The unified treatment of the five module-theoretic notions, transfer, inflation, transport of structure by an isomorphism, deflation and restriction, is given by the theory of biset functors, introduced by Bouc. In this paper, we construct the algebra realizing biset functors as representations. The algebra has a presentation similar to the well-known Mackey algebra. We adopt some natural constructions from the theory of Mackey functors and give two new constructions of simple biset functors. We also obtain a criterion for semisimplicity in terms of the biset functor version of the mark homomorphism. The criterion has an elementary generalization to arbitrary finite-dimensional algebras over a field. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved