Steven Woods

For other people named Steven Woods, see Steven Woods (disambiguation).
Steven Gregory Woods
Born June 16, 1965 (1965-06-16) (age 46)
Melfort, Saskatchewan
Occupation Currently Google site director in Waterloo, Canada. Former Quack.com Co-founder and NeoEdge Co-founder & Director.

Steven Gregory Woods (born June 16, 1965 in Melfort, Saskatchewan) is a Canadian entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Quack.com, the first popular Voice portal platform, in 1998.

Contents

Career

Motivated by Woods' desire to pull together a highly talented group of friends in one place to do something interesting for a year, Quack.com was born in 1998, funded September 1, 1999, and acquired August 31, 2000 by America Online.[1]

Woods is currently Engineering Director for Google in Canada. [2] Previously, he served as Chief Technology Officer of NeoEdge Networks, in Palo Alto, California.[3] He founded NeoEdge in 2002 under the name Kinitos[4] along with former America Online, Netscape, and Quack.com colleagues including Jeromy Carriere. Prior to NeoEdge, Woods was Vice President of Voice Services for America Online and Netscape - joining America Online through the acquisition of Quack.com in September, 2000.[5] Quack.com was notable as the first Voice Portal, and held a number of key patents around interactive voice applications, including the definitive Voice Portal patent - "System and method for voice access to internet-based information".[6] In 1998 Woods co-founded Pittsburgh-based voice-portal infrastructure company Quackware with Jeromy Carriere and Alex Quilici. Quackware became Quack.com in 1999 and moved headquarters to Silicon Valley.[7]

Before the founding of Quack.com, Woods was Technical Staff Member at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute[8] working on technical efforts there in product line development and practical software architectural reconstruction and analysis. He holds a Ph.D and M.Math from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo[9] in Canada and a B.Sc. from the University of Saskatchewan.[10]

Woods' Ph.D was published in 1997 as a book co-written with Alex Quilici and Qiang Yang entitled "Constraint-Based Design Recovery for Software Reengineering: Theory and Experiments"[11]

Trivia

Notes

  1. ^ "Voice: The Killer App". Andrew Seybold's Outlook. 2000-09-30. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-9357905_ITM. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  2. ^ "Steven Woods's public LinkedIn profile". 2008. http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenwoods. Retrieved 2008-09-24. 
  3. ^ "NeoEdge". NeoEdge Networks. 2010. http://www.neoedge.com/about/boardSWoods.htm. Retrieved 2010-03-24. 
  4. ^ "Steven Woods - P.G. Sorenson Distinguished Graduate Lecture". 2008. http://www.cs.usask.ca/research/seminars/pgs_dg.shtml. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  5. ^ "Jefferson Partners' Investment in Quack.com Pays Off, as Voice-to-Web Innovator is Acquired by AOL". 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5559/is_200009/ai_n22589166. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  6. ^ "System and method for voice access to internet-based information". 2008. http://www.google.com/patents?id=Z1kOAAAAEBAJ&dq=Steven+Woods. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  7. ^ "Risking it all for dot-com gold in California". 2008. Archived from the original on August 6, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070806021124/http://www.digitalmooselounge.com/press/press_5.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  8. ^ "SEI Architecture Practices Propel Successful Startup". 2008. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/news-at-sei/feature11q02.cfm. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  9. ^ "University of Waterloo - notable companies started by alumni". 2008. http://uw.cheerweb.net/index.php?secid=17&pageid=55&PHPSESSID=d899682e021826bda04e16e8607013d2. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  10. ^ "Steven Woods - University of Saskatchewan Alumni". 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Saskatchewan#Notable_companies_started_by_alumni_and_spin-offs. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  11. ^ "Constraint-Based Design Recovery for Software Reengineering: Theory and Experiments". 2008. http://www.amazon.com/Constraint-Based-Design-Recovery-Software-Reengineering/dp/B000TB8BKG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205539108&sr=8-2. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  12. ^ "OUA Golf Len Shore Trophy". 2008. http://oua.ca/sports/golf/awards/#LEN%20SHORE%20TROPHY. Retrieved 2008-03-13. 
  13. ^ "J.W. Graham Medal and past recipients". http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/navigation/Alumni/awards_grahammedal.shtml. 

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