Originally published November 29 2005
Medio Systems announces venture capital for mobile search
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Medio will use predictive analytics technology to give people relevant search results on their mobile phones. Brian Lent (the creator of Medio) had several chances to join Google in its research phase, but chose not to.
As a graduate student in Stanford University's computer science department in the mid-1990s, Lent worked side-by-side with the founders of Google and Yahoo!
as they tried to come up with new technologies to search the Web.
But while Lent missed out on those two home runs, the 35-year-old entrepreneur believes he has stumbled upon what could be a much bigger opportunity: bringing Internet search to the mobile phone.
Today, Lent's 17-month-old mobile search startup -- Seattle-based Medio Systems -- plans to announce $11 million in venture capital financing from Frazier Technology Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Dot Edu Ventures and others.
The money will be used to grow the business, which now consists of about 40 employees at the headquarters in the Bank of America Tower and offices overseas.
Those companies -- along with additional competitors such as Bellevue-based InfoSpace and San Francisco-based Mforma -- want to help consumers find everything they may need on their cell phones, from maps and movie listings to restaurants and ring tones.
Jadallah, a former Microsoft Corp. vice president, thinks Medio has an advantage over the big search engines that are trying to transfer their technology to the mobile environment.
"Our approach is to do a clean sheet -- mobile is different enough and big enough that you are much better off going clean," he said.
"If I am looking for an Intel stock quote and I put Intel into my phone, I don't want to get a return of Fidelity, Yahoo!
In 1994, Lent hooked up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin to create Mining Data at Stanford -- the laboratory that spawned the wildly successful search engine.
In 2001, he founded Bellevue data mining startup Intelligent Results.
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