Speaker:
Moderator:
Panelist:
Event Description:
Remember the heydays of the first generation Internet search engines like InfoSeek and AltaVista and then of course, our darling Google? Vertical Search is now one of the hot new topics buzzing around the Internet industry and the investment community today. It refers to specialized search technologies that focus on narrow niches like a specific industry such as travel or health or new Web-based communication tools like blogs. Users can much more effectively find what they are looking for – be it cheap plane tickets or to find out what the investor community thinks about a certain technology. Businesses have much more effective way to reach their target customers. But the big question, as with first generation search, is Where is the Money? Though there is no question that there is value for vertical search, who is willing to pay for it? At the September 20th VLAB event, Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster, will present how his company is building a business around providing vertical search for listings, news, and blogs, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Barney Pell, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Mayfield.
Primer: made available from Dave B. Hill, President and CEO, Looksmart, Ltd.
What is Vertical Search? It is a specialized search engine tha mines data for one narrow niche of the marketplace, such as jobs, travel or blogs. Because the data sources are so fragmented, there seems to be an opportunity to massage the data and present it in a manner that is simple to use and easy to consume.
Definition:
Vertical search is about “providing essential (versus exhaustive) search content and related tools for people who have a passion, need or repetitive task,” says Dave Hills.
Bringing together two types of search:
Broad search – need-based without knowledge or opinion of where to find information, products or services; consumer needs to case a wide net.
Vertical search – still need-based, but the consumer has knowledge and needs greater concentration in one form of results.
Vertical search is not new, and has been around for a number of years, starting with travel and real estate. The explosion of services recently is due to the ever growing amount of advertising dollars shifting to search marketing, and the lower cost of development for new entrants. The space will be segmented by content or by audience, and will leverage partially on technology and partially on human editors. These vertical search sites will also provide a valuable service for one aspect of life.
*Errata notice: We regret that the attribution for Dave Hills’ quote, which was used in the flyer that we handed out at the September 20th event on Vertical Search, was inadvertently omitted during the production process. The text of the primer has been corrected and we have added the text of the primer to this web site above. We have also made the correction on the flyer. We offer our sincere apologies to our esteemed colleague Dave Hills and his team at Looksmart, Ltd. – Louise Velazquez, Chair, MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB), September 30, 2005.
Speaker:
Scott Rafer 
President and CEO
Feedster
Scott Rafer is President and CEO of Feedster, a fast-growing blog search engine and advertising network. Feedster delivers more relevant, and timely information by continuously collecting data from over 13 million RSS content feeds. Before Feedster, Rafer co-founded WiFinder, the Wi-Fi hotspot directory; BookBroadband, the broadband hotel finder; Fresher Information, RSS indexing way too early; and FotoNation, a creator of connected photography solutions. Previously, Rafer led the Internet products group at Kodak Hollywood and worked in investment banking at Needham & Company. For school, Rafer graduated from the Management of Technology program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Moderator:
Barney Pell PhD
EIR
Mayfield
Dr. Barney Pell is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, a Venture Capital Firm based in Silicon Valley. He is exploring and evaluating early-stage companies in the areas of search, information management, human interfaces and social software. Prior to joining Mayfield, Barney was Technical Area Manager for the 80-person Collaborative and Assistant Systems (CAS) area within the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center. Dr. Pell received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cambridge University in 1993, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and his B.S. degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University in 1989, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was a National Merit Scholar. From 1998 to 2000, Dr. Pell was Chief Strategist and Vice-President of Business Development for StockMaster.com, a provider of internet-based stock-market analysis tools. Dr. Pell helped StockMaster.com grow from $500,000 to $5 million in revenue in 2 years, when the company was acquired by Red Herring Communications in July, 2000. From 2000 to 2002, Dr. Pell was Vice President of Strategy for Whizbang! Labs. a provider of advanced text processing and search engine software. Whizbang created Flipdog, an online recruiting site that automatically built the world’s largest jobs database extracted directly from corporate websites, which was acquired by Monster.com.
Panelist:
Paul A. Flaherty PhD
VP Product/Strategy
TalkPlus
Paul A. Flaherty, Ph.D. received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1994, for his work in computer architecture, digital radio communications, radio science and RF engineering. He is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on communications protocol design. After Stanford, Dr. Flaherty joined Digital Equipment Corporation’s Network Systems Laboratory, where he invented and managed the Alta Vista search engine, generating over $4.5 Billion in value for DEC. Since then, he has worked as a corporate strategist and management consultant both independently, and for firms such as Zindigo and Accenture. Author of the forthcoming book, “A Better Mousetrap: Corporate Strategy for Emerging Technology”, Paul has delivered international keynotes for COMDEX, Internet World, DECUS, and other trade shows in the US, Canada, Barbados, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, and the Czech Republic.
Reid Hoffman
CEO and Chairman
LinkedIn, Ltd
Reid Hoffman was previously EVP at PayPal (Nasdaq: PYPL), where he was in charge of all external relationships and payments infrastructure. Reid serves on the board of directors for Grassroots.com, JumpStart Technologies, Talk To The Future, TreasureGames, SixApart, and the International Media Project and on the board of advisors for EZCab and WeAttract. He is an angel investor in Ironport, Friendster and Nanosolar. Earlier in his career, he worked at Apple Computer, Fujitsu Software Corporation, and SocialNet.com. He holds a B.S. in Cognitive Science from Stanford University and a Master’s in philosophy from Oxford University, and won the Dinkelspiel Award and a Marshall Scholarship while at Stanford.
Dion Lim
VP Business Development
Simply Hired
Dion is the creative spark that plugs us in to the great companies and technology Silicon Valley has to offer. An experienced entrepreneur, his resume reads like a short history of the Internet itself: co-founder of Epinions.com (now Shopping.com), COO at Chinese portal Sina.com, Director of Biz Dev at Quote.com (now Lycos), co-founder of the “dot-com Petri dish” Round Zero, marketing exec at Schwab (ok, we’re pretty sure he’s making up so me of this stuff) and way back when: excel jockey at Morgan Stanley and due diligence grunt at H&Q. In fact, the only startup we know he didn’t have a hand in is Initech… although he does have a certain penchant for red Swingline staplers.
