Featured Entrepreneur: Interview with Georgi Dinkov, Co-founder, Euraeka
Image courtesy of Euraeka
Fairfax, VA – We recently interviewed Georgi Dinkov, Co-founder of Euraeka, a high-tech start-up based in Washington, D.C. Originally from Bulgaria, Georgi first came to the U.S. to pursue undergraduate studies at Georgetown University. Since then, Georgi has received two bachelor's degrees, one in Computer Science and the other in Mathematics, from Georgetown, and a master's degree in Computer Science from George Mason. Although he works full time for a government contractor, Georgi's entrepreneurial spirit helped motivate him and co-founder, Jack Dempsey, to work on the development of their own company in their spare time. Jack was also a double major in Computer Science and Math at Georgetown, and has been developing web applications in the D.C. area for the past ten years. Currently, he is focused on a large private beta for a client and Euraeka.
In one sentence, what is Euraeka?
Euraeka is an Artificial Intelligence engine for the search, discovery, and recommendation of news.
What led you to the decision to start your own company and why did you decide on Euraeka?
Both Jack and I are very entrepreneurial in spirit. Unfortunately, both of us realized that being innovative and entrepreneurial is not often career-advancing when you are a hired employee. In other words, you get paid to preserve the status quo, or to implement someone else's idea, not your own. But that goes against the very spirit of what America is all about. This is THE country where if you have an idea and the guts to invest in it, you should by all means follow your dreams. So the decision to start Euraeka was pretty easy. We both love inventing, we both love technology, and we both are fairly good at identifying problems in society that technology could solve. The reason we chose the name Euraeka is that it refers to the AHA! moment of scientific discovery (credited to Archimedes). Since one of the functions of Euraeka is to be a news "discovery" platform, we thought that the name was a pretty good fit.
What are some of the hurdles you faced in getting your business off the ground?
We just launched so I can't really speak of the hurdles because they are yet to arrive. Perhaps the biggest hurdle in getting the startup launched was finding time to work on building it, considering the fact that we are both employed full-time. The second biggest hurdle was finding people who are able to give quality feedback. Most people with comments tend to quickly swing into the camps of either "you will fail" or "this is the best thing since sliced bread". Finally, finding good user experience design experts has been a challenge. A lot of people can design a flashy web site, but very few can design a site that strikes the right balance of being attractive, informative, and not overwhelming to the user.
Aside from that, as we grow we'll probably face the hurdle of needing investment. Right now Euraeka is bootstrapped and one of the reasons is that the site is completely automated and scalable. In other words, if we need to handle more users we just add more computing capacity. There is almost no human effort involved in running the site.
Your web site recently launched on June 17, 2009. Is the turnout what you expected?
We have only shown the site to a few friends and relatives, which means that we are essentially in a private beta status. Even with that meager audience, we already have several thousand registered users and requests for interviews and media coverage from major news sources such as the Washington Post and Wired magazine. Basically, we have not yet had a chance to present the site to a large number of people, but given the initial responses we are confident that we will continue to grow very fast. If we market the site well and the technology proves useful (which we think it will) the site should be successful in terms of reaching a very wide audience and getting adopted as a leading portal for quality news.
Considering the abundance of online news sources today, how is Euraeka different? What is your competitive advantage?
The competitive advantage of Euraeka is multifold. In general there are two types of news sites - algorithmically driven and socially driven. Algorithmically driven news sites try to perform automatically as many tasks as possible - i.e. collecting news, ranking news, recommending news, etc. Their strength lies in the scalability of machines. A machine can collect and process orders of magnitude more than a human being at a fraction of the cost. However, a machine is not as "smart" as a human being. In other words, machines follow a procedure and if something doesn't match the rules the machine following the results could be less than acceptable. One good example is Google News. Google uses their powerful computing infrastructure and ranking formulas to build a search engine for news. The problem is with the ranking functions of Google News - it is done entirely by a machine and often the news that Google News lists as important on their front page is anything but. An example is the recent fiasco of Google News republishing an old story from 2001 that claimed Delta airlines is bankrupt, which caused the stock price of the company to tumble. So to summarize - machine-driven news sites are very scalable and cheap to operate, but are prone to inaccuracies and errors in their ranking.
The second type of news site is socially driven - in other words by people. Imagine a site where people can submit news articles and then other users of the site can vote on which news is most important. In theory, such sites should be much better than Google News because real live humans contribute articles and then decide which ones are of most importance. Sort of like democracy for news. Unfortunately, in reality this is rarely the case. It has been shown that such sites quickly degrade into a form of mob rule where people would do anything possible to manipulate the system in order to get their content to the front page. A very well known example of this is Digg.com.
So how can the problems of these two approaches be resolved while preserving their strengths? Well, what if one could build a machine that behaves like a human being when finding and ranking news? That's what we did with Euraeka. The news collection and ranking engine is a machine, but that machine has been "trained" to match the preferences of millions of people collecting and ranking news. In other words, Euraeka performs the same democratic process for news collection and ranking like Digg, but does it with the speed and low-cost of a machine and without the mood swings of a crowd like Digg's. That's our core advantage - we are scalable and as low-cost as a machine, yet as accurate as a human (actually millions of them) judging what news is worth reading.
How do we sign-up?
Signing up for Euraeka is simple, quick, and most importantly, free. Just visit, http://euraeka.com/signup, and create an account in one easy step.
To learn more about Euraeka:
Please visit their web site at: http://euraeka.com.
Do you know of a local entrepreneur who you’d like to see featured? If so, let us know by dropping us an e-mail patriote@gmu.edu.