Location:
274 14th Street ,
Oakland, California 94612,
United States
Founded in: 2006 Stage: Beta (public testing) Number of employees: 1-5 Completed funding: Angel/Investor Profitable year: 2009 Investor names: Rachel Blatt, Tom Brackett, John Hendrickson, Michael Simpson, Pawan Vora Ph.D., Patrick Weil Ph.D. Short URL:http://vator.tv/c/580
Profile creation: March 05, 2008 Last updated: September 22, 2009
Using semantic real-time implicit personalization, Surf Canyon is developing Discovery for Search™. The
patent-pending technology sits atop virtually any
third-party search engine and assists users in finding relevant information
buried within the often overwhelming results. As content on the internet expands
it is becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to locate the information
they seek amongst all the irrelevant results. Moreover, as users' expectations
of search rise, frustration mounts. Surf Canyon's application, which installs itself in the user's browser, alleviates this problem by disambiguating queries in real time in order to
improve relevancy for natural and sponsored results.
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.
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.
The company has two pending patents on the technology:
Dynamic Search Engine Results Employing User Behavior
Real Time Implicit User Modeling for Personalized Search
The complex nature of this innovative technology also makes it difficult to replicate. Having been working on it for almost two years, the company has already established a considerable head start in the development of the IP and the optimization of the relevancy algorithms.
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