Alora C. Chistiakoff first got online as a journalism student in 1993; she got her first tech industry job in 1996. Since then, she has spent her career as a change agent, implementing technology, marketing and operations initiatives for both external and internal clients. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Alora has also lived and worked in New York City and Austin, Texas.

Though she has worked in different types of environments, her real passion is small business and technology startups. As someone who grew up in a small, family-owned business, Alora is a cloud computing and SaaS evangelist for small business.  Their combined market impact has brought about revolutionary paradigm shifts that have radically changed the nature of and opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs in ways never before possible.

A project manager by discipline, Alora’s has spent most of her career working in ecommerce, with such brands as Armani Exchange, Fossil, Norm Thompson, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, The Swiss Colony and JetBlue Airways.  As the web has shift from a technology-centric platform to a product and marketing-based one, so too has Alora's focus evolved.

Alora and her husband own The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a management consultancy firm specializing in content strategy, web implementation and project management. Alora formerly served as the Sr. Managing Editor for Social Computing Journal; she blogs regularly at The Pragmatic Contextualist about the social, economic and political implications of living in an Information Age; and she writes a blog series at WorkingPoint called the Entrepreneur Evangelist.

Alora studied Organizational Behavior at the University of San Francisco, and resides in Austin, TX. She can be reached via email or Twitter.