The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 7)

SM: If I were planning a trip to Ireland, where would Cuil take me? TC: I would hope we would take you to the more interesting places and to the path less traveled. My parents run a bed and breakfast north of Dublin. Everyone lands at Dublin and goes south.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 6)

SM: That is your hypothesis, which is fine. I think there are vertical search cases which have broken out of the pack and been very successful. TC: I do think vertical search works. There is no question that in places people can manage to get themselves established as an idea.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 5)

SM: Is there really a high degree of mistrust in Europe? TC: In Ireland you do not give your credit card to a waiter at restaurant. The waiter will bring the machine to your table where you swipe it yourself and enter your PIN. There is a high degree of mistrust.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 4)

SM: Based on the way you are approaching the problem, it seems much easier to do relevance in a constrained domain than in an unconstrained domain. TC: Absolutely. Relevance is the idea of constraining things.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 3)

SM: How successful is your architecture when it comes to indexing? TC: We now index a lot more pages than other people. Microsoft and Yahoo! have fallen behind in terms of indexing and keeping up with Google. Google will get better with more competition.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 2)

SM: Did Anna go to Google after it went public? TC: She went there before it went public. Google was in a total panic as Yahoo! had come out with a competitive product. Google was in a hyper phase of trying to make things better, which is a terrible thing to do. They got nothing

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The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 1)

Tom Costello has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University. His emphasis is artificial intelligence (AI), and aside from teaching he has worked as a researcher at Stanford for DARPA and the U.S. Air Force. He was one of the founders of Xift, and he later worked at IBM. Today his research in the area

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From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 7)

SM: Since you have set up the company as an equity-based structure, you are going to have to exit it. If you were going to keep it you would have needed a different structure. MM: Definitely. We would like to sell the company as a strategic acquisition to a company that can make use of

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