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Leora Kornfeld is a digital media researcher and consultant and former radio personality. She was best known for hostingRealTime onCBC Stereo in the 1990s, which was billed as the first radio program in the world to integrate emergingInternet technologies such asIRC internet chat into its program format.
Kornfeld got her start in radio atCITR-FM, the campus station at Vancouver'sUniversity of British Columbia where fellow disc jockeys included Terry McBride, founder of theNettwerk label, and formerGlobe and Mail music critic Chris Dafoe. After graduating from UBC she went on to work atCFOX-FM, first as a technical operator during the 2-6 a.m. shift and then as the writer for the syndicated programThe Rock Journal. Following her stint at CFOX she ventured into television writing at theCBC. Her first job there was on the short-lived late night teen seriesPilot One. She then went on to work on the final season ofSwitchback and the inaugural season ofStreetcents.
Kornfeld made the leap from CBC Television toCBC Radio, starting as a writer/producer and eventually as host of the music magazine programThe Beat heard on CBC Radio 1 and Radio 2 in the early 1990s, and continued her hosting duties at CBC on the programsRealTime (1994–1997) andRadiosonic (1997–1999).RealTime was merged in 1997 withDavid Wisdom'sNight Lines into a new program calledRadioSonic, and Kornfeld and Wisdom continued as cohosts ofRadioSonic until 1999, at which time Kornfeld took a leave from CBC to pursue graduate studies in Media & Communications atGoldsmiths College, University of London. In 2002 Kornfeld founded Ubiquity Interactive,[1] a company that developed early mobile technology such as multimedia museum guides and cell phone applications.[2] The company's mobile museum guide, the VUEguide, was recognized with the Gold Award in the category of History & Culture by the American Alliance of Museums.
From 2008 to 2014 Kornfeld was a researcher at Harvard. Her work there focused on the new models of communication and new business structures enabled by digital, connected networks. Her published work includes cases ondigital marketing in the music industry, politics in the age of social media, and how organizations such as Coca-Cola and Ford have pioneered new marketing strategies based on user-generated content. From 2015 to 2016 she was an adjunct faculty member at York University's Schulich School of Business.
In 2018 Kornfeld was commissioned to host theCanada Media Fund's podcast seriesNow & Next, which debuted on the iTunes charts as one of the country's top technology podcasts.