This story about a new Google acquisition is like the high tech version of the Fast and the Furious. What if you started a company and Google bought it within 60 days of launch?
August 11, 2003: ZDNet runs a story about "stealth start-up Kaltix," founded by three members of the PageRank Group at Stanford University to provide large-scale personalized and context-sensitive search, opening the way for highly targeted--and opportunistic--personalized advertising on all those personalized search pages.
On September 30, 2003: Google announces the acquisition of Kaltix. The Kaltix home page now defaults to Google. .
That's 45 days or less from first mention to sold...
However, there is NO INFORMATION about the company. The Kaltix home page defaults to Google. The names of the founders are NEVER mentioned. The Stanford Page Rank Group home page is now also restricted.
Who are these guys What is this technology? I don't think Google wants us to know.
However, I have some ideas about who the members of Kaltix are and I think two of them are members of the Stanford WebBase Project-
My guess is the the three are
1) Taher H. Haveliwala
2) Sependar Kamvar, who has coauthored several recent papers related to PageRank with Haveliwala.
And Glen Jeh, whose recent research has focused on personalized web search.
Am I right?
Whomever they are, they are very rich geeks, right now, I suspect...Probably having exchanged their company for a shitload of options on that eventual Google IPO and fat salaries and bonuses.
More blogosphere comments at Googler.blogs.com., Jeff Heer and Doc Bug.
Technorati links here.
Whoever who created Kaltix I can say they are fantastic for they created an amazing application become a tool for Google's ultimate success. Based on the facts I've gathered Kaltix's main technology is a faster way to compute PageRank. It has mainly been working on "personalization," which aims to sort search results based on the specific needs and interests of individuals. Furthermore, this technology would allow Google (or any other search engine) to quickly recalculate personalized indexes for each and every user. After seeding a personal index with my bookmarks file, Google would know that when I search for "Jaguar" I'm probably interested in the latest version of Apple's OS, not the car or the cat. -Tire Works