Daniel Harple (born July 23, 1959) is an American entrepreneur, investor, inventor and engineer best known for his role in the creation of several Internet standards, among them, Real Time Streaming Protocol used in entertainment and communications systems such as YouTube, RealPlayer, QuickTime, Skype, and others.

[3][4] He studied Liberal Arts at Marlboro College from 1977 to 1981, and received Bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Mechanical engineering from the University of Rhode Island in 1982 and 1986, where he also completed graduate-level work.

Context Media tackled the big data problem by building technologies to search, connect, and display content across large extended enterprises.

The extensive of use of metadata was deployed in this effort, which also resulted in an invention and subsequent patent by Harple in this area of collaborative real-time computing.

[10] An early developer, investor, and advocate of mobile social networking technology, he saw it growing faster outside of the US, telling The New York Times in 2008, "I moved to Europe because I thought the U.S. venture capital community -- which I was a part of -- was myopic," he said.

[3][16] A chapter in former The Wall Street Journal columnist Tom Petzinger's book, "The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace," is devoted to the story of InSoft during the early days of the Internet.

[18] Harple's team used the collaborative computing and streaming media technologies created at InSoft as the basis for new Netscape products such as LiveAudio and LiveVideo.

The company's name echoed Rundgren's and Harple's vision of "recontextualizing" the Internet by developing tools and products that helped process the vast amount of knowledge contained in it, "putting it into a context that derives the most meaning to each of us as individuals.

[26] The resulting startup was acquired and merged by GeoSentric OYJ, a NASDAQ-listed company in Finland, where Harple subsequently assumed the role of Executive Chairman and Group CEO.

[2] Harple is currently CEO and managing director of Shamrock Ventures BV in Amsterdam, offering strategic guidance to entrepreneurs to structure, start, and navigate companies from inception to liquidity events.

Based in part on Harple's work at MIT Sloan and the MIT Media Lab concentrating on "innovation dynamics" that resulted in a platform called InnovationScope, which functions to identify and describe innovation and its contributing components,[36] the company's offerings are focused on the integration of secure distributed and shared ledgers (Blockchain), network graph analytics and visualizations, data interoperability, trusted identity management, and micro-payment enablement.

He has been an invited speaker at i4J Innovation for Jobs Summits in Mountain View, California, Paris, France,[40] and authored a chapter of the group's 2016 book, Disrupting Unemployment: Reflection on a Sustainable, Middle Class Economic Recovery.

The stated intent is to deliver platform solutions that "enable publishers to reach consumers with less friction, reduce their channel costs, and provide better direct one-on-one customer relationships".

Harple commented that "blockchain technology has been evolving for several years and is now becoming integrated into work flows in supply chains and financial tech.

[36] Pentalytics was derived from the research thesis Harple developed at MIT Sloan and was influenced by his founding of the Regional Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab (REAL) and his term as Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

[49] As core variables used in modeling, the Penta Helix enables "big data methods and algorithmic tools on the Internet to interrogate large distributed economic global datasets, query and extract the relevant pre-defined cluster attribute data, filter and process it to present a deeper analytically comparative lens of innovation clusters".

Harple also describes Pentalytics potential as a predictive tool for network performance, and to navigate and assist decision-making related to resource allocations, partnership and contractual targets, angel and venture funding strategies, and the growth and linking of innovation clusters.

OMI "aims to establish a global, open sourced platform, providing technology for a shared ledger of music creators and rights owners".

[1][65] In 2013, Harple founded a Dutch non-profit for the purpose of advancing innovative capacity in the Netherlands via a multi-stakeholder process with academia, government, industry, entrepreneurs, and early-stage capital.