Startups
Founded in 2005 as Nextumi, Inc., ShareThis is the world’s largest sharing network. It makes it easy to share ideas and get to the good stuff online. The little green button makes sharing simple and valuable, and the firm was founded by Professor David E. Goldberg and professionals leading Internet, data, and social media companies such as Advertising.com, Amazon, AOL, IAC, LinkedIn, MySpace, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Yahoo! and Google/YouTube. Investors include leading venture firms such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Blue Chip Venture Company, DFJ Mercury, Reservoir Partners, Illinois Ventures, Queen City Angels and RPM Ventures.
Using semantic real-time implicit personalization, Surf Canyon develops Discovery for Search™. This patent-pending technology is embedded in a browser extension that can work with virtually any third-party search engine, and assists users in finding relevant information that’s buried within the often overwhelming amount of search results. The company is headquartered in Oakland, CA and was founded in 2006.
Bytemobile was created in 2000 to solve a real problem — high-bandwidth data applications on low-bandwidth wireless networks — and to fulfill a real promise: the perpetual value of optimizing the user experience, regardless of network speed or device sophistication. Today, Bytemobile reaches all the way from the data path in the heart of your network to the mobile device in the consumer’s hand. And today, the company has access to over a billion subscribers worldwide.
Cazoodle Inc., established in August 2006 aims to enable “data-aware” search– to access the vast amount of structured information beyond the reach of current search engines. With the mission of providing semantic data-aware search, Cazoodle is focusing on the pressing demands of building “vertical,” or domain specialized, search services. Cazoodle has general platform technologies for supporting intelligent vertical search for virtually every domain, using which Cazoodle is building services in selected domains. As the following screencast explains, Cazoodle’s semantic search technology can enable much better vertical search—way bigger, much deeper, and available everywhere.
Pattern Insight was founded by a team of researchers with cutting-edge expertise in systems mining—Yuanyuan Zhou, formerly an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and three members of her research team—Zhenmin Li, Spiros Xanthos, and Qingbo Zhu. Pattern Insight brings powerful data mining technology to the advanced, real-time analysis of every type of system data—code, logs, scripts, and more. Pattern products help analyze system data at every stage of the lifecycle, and are changing how software-intensive products are developed, tested, and supported.
Solidware was founded in 2004 and produced products aimed at the software quality engineering market. The company developed an analytical test platform which mines information from the existing development environment and synthesizes this with code analysis results, to identify risk in code. Where there is risk, there is a high probability of defects. By providing transparency across the application life cycle, Solidware’s analytical test platform enables customers to improve quality and predictability while minimizing cost and risk. Solidware was acquired by Coverity in 2008.
aPriori is a software company located in Concord, Massachusetts that develops and markets product cost management software. The company was founded in 2003. aPriori software and services generate hard-dollar product cost savings for discrete manufacturing organizations. Using aPriori’s real-time product cost assessments, employees in sourcing, manufacturing and design engineering make more-informed decisions that drive costs out of products pre- and post-production.
RiverGlass was founded in 2003, by Michael Welge, head of NCSA’s automated learning group, recognized the tremendous benefit of offering more specialized, highly selective data analytics solutions to help businesses and governments gather, organize, merge and analyze data from disparate sources throughout the Internet. To launch the business, the company partnered with IllinoisVENTURES, a service firm that works with University of Illinois researchers to turn university research projects into viable commercial ventures. RiverGlass delivers software solutions to a prestigious list of Fortune 1000 companies and governmental agencies for which access to accurate, concise and oftentimes obscure information is essential.
Founded in 2006 by Professor Ravi Iyer, Armored Computing aims to bring low cost, transparent to the application and scaleable (supporting large deployments) software-only solutions for providing high availability and security monitoring applicable to all market segments and customer levels and tools to benchmark high availability characteristics of systems and applications.
LK4 Technologies offers The Accessible Wizard for Microsoft® Office which provides a simple way to create highly accessible and standards compliant web versions of Office documents that are more accessible and usable by everyone, including people with disabilities. The HTML generated by the Accessible Wizard supports everyone including those in need of screen readers, those with legacy browsers and those with slow Internet connections. Documents created with the Accessible Wizard can be put on the web, e-mailed to colleagues, shared on intranets and read with a wide variety of web browsers.
Online Database Development, Inc. created Letters of Evaluation Online (LEO). LEO is a web-based credential file service developed by Dan Horlander (co-owner of the company) and Karen Paulsen (Associate Director of The Career Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). LEO was created to replace a labor-intensive and paper-dependent letters of evaluation service, while maintaining institutional control.
PRZM Corporation was founded in 2003 by a team of four capital program professionals from the University of Illinois, one of the world’s premier research institutions. These professionals spent over three years developing our core technologies in order to manage approximately $1.4 billion worth of capital projects at the University’s three major campuses. Given the extensive internal use of these systems - PRZM, MECA, CAPS and CDS – and their unique owner’s perspective, it was decided to offer these technologies commercially. Unfortunately, the company did not survive.
