RAMP-The Content Optimization Company

I met with David Beisel of Masthead Venture Partners yesterday.  David writes the Genuine VC blog, which you can find in our Blogroll.  David has been running the Boston Web Innovators Group networking events for people interested in internet and mobile innovation.  I missed the last one in January, but David is targeting mid-March for the next one. 

David has been focused on Web 2.0 type companies at Masthead.  One of the demos he featured in January was Sconex, a high-school focused social networking site which has had explosive growth.  I’m a big fan of the new wave of social networking and sharing/tagging sites.  You can also read David’s recent blog entry about Vertical Social Networks.

I’ve tried out LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster, but the one I use regularly is HeyLetsGo, which is more event-focused.  I don’t know anyone in Facebook and Friendster, since the target audience is not my age group.  However, HeyLetsGo was started by some friends of mine, Rebecca Xiong and Roy Rodenstein, and I know a lot of people in that network.

On the sharing/tagging sites, I have yet to try out Flikr but recently tried YouTube.  I use a desktop client for tagging my own photos and movies (Adobe Photoshop Elements), so haven’t felt too compelled to try the online sites yet.  I’ll talk more about these sites in the future. 

I read John Battelle’s Sarch Blog regularly, and today saw John’s blog entry about my PhD thesis advisor, David Tennenhouse, becoming the new CEO of A9 Search.  David left MIT to run DARPA’s ITO office prior to many of us graduating – I have (ahem) fond memories of flying down to DARPA to have him review drafts of my thesis.  David was at Intel as VP of the Corporate Technology Group and Director of Research prior to joining A9.

We had a great group (Telemedia, Networks, and Systems), and its alumni have gone on to do some interesting things.  Of the PhD students, Chris Lindblad managed to graduate first, joining Infoseek and architecting is Ultraseek intranet search server.  Chris is now founder and chief architect at MarkLogic, an vendor of XML Content Servers.  Bill Stasior was next to finish, and Bill is now Director of Search and Navigation at Amazon/A9.  After I made it out, Vanu Bose went on to found Vanu, Inc., which delivered the first FCC-approved software radio to the market.  David Wetherall was the last of the PhD students, and is now an associate professor of computer science at University of Washington.  Starting in July this year, David will be Director of Intel Research Seattle.

Not bad for a group that got heavily distracted by the web and Doom!  We set up some of the earliest web sites, put up the world’s first web-initiated live video streamed over the net, and put up the first remote-controlled car on the net, which even Al Gore drove.