The ab|inventio Gazette

I am most pleased to announce the appointment of Steve Glovsky as an Executive-in-Residence at ab|Inventio. In that capacity, Steve’s role is to help commercialize ab|Inventio’s technologies. Steve supports ab|Inventio’s technologists and engineers on the business side, providing corporate business development, sales, marketing and operations guidance and support.

Prior to ab|Inventio Steve helped grow MaxPreps (the ESPN.com for HS Sports) into a national media company focused on prep sports, resulting in a sale to CBS for a reported $42 million. Steve worked closely with MaxPreps’s CEO to develop the business strategy and then helped the CEO’s young employees execute on that strategy. Steve stood in as MaxPreps’ business development executive and completed deals with ESPN, NFL, USAToday, Topix, Westwood One, Verizon and many others. Steve also stood in as MaxPreps’ mobile product executive and developed a full featured mobile application for Verizon’s deck. This mobile application was the only non major brand product on Verizon’s sports deck. It was CBS, ESPN, FOX and the MaxPreps product.

Steve began his technology career in 1987 with Security Pacific National Bank (SPNB). At SPNB Steve was the general manager of the first remote business banking product using personal computers (PC Banking). Steve worked with American Airline’s SABRE division to develop this product. Steve also was on the team that developed a comprehensive consumer and small business customer relationship model (CRM) focusing on profitability. In addition, Steve was on the innovations team that evaluated automated teller machines (ATM) (Diebold, IBM, etc.) and later developed and maintained the models supporting the ATM implementation and roll out. After Bank of America acquired SPNB, Steve became a Regional Chief Financial Officer responsible for 250+ bank branches, a 7,000 employee incentive program and a $500 million operating budget.

After Bank of America, Steve started his own eLearning Company that he grew from 3 employees generating $150 thousand in revenues to over 20, generating $2 million in revenues. RKG Interactive (www.rkgi.com) became Macromedia’s # 2 corporate reseller within 24 months. Steve was in charge of all non technical activities including sales, marketing and finance. Customers included the US Army, So. Cal. Edison, Apple, PacifiCare, PIMCO, Intel, Toyota and Nissan.

Since 2000, Steve has been assisting CEOs and general managers bring new products and services to market. Steve’s projects have included a distributed processing technology developed at NASA, a web based advertising product used by hundreds of publishers, a white label entertainment content website producing original content on a daily basis, a teenage acne product and a bioagent detection device.

During this time Steve has completed deals, built products for and/or negotiated with the following organizations:

You don’t want to miss this.

Looked for the name of the investment banker who sold Powerset yesterday. Whozat yielded his name on the first page of search results. Neither Google nor Powerset did –you’d think someone at Powerset would have written a Wikipedia article about him after the $100MM price tag he got them.

–Alex

My friend Philippe kindly alerted me to the fact that Argentina would play Brazil in the Olympics soccer semifinal yesterday. So I did a whole bunch of web searches to try to find out if it was being shown anywhere in L.A., in which channel and when. The searches were fruitless –every search engine I tried gave no good results. Then when the game was over, I tried to find a video of it online. After looking through lots of “top-ranked” videos on the topic, I found none. Still a lot of work left to do in search.

–Alex

P.S. Argentina beat Brazil 3-0, earning its place in the final to defend its gold medallist status.

I stopped by Barney’s Beanery today and ate one of their great appetizer platters. On my way out, I asked Betsy, a hostess, how QLess was working for them. Here is what she had to say:

“Everyone loves it! I love it. It saves me a lot of time.”

–Alex

The Boiling Crab, perhaps the most popular Cajun restaurant chain in California and Texas, is going QLess for 3 of its restaurants. Welcome to the QLess family!

–Alex

Check out this diva’s homage to Whozat. Thanks!!!

–Alex

As Yahoo’s Santa Monica offices dealt with an hour-long power outage and cell phones turned useless all day across Southern California, abInventio’s websites remained fully operational through the 5.4-magnitude earthquake. None of our data centers serving Whozat, HoundWire, REPcloud and QLess in Altadena, Santa Monica or Texas were affected. Indeed, HoundWire was among the first news organizations to report the earthquake, within a half hour of the event.

–Alex

We have previously noted that Whozat’s semantic engine provides better search results than Google. This is not surprising, as Google is not a semantic engine. But what about the semantic engines that have been raising so much hoopla lately, after Powerset sold to Microsoft for a rumored $100MM? Here is a comparison between Whozat’s, Powerset’s and Hakia’s semantic engines for the first five queries I tried on them:

First I asked the 3 engines “What company has Silvia Moos started?”. Silvia is my mother, and she started two companies: Centralab and Klik Mental Fitness. I picked that search to be fair to Powerset, as I knew that the answer can be found in Wikipedia, and Powerset only searches Wikipedia. Powerset found no results:

Hakia found one of the companies but failed to find the other:

Whozat found both, and put them front and central in the concept cloud:

Then I went for a non people search (did you know that you can use Whozat’s powerful interactive semantic engine for regular, non-people searches simply by using the keyword field and leaving names blank?). I did a search I had done before: Whittier compost (looking for a company called Whittier that sells compost). Powerset did not return anything –not surprisingly, as Wikipedia is a much more limited source of information than the WWW:

Hakia did better, but failed to return the site sought (Whittierfertilizer.com):

Whozat yielded the desired site

I asked Igor for a search in Russian, and he gave me Владимир Ленин. Powerset asked me if I meant something else:

Hakia gave results in Russian, but failed to make the connection to Lenin’s English name, even when asked Who is Владимир Ленин:

Whozat gave the answer, Vladimir Lenin, front and central in the concept cloud:

At that point I did an SQL query, but forgot the command to sort, and used sort by instead of order by. So I searched for the right command in all 3 engines. Powerset had no clue that sort by was related to order by:

Neither did Hakia, at least not on the top 3 results:

Whozat gave the desired result in its first link and in the concept cloud:

A final one: I searched for how to buy a train ticket from Los Angeles to Albuquerque. Powerset gave relevant information, but no link to the Amtrak site (again, limited to the Wikipedia corpus):

Hakia gave lots of links, but not one of them was to Amtrak’s site (not on the 1st page, at least):

Finally, Whozat gave the relevant Amtrak links on results 1, 2 and 3:

Combine that with the fact that Whozat’s semantic engine, unlike Powerset’s, is language-independent…

’nuff said. Lots of work left to do.  And it’s only 1 AM.

–Alex

Whozat entered the BOSS program this week to start working with Yahoo to deliver semantic, machine-vision aided, interactive, next-generation search results. We are proud to be working with Yahoo, and look forward to extending our partnership to other leading search engines in the future.

–Alex