Wharton Club of Northern California - Next Generation Internet Search: A First-hand View from the Powerset Founders

Next Generation Internet Search: A First-hand View from the Powerset Founders

Meet and talk with Powerset's leaders . . . and test their next generation products at Powerset's corporate headquarters in San Francisco!

Powerset is a 70-person Silicon Valley company building a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing. Powerset's innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search. By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results. Powerset has assembled a star team of talented engineers, researchers, product innovators and entrepreneurs to realize an ambitious vision for the future of search. Our team comprises industry leaders from a diverse set of companies including: Altavista, Apple, Ask.com, BBN, Digital, IDEO, IBM, Microsoft, NASA, PARC, Promptu, SRI, Tellme, Whizbang! Labs, and Yahoo!.

During this Wharton Club of Northern California exclusive event, Barney Pell (Founder and CEO), Steve Newcomb (Founder and COO), and Lorenzo Thione (Founder and Product Architect) will discuss the future of consumer internet search, the semantic web, and how advances in AI technology are transforming the web and world around us.

In addition to the interactive discussion, you will have an opportunity to try out the latest products and mashups from Powerset Labs!

Wharton Club members who can’t attend can still sign up for Powerset Labs.

Register online

Date & Time: 6:30pm Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Networking/Appetizers - 6:30 - 7:00pm

Presentation and discussion - 7:00 to 8:00pm

Location: Powerset HQ @ 475 Brannan, San Francisco, CA

Registration: $20 per person for WCNC Members and members of affiliate clubs, and their accompanied guests. $40 per person for non-member alumni and other guests. $10 additional for tickets purchased after 6pm Monday, August 6th. The WCNC's standard cancellation policy applies for this event.

Barney Pell, Ph.D. (CEO) For over 15 years Barney Pell (Ph.D. Computer science, Cambridge University 1993) has pursued groundbreaking technical and commercial innovation in A.I. and Natural Language understanding at research institutions including NASA, SRI, Stanford University and Cambridge University. In startup companies, Dr. Pell was Chief Strategist and VP of Business Development at StockMaster.com (acquired by Red Herring in March, 2000) and later had the same role at Whizbang! Labs. Just prior to Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, one of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley.

Steve Newcomb (COO). A serial entrepreneur whose primary career focus has been on operations and execution in search, natural language voice search, mobile, media and consumer entertainment companies for the last 15 years. Most recently, Mr. Newcomb was Vice President of Promptu's Mobile Division where he was responsible for product management, marketing, finance and business development. In the course of his career, he played essential roles in three successful exits totaling over $2 billion dollars, and has held positions of GM, VP Product Marketing, VP Product Management and Director of Software Development.

Lorenzo Thione (Product Architect). Mr. Thione brings to Powerset years of research experience in computational linguistics and search from Research Scientist positions at the CommerceNet consortium and the Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory. His main research focus has been discourse parsing and document analysis, automatic summarization, question answering and natural language search, and information retrieval. He has co-authored publications in the field of computational linguistics and is a named inventor on 13 worldwide patent applications spanning the fields of computational linguistics, mobile user interfaces, search and information retrieval, speech technology, security and distributed computing. A native of Milan, Italy, Mr. Thione holds a Masters in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Welcome to the Wharton Club of Northern California - Next Generation Internet Search: A First-hand View from the Powerset Founders