Grayboxx Announces Advisory Board of Industry Thought Leaders
Grayboxx™ Inc., a local search company backed by Sierra Ventures, today announced a board of advisors consisting of industry luminaries, including Rajeev Motwani, co-author of PageRank. Grayboxx is proud to have the following individuals as members of its corporate advisory board:
Rajeev Motwani: Motwani is co-author of the citation-ranking patent more commonly known as PageRank. PageRank fundamentally reshaped the Web search landscape and led to Google’s emergence and market dominance. Motwani is widely acknowledged as a foremost thought leader in Web search.
Ben Golub: Golub is CEO of Plaxo which has more than 15 million users and is among the most widely adopted contact management services on the Web. Prior to his current position, Golub served as senior vice president of marketing and corporate affairs at Verisign.
Stu MacFarlane: MacFarlane was formerly CEO of Insider Pages, a search engine backed by Sequoia Capital, Softbank Capital and Idealab. Prior to his role at Insider Pages, he was vice president of new ventures at Idealab, where he advised start-ups in business and product development.
Vahid Razavi: Razavi is the director of alliances at FAST Search, an enterprise search technology provider with more than 3,500 installations, many at Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. FAST operates the Center for Search Innovation, which provides thought leadership for the industry.
Doug Threet: Threet was the senior director of SBC national advertising’s West Coast operation, where he was responsible for local and national advertising accounts totaling $30 million in annual revenue.
The “PageRank” of Local
“Grayboxx has an accurate, algorithmic way of illustrating the popularity and quality of businesses,” says Motwani. “Local search needs this because people can’t possibly provide reviews for every business out there. In the 1990s, the scale of the Web required the invention of PageRank to help people find the best Web sites — the needle in the proverbial haystack. PageRank was particularly powerful because no explicit user involvement was required, and instead PageRank relied on implicit recommendations. Grayboxx’s PreferenceScoring™ does for local search what PageRank did for Web search – it provides an accurate, highly scalable way of providing informed recommendations on local businesses based on implicit consumer endorsements.”
“We are pleased to have people of this caliber actively engaged in grayboxx,” says Nick Ordon, president and chief executive officer of grayboxx. “Our advisors have been and will continue to be instrumental in guiding this transformative solution.”
“Web search stagnated in the late 1990s. It took a bold idea like PageRank to redefine the market and give customers a quality Web search experience,” says Bob Chandra, founder and chief grayboxx officer. “Today, with low customer satisfaction, local search requires a re-think. Low satisfaction stems from the fact that while user-review works fine for restaurants, it falls short with the broader expanse of businesses. Through PreferenceScoring, we plan to change that and allow people to get recommendations for any kind of business, anywhere.”
About grayboxx.com
Grayboxx is a Sierra Ventures-backed local search company located in Saratoga, Calif. Details of the company’s product have not been disclosed publicly. The company expects to rollout its local search engine in early 2008.
“Grayboxx” and “PreferenceScoring” are trademarks of grayboxx, Inc. All other trademarks referenced in this release are the property of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged.