stumbleupon.com

Stumbleupon.com is an internet website that allows the user to browse through many different websites that are not normally looked at.

__Background__ StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 8 million+ other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.

__Founding Members__ Garrett Camp, Founder & CEO

Garrett has guided StumbleUpon’s development since 2001, from inception to more than 15 million registered users. StumbleUpon is now the largest personalized content discovery engine on the web, delivering more than 800 million personalized recommendations per month. Garrett completed his Masters in Software Engineering at the University of Calgary, where he researched interfaces for collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval. He is also a 2007 recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award.

Geoff Smith, Founder & CTO

Geoff has wide ranging business and technical skills. Geoff comes to StumbleUpon with a diversity of experience, including product management at a small internet firm, coordination at an environmental NPO, and software development at a company that produces management and accounting software for government and law offices. His education includes Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Mark Bartels, CFO

Mark joined StumbleUpon in early 2008 and is the Chief Financial Officer. He has ten years of accounting and M&A experience in technology and consumer business and began his career at Deloitte in Cape Town, South Africa. Mark also worked in the UK and Luxembourg prior to happily settling in the Bay Area. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce and PGDA from the University of Cape Town and is a qualified Chartered Accountant.

Marc Leibowitz, VP Business Development and Marketing

Marc leads StumbleUpon’s strategic partnerships and marketing. He joins us from Google, where he was responsible for many of Google’s major revenue and distribution relationships over the past seven years. Most recently he managed the worldwide team responsible for developing partnerships around Google’s mobile services and desktop client applications. Prior to Google, Marc co-founded a web-based financial services start-up, was responsible for corporate development for a publicly traded software firm and was an investment banker. Marc holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

__How Does it Work?__ StumbleUpon uses / ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine.

Searching vs. Stumbling:

Using search engines to locate relevant content typically means hunting through pages of results. Rather than searching for quality web sites, StumbleUpon members are taken directly to web sites matching their personal interests and preferences.

Combats Information Overload:

Information on the Internet changes rapidly. StumbleUpon is a dynamic approach to keep on top of this ever-evolving pool of knowledge. StumbleUpon filters through the vast amount of information on the web to direct Stumblers to high quality web sites which are relevant to their personal interests. An obscure but interesting site can be immediately shared with other like-minded users. Old or low-quality sites can be removed if their ratings become too low. The participation of community members helps maintain a database of the most up-to-date and highest quality sites possible.

People-Driven Technology:

Using a combination of human opinions and machine learning to immediately deliver relevant content, StumbleUpon presents only web sites that have been suggested by other like-minded Stumblers. Each time the ‘Stumble’ button is clicked, the user is presented with a high quality web site based on the collective opinions of other like-minded web surfers.

Easy, Community-based surfing:

The StumbleUpon Toolbar is integrated with the user’s browser to allow for one-click access to quality web sites. A simple 2-level rating system gives users the opportunity to pass on or give their opinion on any webpage with a single click. These ratings also connect people sharing unique combinations of interests. Stumblers share their favorite web sites and interact with other users to further improve their web surfing experience.