Powerset

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.
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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.
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Luke Nosek is an American entrepreneur of Polish descent. Nosek received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at... Urbana-Champaign. During college in the summer of 1995, he cofounded SponsorNet New Media, Inc., along with fellow UIUC students Max Levchin and Scott Banister. Nosek then worked for Netscape Communications Corporation. In 1998, with Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Ken Howery, Nosek co-founded PayPal and was its vice president of marketing. After PayPal went public and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Nosek left PayPal to pursue travel and angel investing. In 2005, Nosek started Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, a $500m under management early stage venture fund. In 2009, Nosek joined Halcyon Molecular, a Founders Fund portfolio company pursuing a novel approach to ultra fast complete genome sequencing, as President. He is currently chairman of Halcyon Molecular. Luke Nosek currently sits on the boards of SpaceX, Pathway Genomics, and Halcyon Molecular.
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Scott Banister is Co-Founder and VP, Corporate Strategy at IronPort. Scott started his career as a pioneer in the email business. He was founder and... VP of Technology at ListBot, the largest ASP for business email list hosting. Over half a million customers used ListBot to communicate with more than 20 million unique list members. ListBot was acquired and became Microsoft's ListBuilder™, part of the bCentral™ suite of business offerings. After ListBot, Scott spent his time working with other leading start-ups as board member and investor. These start-ups include eVoice, creator of the first email-enabled home voicemail service, which was acquired by AOL in 2001. Scott most recently served as VP of Ideas at idealab!, where he contributed numerous innovations, including the unique bid-for-placement search engine model that powers Overture.
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Barney Pell and at Whizbang! Labs. Prior to joining Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mayfield Fund, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.