Grayboxx was founded in 2005 to bring optimal relevancy to "local search". In English, that means users are going to get what they're looking for. By leveraging intelligent, patent-pending algorithms that discern the quality and reputation of local businesses with minimal user interaction, we index and score local businesses without imposing review-writing chores on end-users.
Grayboxx has the unique advantage of Preference Scoring™. Our PreferenceScoring™ solution evaluates 'implicit endorsements' (essentially, people's expressions of approval for a business). When people buy things from a store or make reservations at a restaurant, they are speaking with their acti ons about what they like. With this model, we're able to show you businesses that are favored by your community. Any business, any community. This does for local search what PageRank did for web search.
Bob Chandra founded Blue Inc., an Internet publishing technology start-up, in 1996. As CEO of the 25-person company, Chandra led a 12-person engineering team to bring a groundbreaking Internet solution to market and oversaw a sales/marketing team which built a customer base of prominent publishing firms such as Harvard Business Review and Forbes Magazine.
Jen Stephan serves as Vice President of Engineering at grayboxx. Jen is responsible for the product development of the grayboxx local search engine. Most recently Jen was VP of Engineering and Operations at IPRO, a provider of verified audience research and measurement. Prior to her nine years at IPRO, Jen held engineering positions at Omnis Software and Oracle Corporation.
Greg Brodick serves as Sr. Product Manager at grayboxx. Greg was formerly at Yahoo! where he spent seven years in Yahoo's shopping division, most recently as a Product Manager. Prior, Greg was involved in high-technology roles including IT, programming, and for two years ran an independent film/video and web design studio.
Nikole manages the HR, finance, and operations of grayboxx's Saratoga headquarters. Her past experience includes Executive Assistant at Gaia Online, as well as heading operations for J.D. Engineering.
Prior to joining Plaxo, he was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for VeriSign, Inc. In his eight years at VeriSign, he also served as Senior Vice Pr esident of the security and payments business and General Manager of VeriSign's managed security services business. In these roles, Ben managed worldwide sales, marketing, product development, support, operations, and business development activities. Prior to VeriSign, Ben held a number of product development, operations, and business development roles at companies such as Avid Technology, Inc., and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Ben holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Masters in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Stuart brings more than 10 years of consumer internet and new media experience to Momentum Venture Management, with a strong track record of launching popular online destinations. He joined Momentum in 2007 after serving as CEO of Insider Pages, a search engine backed by Sequoia Capital, Softbank Capital and Idealab. Previously he was VP of New Ventures at Idealab, where he advised portfolio companies in business development, fundraising and new product development. Prior to joining Idealab Stuart was Managing Director of Digital Media Services at Loudeye Technologies, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at MXG Media, and was also a consultant at Bain & Company. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Motwani has received the Godel Prize, the Okawa Foundation Research Award, the Arthur Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Young Investigator Award from the National Sc ience Foundation, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur, the Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Bi-National Science Foundation, and an IBM Faculty Award He serves on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Motwani has been on various industry and advisory boards, including Adchemy, Agitar, Baynote, Coral8, Flarion, Google, Kaboodle, Mimosa Systems, and Neopath Networks.