people loved what we had come up with. In the case of MetaCrawler, once it was announced, usage was doubling every week and people were telling each other about it. With Farecast, there was a press release and then it got picked up in the press, and I was getting hundreds of e-mails from people saying, ‘I want this, I need this.’ Students were raising their hands in my class saying, ‘Hey I need to know when to buy my ticket home.’ That made me realize, wow, people really feel passionate about this. I wanted to give it to them, but you can’t do that at the university, you need to operate at a scale that really requires private sector funding.
X: How did you get involved with Madrona Venture Group?
OE: They approached me back in 2000 to work with them one day a week. I’ve learned a huge amount from these guys. They’re very smart and very committed to helping Seattle. They’ve funded several spinouts out of UW’s computer science and engineering. So I think they do a lot for Seattle. At the same time, Seattle—UW, Microsoft, Amazon—generate ideas that turn into successful companies for them.
There’s an ecosystem here in Seattle, it’s very vibrant. We’re not in Silicon Valley, but people say we’re arguably number two. There’s a lot of people with startup experience, very high quality venture capitalists, very high quality technical people coming out of the university, out of Microsoft, out of Amazon. And then often people who have had successful companies become angels and invest in new companies. It’s very exciting.
I tell my graduating students, you could become a professor, you could go work for a big company, you should also consider a startup. If you’re up for the emotional rollercoaster and the stress of it, it’s incredibly gratifying. Each person in early stages of a startup is an incredibly important part of the team and has a lot of influence in what’s going on.
X: What’s your role at Madrona?
OE: I do several things. When they are looking at companies that are in my area of expertise, I help evaluate those. I also chair their technology advisory board. We often try to think ahead to identify technological trends that would influence investment. But they’re very sharp in terms of business, so really I just bring technical expertise.
X: So what are these upcoming technology trends?
OE: One is mobile, which has been around for a while, but now with the iPhone and the gPhone, it’s incredibly exciting. And we don’t have the answer yet of how to search on a mobile phone, not by a long shot.
Something else I like to think about is information overload. There’s constantly more and more stuff, more and more blogs, more and more tweets. Do I spend my time managing that, or can I have some tools that can help me find what I want faster? There’s an exciting new company in town called Gist. I was just playing with their tool, which is in beta. It reduces information overload by managing your email in a more sophisticated way. There’s another local company, Smartsheet, that manages your to-do lists.
The predominance of English is another thing. People are saying there are more English speakers in India than in the United States, and there’s going to be more Chinese on the Web than English. Globalization is an old trend, but it reaches certain tipping points. What are you going to do when the Web is so multilingual that you can’t understand most of the pages you come across? Do you just stay in your own little neighborhood, or are there some tools that help you solve them? PanImages is a tool along those lines.
Another thing we’re working on is a technology called information extraction