The ab|inventio Gazette

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Welcome to The ab|INVENTIO Gazette, the official blog of The Invention Factory.

At ab|INVENTIO, The Invention Factory, we work hard to conceive, gestate, give birth to and raise great products. To develop technology that will bring about a better future. Our team hails from places like MIT and the California Institute of Technology (down the street from our HQs), and from companies like Google, Yahoo, and Intel. Our investors are savvy in high-tech, and include the California Institute of Technology. They have gathered at ab|INVENTIO to invent the future. To come together at a place completely dedicated to innovation. A place that combines the advantages of multi-disciplinary collaboration with the razor-sharp focus that comes from having each small team’s fortunes dictated by the success of their product.

QLess™, an ab|INVENTIO company, is an award-winning wireless solution that has saved more than half a million users from more than 10 straight years standing in line at DMVs, restaurants, retail stores for Fortune 100 companies, shopping malls, doctors’ offices, colleges and other locations across two continents, as featured in The New York Times, CNET, Mashable, Killer Startups and many other publications  –QLess was named one of the Best Business Innovations of the year by the 2009 American Business Awards and one of the ten most promising new technology companies by Vator & The Funded in a contest sponsored by Mashable, Microsoft, WSGR & others, and the Best Overall Business Services Company of the Year Under 100 Employees by the American Business Awards in 2010. QLess was also featured in the first Vator.tv startup sessions video to focus on a company outside Silicon Valley.

Another of ab|INVENTIO’s daughter companies, Whozat™, The People Search Engine™, was named one of the 100 hottest start-ups in the world by famed technology blog TechCrunch, a semantic search engine with machine vision that garnered tens of thousands of pageviews within a week of launch. Whozat beat Google and every other search engine tested 3 to 1 or more in results relevance in a blind people search comparison. Prof. Harry Lewis, endowed chair in CS at Harvard; former Dean of Harvard College, wrote in his blog: “Try whozat.com. I learned things about myself I didn’t know. Seriously. And now I’m checking on you.” Whozat has since launched SocialDiligence.com, pioneering the first search engine that can search based on a resume (or any document), capable of scouring the web for information related to any document, whose traffic has grown by a median 130% (average 483%) per month since launch.

ab|inventio, the invention factory,’s companies have consistently grown their aggregate monthly revenues at a median year over year growth rate of over 500% since the launch of their first product.

Car Shippin

Why the focus on innovation? For starters, it’s fun. Second, it is impactful. Third, it generates the most value per unit time and per investment dollar.Why do we start many companies at once? Isn’t it better to focus all your efforts on one thing? We don’t believe so. For starters, 9 women cannot give birth to a baby in 1 month. Second, there are synergies between our operating companies. Third, multi-disciplinarity fosters innovative breakthroughs. Fourth, a portfolio approach to innovation diversifies risk –for our investors as well as any of our stakeholders. Fifth, it spreads the natural ups and lulls of any start-up, providing a steadier pace of progress. Sixth, the world is moving too fast to put a good invention on hold, and is so interconnected that good teams accrue on a good idea no matter how small the initial team is. Seventh, innovation is like any other skill –the more you do it, the better you get at it. Finally, it’s more fun. And because it is, it allows us to attract a higher caliber of innovators.

Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Is ab|INVENTIO an incubator? No: incubators are machines in which babies that someone else has gone through tremendous labor to give birth to are kept warm and fuzzy until they can live with their parents. In that sense, abInventio is more of a womb.

ab|INVENTIO was founded and is headed by Dr. Alex Bäcker. Alex is also the founder of Adapt Technologies™, an emerging leader in search engine marketing technology which has boosted the reach of Search Engine Marketing campaigns by up to 580% while simultaneously reducing their cost per action by up to 78%. Alex raised $10M in an oversubscribed round of financing with top-tier Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and served as Adapt’s first President, CEO and CTO, growing net revenues by more than 200% every quarter of his tenure as CEO, and served in Adapt’s Board of Directors until the company’s sale in 2008. At a recent Search Engine Strategies show, Adapt’s product, SEM In A Box, was called “the most interesting thing going on at the show” by Google’s SEM Channel Manager, who also said that “he hasn’t seen this kind of innovation since bid management was introduced 4 years ago”. Before that, Alex did a brief stint at McKinsey & Co. and held positions at the Department of Computational Biology and Evolutionary Computing at the Center for Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics of Sandia National Labs, and the Biology Division of Caltech. Alex holds a degree in Biology and Economics from MIT, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems and Biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the Dean’s award for ‘great contributions and outstanding qualities of Leadership and Responsibility’ while a Fellow at the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, and where he founded or co-founded the CNS Journal Club, the Da Vinci Club and the Caltech Filmmaking Club. A native of Argentina, Alex represented the country twice at the International Olympiads of Informatics. He has been an invited speaker at numerous conferences on diverse science and technology topics around the world. A more complete and up to date Bio of Alex is available here.

ab|INVENTIO is very fortunate to have gathered a stellar advisory board, including:

• Brad Ball, VP/Entertainment Marketing at NASCAR, Director of the Board at the PR agency Moroch, formerly President of Domestic Corporate Marketing at Warner Bros. and SVP and CMO for McDonald’s domestic business.
• Alex Cory, CEO, Global Conference Partners, Chairman, Stochasto; CEO, Neven Vision; EVP, Overture/Yahoo.
• 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.
• 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.
• Bob O’Rourke, VP of Public Relations at the California Institute of Technology.Richard Spitz, Global Managing Director, Technology Market at Korn Ferry International.

   

In addition to these advisors, our brain trust includes other heavyweights who have lent us their experience:

• 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.
• Geoff Dunbar, Founding Managing Partner of Heidrick & Struggles’ Private Equity practice.
• Bob Buce, CFO of Zag.com & former Managing Partner at KPMG, among others.
• Our counsel Mr. Jeff Suto.
• Our IP team, headed by Fred Farina of Caltech and Sandro Steinfl and Brian Cash of Ladas & Parry.
• Our tax and accounting expert, Jim Walters, Chairman of Kellogg & Andelson, have been invaluable.

Thanks for visiting. Check back often or subscribe to our feed for news of our latest inventions.

About our name

ab inventio means “from invention” in Latin. That’s exactly where we start.

About our logo

Our logo uses Thomas Alva Edison’s handwriting. His invention factory was responsible for starting the electric utility, electric lighting, music and motion picture industries, among others.