The ab|inventio Gazette

Qless (http://www.qless.com) is a hosted service that virtually manages your customer lines or wait lists.

With QLess, customers can:

Join virtual wait lists by calling or texting with their cell phones
Pursue whatever activities they want, wherever they wish, while QLess holds their place in line
Obtain estimated wait times, which QLess calculates automatically
Ask to be pushed back in line if they need more time
Be notified when they reach the front of the line
Remove themselves from a wait list

We’re currently looking for an experienced individual to join our team to initiate and build the Qless sales and marketing function.

Key Responsibilities include:
•The drive to organically develop new business.
•The ability to open doors through effective prospecting.
•Proven history and ability to meet sales goals.
•Identify sales targets within a specific vertical, or across multiple industries like Casino/Gaming, Retail, Hospitality/Food Services, etc.
•Effectively manage client campaigns from concept/inception to implementation and post-mortem.
•Utilize internal sales platform to manage and maintain your pipeline and report your progress on monthly, quarterly and annual sales targets.

Requirements:

• 5+ years experience and a successful track record in direct marketing or sales preferred.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, presentation and negotiation skills.
• A history of success.
• Outstanding customer support & service skills.
• Entrepreneurial drive to open new markets.
  
• Ability to address basic technical questions and understand their impact on sales opportunities.
• Proficiency in MS Word, MS Excel, PowerPoint.

Dear all, 

• We moved into our new offices! I am told they bear a striking resemblance to the early offices of HP, Apple and Google. Amenities include a swimming pool, a hot tub, free Coke and donuts, lots of books and computers, 24-hour access and a couple of swings.
• We received three new investments this week. Thanks for your vision and support, we could not be doing it without you. There is very little time left to invest in the ab|inventio fund at the current best-ever valuation!
• We have received a number of job applications, thanks in part to Greg Buechler, our terrific recruiter. Of particular interest is that of executives of the largest company making some of the products we think QLess will replace. It sure is exciting when executives at a big competitor want to leave their job to join you because they thinks your product will take over their market.
• 1ofthese has moved into our production server!
• Whozat now works from your cell phone! Watch out for a new logo coming soon, too.
• The statistics for Whozat usage show that users are using our unique interactive features to refine search more than once per visit on average. This is much more than we could have hoped for, and suggests that one of the innovations that makes Whozat unique is really useful to people. Paraphrasing our advisor Alex Moulle-Berteaux, who generously spent 3 hours of his time with me last week in NY, Whozat is the only search engine that actually establishes an interactive dialog with the searcher rather than blindly spitting something back. Furthermore, the average stay in Whozat is over 9 minutes, which is almost twice the average time on Google and 4 times the average stay on our main competitor, according to Compete.com. Interestingly, visitors spend that greater time in Whozat viewing 50% fewer pages per visit than on Google, which suggests that perhaps they are finding what they are looking sooner but spending more time absorbing it, as Whozat actually gives information right on its search results pages rather than just being a portal to information.
• The launch of ab|inventio’s blog has multiplied the average daily visits to our site by many-fold, and they keep growing every day. You may subscribe to it at http://blog.abinventio.com/feed .

Cheers,

Alex

ab|inventio is growing, and hiring!

We are looking for:

* Search Engine Marketing/PPC Specialist. Whether you are an SEM expert already or looking to become one, The SEM Experts is looking for smart and motivated people with a desire to work with industry leaders and help some of the world’s best products reach more customers.

* Sales Guru. Our companies have innovative products unlike any in the industry, and are young enough that the whole marketplace is still open. It doesn’t get any better for a savvy sales guru to start and grow a winning team!

* Operations Meister. Are you an expert at getting things done? Capable of keeping a dozen plates up in the air? Enjoy wearing many hats? Have experience keeping a business running? We want you!

* Business Development GrandMaster. Can you ideate and strike strategic partnerships to drive revenues? Are you well connected or really persuasive? Do you have what it takes to put great products in the hands of millions of users? Come talk to us!

* Website Designer. Do you have experience building websites that rock? Do you know how to engage a visitor? Are you an entrepreneur at heart? Come show us!

* Software Engineer. Do you speak AJAX in your dreams? Code in your pajamas? Wrote computer games when you were 9? Like to make intelligent machines for the fun of it? Enjoy the feeling of shipping a product? You may belong here.

* CEO. As our companies mature, we look for world-class leadership to take them out of the crib. If you have what it takes to nurture a market leader, we want to hear from you.

Inquire within by emailing careers { at } abinventio.com .

Adapted from recent correspondence with Marc Andreessen:

Mike just pointed me to Marc Andreessen’s post on The Pmarca Guide to Startups: The only thing that matters (the market), which I recommend. I agree that the market is an essential element of the success of a start-up. Google’s (and Yahoo’s) success can be attributed in large part to the explosion of content on the WWW at the same time, which made almost any search miraculously yield something of some relevance (of course this does not explain why others like Altavista floundered). MySpace’s success can be attributed in large part to the explosion of young people on the WWW. iPod’s on the explosion of digital music. And YouTube’s on the sudden ubiquitous nature of digital video.

That begs the question: what will the next explosive markets be? I think Marc’s bet with Ning is a reasonable one: what could be more leveraged than creating a site to help people create multiple social networks? My own bets right now are on the following:

1. Finding a way to leverage the opinions of the millions of users who have started to express their view on anything under the Sun on the WWW.
2. Finding a way to find regular (i.e. not famous) people on the WWW –traditional search engine algorithms like PageRank were designed to find important webpages, and most people don’t have one.
3. Using the massive amount of digital data to personalize everything –the next decade will be one where cookie-cutter solutions won’t make the cut.
4. Using the ubiquitous nature of cell phones to solve the multitude of problems and waste (including waste of time) derived from lack of communication –automatic communication everywhere everytime will be the norm going forward.
5. Easy and inexpensive access to data and testing will eliminate arbitrary and/or irrational business decisions in favor of automatically tested strategies.
6. The commoditization of everything non-unique: The Internet has enabled the global supply of most any good to satisfy demand most anywhere on the Planet, meaning consumers no longer have to choose one seller: they can choose a good or an equivalence class, name a price, and let sellers compete to provide it.
7. (added by our own Mike Yudin): The web started as a very global media, it is now spreading to the local level. People expect to find information about their local community and interact with it online. Doctors and lawyers, car dealers, diners, plumbers, florists, community groups, schools, etc…

ab|inventio seeks to capitalize on these market trends. We have a number of teams working on solutions to each of the problems above: #1 is addressed by REPcloud (in stealth). #2 by Whozat. #3 by 2 start-ups we are working on that will personalize news and entertainment, both in stealth. Our first pass at #4 is QLess (www.waitinginlinesucks.com) , recently a finalist of TechCrunch Supernova. #5 we’re only just beginning to tackle, but www.PREPROVE.com will tackle one aspect. www.1ofthese.com will soon address #6. #7 we’re combining w/#3 in one of those companies in stealth.

Care to join us in the adventure? We’re hiring!

eBay Live 2007, the biggest trade show in the eBay ecosystem, started on Thursday morning. 1ofthese, an ab|inventio company that can convert every bidder into a winner/buyer by finding equivalent items for losing bidders, had a booth to introduce its services to big eBay sellers. It was the night before the show, and our booth sign had not been delivered. Our software still had a critical bug. Our impact movie had not been received. Our company T-shirts had not been received, and the girl who was supposed to wear one of them had not confirmed her presence. And the FEDEX package with the mind-reading headsets that we would use for our contest, prizing the contestant who got the highest attention score when concentrating on “I want more sales” was late.

But we did not give up, and thanks to diligent work by Susanne Sandsberg, Umesh Lalwani, Kartik Sehgal, Harender Kumar and team (and the fact that the Sun never sets on the ab|inventio empire), by the following morning, every one of those had been solved. With Mike Yudin (whose assistance was invaluable) and I manning our booth, we went on to collect hundreds of leads from eBay sellers interested in using our services, with many of them signing up right there on the spot. Prospective customers told us such things as “It’s a no-brainer to sign up for this!”, “This is a great idea!” (repeatedly) and “This is much better than eBay’s method”. We received visits by print and radio journalists, by an analyst intent on writing about us, and repeated visits by eBay executives, including Rob Cross, Sr. Manager of the Developers Program, and the top gun at Prostores, an eBay company which, in his words, has little to do with 1ofthese (eBay wouldn’t be spying on us via their companies, would they now?), . The keynote speech by eBay’s President North-America focused on eBay’s intent to increase “windorphins”, a term they recently coined for the feeling of winning an auction on eBay, which was practically an ad for us, given that 1ofthese is designed to help convert every bidder into a winner. We had a visit by a big potential bus dev partner, and by people intent on distributing our software in Europe. We had several visits by eBay educators who teach and train other eBay sellers. We had visits by Titanium sellers (the top of eBay’s tiers of sellers). And we had lots of useful feedback for future product development. I even got a chance to briefly meet Meg Whitman, eBay’s CEO. In sum, it was a thoroughly successful debut show. All with an investment in the smallest booth size available.

In the meantime, the Whozat team made several exciting improvements: a new UI, improved relevance, new interfaces to allow for comparisons of search quality, and two new internal UIs to test relevance improvements.

The SEM Experts grew its client base again.

And we came up with several new inventions for times to come.

All this in just a few days. Which brings me to how you can help. We are looking for a sales person and/or a biz dev. guru for QLess’s several verticals (restaurants, theme parks, hotel/casinos, supermarkets and retail, clinics and pharmacies) as well as one for Whozat HR and another to sell our Community-powered Corporate News Site to Fortune 500 companies who like to stay abreast of what their employees are reading and talking about. And if we find the right person, we may hire a Chief Revenue Officer as well for ab|inventio –someone with the experience to strike strategic partnerships and drive revenue across all our daughter companies. Referrals of exceptional people appreciated. And as always, we are always thankful for customer referrals, or for a word of advice.

We have also received investments by Assigncorp and Tom Mitchell, of Heidrick and Struggles fame and the co-founder of True Data Partners and several other successful ventures.

Thanks for your ongoing support. Thanks for helping us invent a better future.

Alex

The time has come for ab|inventio’s blog. We have too much to be excited about not to share.

Ø First and foremost, the best news has been the outstanding quality of the people we’ve been able to attract, which is both a testament to our incipient work and its best guarantee. In order of appearance:

o Jon Malmaud was courted by Earthlink, Adapt and the big financial powerhouses, yet he chose to be a risk-taker and start up REPcloud, the world’s first serious reputation engine.

o Dr. Marzia Polito was wooed by Yahoo after she left Intel but she chose to start Whozat instead.

o Ted DiSilvestre brings more than 25 years of software development and integration experience, from Director of Developer Technologies at Adobe to CTO of Conscium, and has already contributed to three different ab|inventio companies.

o Tim McCune, of Adapt and Yahoo fame, could be doing anything he wants but chose to lead QLess to launch in record time.

o Kirk House left his stable job with a cushy salary and has been racing at astounding speed to develop the first news site that I will actually read, because it is personalized for each and every person and adapts news to where in addition to who.

o Dr. Demetri Spanos, of Caltech, Google and Adapt fame, declined offers by Google and Spock, and although most of his time is still taken up by Adapt, has already left his imprint on Whozat.

o Dr. Alex Holub will be joining us this summer to use his expertise in visual recognition and learning to further improve Whozat.

o Mike Yudin brings 12+ years of engineering and entrepreneurial experience in the Internet business, from the prestigious Weizmann Institute to Principal Engineer at AOL to Partner at Scope Aware.

o Or Yogev, from Caltech, brings his experience in evolutionary design and unbridled enthusiasm.

o Doctoral candidates Ling Shi and Stephen Becker, from Caltech, were selected out of many qualified applicants (we had 24X our usual daily traffic when our job posting hit Caltech, and we got tons of qualified applicants) for summer internships. Every one of our offers indicated that we were their first choice and accepted the job.

Ø Second, we are very fortunate to have gathered the beginnings of a stellar advisory board. We are just beginning to constitute it, but it now includes:

o Brad Ball, partner at the PR agency Moroch, formerly President of Domestic Corporate Marketing at Warner Bros. and SVP and CMO for McDonald’s domestic business.

o Dr. Robert H. Fisher, whose client roster in leadership development has included Accenture, Charles Schwab, Chevron, Intuit, Kaiser Permanente, Silicon Graphics, Salesforce.com, Sun Microsystems, United Airlines, and Wells Fargo, among many others.

o Alex Moulle-Berteaux, VP of Marketing at Rockstar Games, formerly World Group Account Director for Apple at TBWA, where he led the development of worldwide marketing campaigns for Mac, iPod, iTunes and iPhone.

o Gitta Salomon, Principal, Swim Interaction Design Studio, formerly Worldwide Director of Interaction Design at IDEO Product Development and before that with Apple and the MIT Media Lab.

In addition to these advisors, our brain trust includes other heavyweights who have lent us their experience in a more casual way: Bob O’Rourke, VP of Public Relations at Caltech, Craig Johnson, Founder of Venture Law Group and Co-founder of Financial Engines and C2C and a Director of Adapt; Jeff Saper, Vice-Chairman of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati; Barry Carr, Founding Partner of Carr & Ferrell, Charlene Vaugh, CEO of The Algonquin Group, and Bob Yorio, co-chairman of the Litigation Practice Group of Carr & Ferrell; among others. And of course, our counsel Mr. Jeff Suto, our IP team, headed by Fred Farina of Caltech and Sandro Steinfl and Brian Cash of Ladas & Parry, and our tax and accounting expert, Jim Walters, Chairman of Kellogg & Andelson, have been invaluable. And Jerry Houser and Will Burrell of Caltech’s Career Development Center have been essential to our recruiting efforts, too.

Ø Third, we have made tremendous progress with several of our products in a very short time:

o QLess, our solution to waiting in line and customer loyalty data collection service, is ready in all of 3 UI formats already: touchtone dialing, text messaging and Instant messaging. A WWW UI is on its way, too. Read more about it at www.waitinginlinesucks.com and join our grassroots campaign to eliminate standing in line.

o Whozat, The People Search Engine, has gone into a private beta, and the statistics show that people keep coming back to use it every day! It has already helped one user discover a cousin she did not know existed, and revealed the most juicy tidbits about some of you.

o REPcloud, our reputation engine, although awaiting the development of an attractive UI, has already shown the value of its algorithms by showing that some of our team-members to be among the most reputable people in the business.

Ø Fourth, we have received our first external recognition: QLess was selected finalist for the prestigious Techcrunch Supernova Connected Innovators prize for promising emerging technologies awarded by Michael Arrington and Wharton School Professor Kevin Werbach.

Ø Fifth, even in this very early period, we have attracted some first-rate clients, including Korn Ferry International, CinemaNow, Assigncorp and others. In fact, our search engine marketing company is already profitable!Ø Sixth, two of our upcoming products, our Media Recommendation Engine and our Behavioral Messaging Testing and Brand Power Metering, have signed customers before we even launched.But it’s still early days, and many challenges and a lot of hard work remain ahead.

Some of you ask how you can help. Here are a few ways:

Ø If you know an establishment that has long lines, refer them to us and we will set up QLess for them. QLess increases customer satisfaction by letting patrons roam free while they wait, increases customer spend by freeing people from standing to spending, and provides invaluable data on customer return rates by day of week, length of wait, time of day, and more. And QLess Basic is free! www.QLess.com

Ø If you know an HR professional who could use Whozat, our People Search Engine, to avoid embarrassing themselves by introducing a candidate with an embarrassing online presence or simply learn more about their job candidates, please let us provide them with a free trial of Whozat HR.

Ø If you know someone who could use help with Search Engine Marketing, please refer them to us. www.TheSEMExperts.com

Ø If you know marketers or agencies, we’d love to run by them two new products we’re developing to help them measure branding power and test messaging in a way that is more accurate, much faster and more cost-effective than the ways it’s been done to date. Brochures available upon request.

Ø And, as always, unsolicited advice is always welcome.With warmest regards,Alex