer of hypertext research and product development, Dr. Freedman entered the field in the early '80s while in medical school when he realized that the information and communication overload faced by physicians could be only be addressed by electronic collection, communication, sharing, and organization of semantically-rich information. Recognizing that the public-at-large would eventually face similar overloading from information in the office and the home, his work has and continues to extend beyond medicine into commercialization of hypertext-related technologies and applications for general business and consumer uses.

Prior to starting Mecando, Dr. Freedman co-founded OpenDesign, Inc. with Edward Jung, former Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, and Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft Chief Technical Officer, to develop peer-to-peer web services platform technology for distributed network applications.

From 1993 to 1999, Dr. Freedman worked at Microsoft Corporation, where he served as the principal designer and lead program manager for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 Channels (the direct ancestor of RSS web feeds), co-created the original Microsoft Passport project as a client-based identity management and privacy protection system, and led the team that created the Microsoft Home Health online consumer health service as part of MSN 1.0. Current versions of these products are used by more than 200 million people worldwide.