Spock (website)

Infobox Dotcom company
company_name = Spock Networks, Inc.
company_logo =
company_type = Private
foundation = 2006
location = Redwood City, California
key_people = Jaideep Singh, Co-founder/CEO Jay Bhatti, Co-founder/VP product
revenue =
url = [http://www.spock.com/ www.spock.com]


caption = Screenshot of spock.com
website_type = Search engine
language = English
registration = optional
launch_date = 2006
current_status = inactive (suspended to add features)

Spock is a website search engine that indexes people. The name "Spock" is explained with a backronym: "single point of contact (by) keyword." [ [http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626678 Spock Joins Crowded People Search Space] ] Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it has "indexed over 100 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records." [ [http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_web_expo http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_web_expo] ] These records are from publicly available sources, including LinkedIn, XING, MySpace, Friendster, Wikipedia etc. The company maintains that "30% of all Internet searches are people-related" [ [http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/11/exclusive-screenshots-spocks-new-people-engine/ Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine by Michael Arrington] ] .

As entity resolution is the main algorithmic hurdle of their indexing endeavour, Spock has issued and awarded the [http://challenge.spock.com/ Spock Challenge] Prize.

Spock opened its service to public beta on August 8, 2007. [ [http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/08/spock-open-public-beta-make-your-favorite-top-10-list/ Spock Open Public Beta by Nick Gonzalez] ]

Financing

In December 2006, Spock raised $7 million in a Series A round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital [ [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/spock CrunchBase Company Information: Spock] ] .

References

External links

* [http://www.spock.com/ Spock - People Search]
* [http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/why_im_so_excit.html Why I'm so excited about Spock] by Tim O'Reilly