I graduated from MIT in 1983, and then got on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Apple (Lisa, Mac). Somehow I wound up focusing on internationalization, and the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Indic, and Tibetan Mac OS projects.
In 1987 I started TransPac Software, a software development and consulting company that specialized in Far East text processing. We created a bunch of different versions of a word processor, as well as Japanese/Chinese input methods, an outliner, and an expert system for fitness clubs (don’t ask).
In 1997 we started consulting for Palm (actually US Robotics at that time) on internationalizing the Palm OS. That led to an interesting seven year relationship – along the way I got to learn more about obscure character sets than I really wanted.
In 2004 I took a break, and started helping out on the Chandler project. It was during that time when I realized that (a) search was really important for developers, especially in the world of open source, and (b) search wasn’t very good for developers.
So in 2005 I co-founded Krugle, a search-oriented system for programmers. We got our first round of funding in October 2005, and our second round in May 2006. Our initial focus was on the public site for searching open source code. In 2007 we started working on our enterprise product, which was fun because we used it internally while creating the product. In 2008 we started selling to large companies, and had closed 20 deals by the end of the year.
At the end of January 2009 we were acquired by Aragon Consulting. They had previously integrated Krugle into their Next.0 outsourced development platform, and were also working with the same set of large companies.
In March 2009 I began working on Bixo, an open source vertical web crawler. During the summer I started Bixo Labs, a company that uses Amazon’s EC2 to provide customized, scalable & affordable web mining solutions.
Ken's Techno Tidbits 