Brief description:

Conga discovers the social relevance between people - whom you should know, within a group, at an event, or wherever you are.

Brief highlights:

Our science applies sophisticated machine learning algorithms to understand the underlying factors behind your professional relationships 

The problem or opportunity:

The value of social networks is stalling.  They have become saturated with "the people we may know." 

“New insight, experiences, and capabilities…come from “the edges of our social networks.” (John Hagel et al., For Ways to Use "Pull" to Increase Your Success, HBR 4/22/2009)

"People we should know," is a hard - yet important - problem.  Conga's science is able to accurately predict and recommend new relationships.

Conga does Social Discovery and People recommendation as a Service.  Companies from large to small are finding the need to make recommendations between people. From global technology forums to local social application services, the people matching/recommendation function has become a ubiquitous need. Conga is the platform that meets this need with science.

By focusing on the recommendation science and making the recommendation results available through our API, we give developers access to better technology more quickly and at lower cost than they can achieve on their own.

Crick Waters

CEO at Conga, Inc.
Advisor and Board member to several co's

LinkedIn Profile

I recently left BT/Ribbit to start Conga. We're in the earliest stages at the moment - a small team of five working on the foundations, and looking for great team members, investors, and customers.

In 2005, I co-founded Ribbit - a company built on the principle that voice communication has value, and that the value is in the application that serves the called and calling. BT purchased Ribbit on July 29th, 2008 and has embedded the Ribbit technology into its UK Future Voice and Global Services VoIP solutions.

Before Ribbit, I led development of consumer voice and data services for AT&T Consumer Services and created NorthPoint Communications' product strategy for services over the company's high speed data network.

Specialties

Entrepreneurship. Business development. Product development.

Three patents.

Todd Fast

Co-Founder at Conga, Inc.

LinkedIn Profile

Senior technical leader and entrepreneur with a penchant for leading-edge product concepts and development.

Previously, I served as chief architect of Sun Microsystems' Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud offerings, and CTO and founding principal of zembly.com, Sun's cloud application platform and browser-based social development environment. I also co-authored the Twitter Data proposal [http://twitterdata.org].

Prior to zembly, I was Chief Architect of SOA, XML, and Java Enterprise Tools at Sun, where I shepherded the integration of the SeeBeyond Technology Corp. acquisition into Sun's developer tools platforms. As part of my responsibilities, I coordinated and oversaw the activity of forty-plus engineers and architects across four geographical regions. During this time, I also conceived and shipped the world's first real-time developer collaboration platform in a mainstream IDE, including features like integrated presence, code-aware chat, pair programming at a distance, simultaneous co-editing, and remote builds.

More recently, I founded the popular Java Native Access (JNA) library, a Java-only bridge to native code from the Java VM which now powers core functionality in popular frameworks like JRuby and Jython.

Prior to Sun, I held positions as Principal Consultant and Engineer with NetDynamics, Inc., the company that invented and popularized the application server. There, I worked with a diverse range of companies ranging from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 100 enterprises architecting and building both enterprise and e-commerce websites.

As a senior architect and technical leader, I have deep expertise in cloud and web application development; app server runtimes; developer tools, frameworks, and platforms; and am a veteran at leading engineering teams through the tricky process of shipping ground-breaking, innovative products. I am a co-author and JavaOne Rock Star, hold four patents, and am named on more than ten patents pending.

Specialties

Software development tools, user interaction design, Web application development and performance, Web application platforms, server architecture, API design, intrapeneurship, innovative product development, technical communications, public speaking

Four patents.

Vivienne Ming

Cognitive Scientist & Entrepreneur

LinkedIn Profile

Dr. Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist focusing on probabilistic models of perception and cognition. Her applied research combines cognitive modeling and educational dataming to develop learning analytics platforms and adaptive tutoring systems.

As an entrepreneur Dr. Ming has worked to take her research into the market: raising capital, managing projects and conveying complex ideas in business contexts.

Her academic research focuses on applications in machine perception and in sensory and cognitive neural prosthetics.

Specialties

Psychology and neuroscience of perception and semantic cognition.
Probabilistic modeling:
* Efficient/Sparse Coding
* LDA and topic modeling
* Graphical Models
* Multi-modal datamining
* Human behavioral experiment design and analysis

Numerous publications.

Ryan Kennedy

Product manager

Co-Founder at Conga

LInkedIn Profile

Entrepreneur and technologist with a passion for creating elegant products and user experiences. 6+ years experience designing, building, and launching innovative products on the Web. Some of the areas that I have worked in: developer tools, cloud platforms, location-based services, and social discovery apps.

Specialties

design, product management, product development, product strategy, user interaction design, product marketing, entrepreneurship, and software engineering.

Personal Discovery Service:  Three-tiered freemium model.

Platform as a Service:  SaaS pricing model

Social relevance is typically relegated to a "people you may know" algorithm in such social networking sites as LinkedIn and Facebook.  Other companies in the social discovery space rely on fact matching such as "you both like Lady Gaga and follow Barack Obama" as their basis for social recommendation.

Conga uses applied science by identifying a pool of ~100,000 factors that characterize the motivations behind your social connections and train the Conga social relevance engine. No input more than the linking social networking sites is required of the user. 

Conga is the first platform solution to the problem of predicting social relevance.

Our team includes serial entrepreneurs (founder, Ribbit), stellar CTO (chief architect for Platform as a Service at Sun Microsystems), and PhD entrepreneur neuroscientist as chief scientist.