Chris Fanini

Fanini, a technology businessman, receives the Alumni Achievement Award

Chris Fanini, co-founder and CTO of San Francisco Start-up Weebly and a 2012 Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) alumnus, has led the way in assisting billions of individuals build simple and affordable Web sites. Recognizing his achievements, he recently received the Alumni Achievement Award from the Penn State Alumni Association.

He was one of 12 celebrity graduates, 35 years and younger, who were awarded the prize. Beneficiaries are appointed by an academical collegiate or university campus and invite by the university' s chairman to come back to their campuses to exchange their knowledge with fellow Penn State and Penn State students.

Featuring Penn State Executives, Penn Achievement Honorées show the student that Penn State Executives are exceptionally successful at an early stage. "It' s really fun to give something back and get audiences enthusiastic about entrepreneurship," Fanini said. Weebly, created by CEO David Rusenko (Class of 2007, IST), Fanini and COO Dan Veltri (Class of 2007, Smeal College of Business), has made it possible for billions of visitors to build their own Web sites with little effort since breaking into the Silicon Valley community in 2006.

WEBLY is a webhosting service that allows the users to "drag and drop" while using their Website Builders. Over 20 million individuals have built a website with Weebly, and 12 per cent of the US populace visit a Weebly website every months. Elected one of the 50 best sites of 2007, Weebly was presented in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur, as well as NBC and the BBC.

Born in Bucks County, Fanini went to Pennsbury High School. Fanini went on to innovate as a college graduate in IST. Rusenko, as Jr., designed the prototyp for Weebly as a cornerstone for Gerry Santoro's web service family.

Students followed an enterprising paradigm in which students' groups suggested a web-based solution with a data base back-end. It was Santoro who gave Rusenko a free hand with the idea, and Rusenko finally cooperated with Fanini and Veltri. You entered the Weebly prototypes into a contest sponsor Y Combinator - a firm that offers start-up capital, consulting and links to start-ups - and won.

Fanini says the charm of Weebly is in the intuitivity and ease of its work. A growing number of individuals have been spurred by the growing share price economics to set up their own business, which means that many of them need to build web sites to help their business. "Humans are able to use our utilities and our business to make the website creation lifecycle simple and affordable," Fanini said.

Fans will be sharing their experience and knowledge with the Penn State Fellowship during the IST Startup Week, which will take place from April 13 to 17. Start-up Day will bring together top business leaders and innovation leaders from around the nation at Penn State for a week-long ingenious and inspirational party. Fanini's unveiling, "Weebly: Further information about the IST Startup Woche can be found at http://startupweek.weebly.com/.