Surf Canyon

Mark Cramer, CEO, has more than 14 years of technology industry experience, from engineer to executive. At Hewlett-Packard in Grenoble, France, he was a Project Manager in charge of international manufacturing and distribution for PC-workstation product lines. Mark was one of the early employees at Keynote Systems, where he successfully incubated and launched their professional services practice. He was later hired as CEO of NetGeo, where he developed the early business plan, brought the first product to market and raised capital from existing and new investors. Mark went on to NexTag, a vertical search engine, where he directed the launch of the mortgage category. Mark earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, where one of his projects included developing a search engine from scratch, and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Mike Wertheim, Chief Architect, has 18 years of experience in software development in both large corporate environments and small startups. He gained expertise in software development by working with relational databases for nine years as an engineer at Sybase. Mike went on to spend three years working at Linkify, where he was the Chief Architect of an innovative, high-performance content management and project collaboration system. Mike also contributed as a content reviewer on the book "Bitter EJB," which was published by Manning Publications in 2003. Mike has a BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

David Hardtke, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, worked for 13 years in experimental particle, nuclear and astrophysics. He has conducted experiments at CERN, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Brookhaven National Lab and at the South Pole Station. Immediately prior to joining Surf Canyon, he was research scientist and lecturer in the physics department at UC Berkeley. David specializes in searches for very rare patterns hidden in enormous (many terabyte) data sets using advanced automated statistical data mining techniques. He is the author of over 70 papers in referenced journals. David holds a B.S. from Duke and earned his Ph.D. in Particle Physics from Ohio State in a remarkable three years.

Revenue will come from incremental ad revenue generated from the superior targeting of sponsored links as well as licensing fees from third-party search engines.