Steven Woods

Last updated
Steven Gregory Woods
Born (1965-06-16) June 16, 1965 (age 58)
Melfort, Saskatchewan
Occupation(s) Google site director in Waterloo, Canada. Former Quack.com Co-founder and NeoEdge Co-founder & Director.

Steven Gregory Woods (born June 16, 1965) is a Canadian entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Quack.com , the first popular Voice portal platform, in 1998. Woods became the head of engineering for Google Canada where he was until 2021, when he joined Canadian Venture capital firm iNovia Capital as partner and CTO, [1] following in the footsteps of Patrick Pichette, Google's CFO who also joined iNovia after leaving Google.

Contents

Career

Born in Melfort, Saskatchewan, Woods holds a Ph.D and M.Math from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo [2] in Canada and a B.Sc. from the University of Saskatchewan. He was the first Ph.D student of Professor Qiang Yang. 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" [3] He then worked for Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute [4] on product line development and practical software architectural reconstruction and analysis.

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. [5] It was funded September 1, 1999, and acquired August 31, 2000 by America Online. [6] Quack.com claimed to be the first Voice Portal, and held patents around interactive voice applications, including "System and method for voice access to internet-based information". [7]

Woods was vice president of voice services for America Online and Netscape after the acquisition of Quack.com in September, 2000. [8]

He founded NeoEdge in 2002 under the name Kinitos [9] along with former America Online, Netscape, and Quack.com colleagues including Jeromy Carriere. He served as an officer and on the board of directors from 2001 through 2010 in Palo Alto, California. [10]

Woods was the engineering director for Google in Canada from 2008 to 2021, where he joined Canadian Venture capital firm iNovia Capital as partner and CTO. [1] [11]

Achievements

While at the University of Waterloo, Woods captained the varsity Waterloo Warriors golf team and in 1995 was co-winner of the Ontario University Athletics "Len Shore Trophy" for top individual performance. [12] During 1991-1992 Woods was a member of the Canberra Knights semi-professional ice hockey in the Australian Ice Hockey League.[ citation needed ] Woods was awarded the J.W. Graham Medal for Computing and Innovation by the University of Waterloo in 2010. [13] [14]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Taher Elgamal</span> American cryptographer

Taher Elgamal is an Egyptian cryptographer and entrepreneur. He has served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Security at Salesforce since 2013. Prior to that, he was the founder and CEO of Securify and the director of engineering at RSA Security. From 1995 to 1998, he was the chief scientist at Netscape Communications. He has been described as the "father of SSL" for the work he did in computer security while working at Netscape, which helped in establishing a private and secure communications on the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Bray</span> Canadian software developer

Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Goldberg</span> Cryptographer (born 1973)

Ian Avrum Goldberg is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL, and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint, a Canadian software company. Goldberg is currently a professor at the Faculty of Mathematics of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the University of Waterloo, and the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He was formerly Tor Project board of directors chairman, and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.

Steven Jeromy Carrière is a Canadian computer software engineer.

David Ross Cheriton is a Canadian computer scientist, businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Shaver</span>

Mike Shaver is a former Engineering Director at Facebook. He is also known for his work on several open source projects. He has been involved in the development of many of the technologies that enable interactive web pages, such as the JavaScript language.

Tim Howes is a software engineer, entrepreneur and author. He is the co-creator of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the Internet standard for accessing directory servers. He co-founded enterprise software company Opsware, internet browser company Rockmelt, and children's education company, Know Yourself. He has co-authored two books, several Internet RFCs, and holds several patents.

Alex Quilici is an American engineer and businessman. He is a national source of information about robocalls for consumer protection groups, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC's staff, congregational legislators and their telecom staff, and national media also look to him for information.

NeoEdge Networks was a Silicon Valley–based technology and in-game advertising company that enabled casual game publishers and developers to deliver television-like commercials within their products – frequently in the context of free-to-consumer casual game play. NeoEdge powered advertising for a variety of game publishers including Yahoo. NeoEdge provided both peer-to-peer game distribution and in-game advertising . It was renamed Blue Noodle in early 2011 and shut down later that year.

Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.

James George Mitchell is a Canadian computer scientist. He has worked on programming language design and implementation, interactive programming systems, dynamic interpreting and compiling, document preparing systems, user interface design, distributed transactional file systems, and distributed, object-oriented operating systems. He has also worked on the design of hardware for computer graphics, high-level programming language execution, and audio input/output.

Epiphany, Inc., previously known as E.piphany and Epiphany Marketing Software, was a company that developed customer relationship management (CRM) software. On September 29, 2005, Epiphany was acquired by SSA Global Technologies. Epiphany CRM software is now produced by Infor, which acquired SSA Global in 2006.

Global IP Solutions was a United States-based corporation that developed real-time voice and video processing software for IP networks, before it was acquired by Google in May 2010. The company delivered embedded software that enabled real-time communications capabilities for video and voice over IP (VoIP). GIPS was perhaps best known for developing the narrowband iLBC and wideband iSAC speech codecs.

The J.W. Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation is an award given annually by the University of Waterloo and the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics to "recognize the leadership and many innovative contributions made to the University of Waterloo, and to the Canadian computer industry." Recipients of this award receive a gold medal and certificate. Recipients are graduates of the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics from business, education, or government.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bradley Horowitz</span> American businessman

Bradley Joseph Horowitz is an American entrepreneur and internet executive. He is a vice president at Google.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Illinois Department of Computer Science</span>

The University of Illinois Department of Computer Science is the academic department encompassing the discipline of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. According to U.S. News & World Report, both its undergraduate and graduate programs rank in the top five among American universities, and according to Computer Science Open Rankings, the department ranks equally high in placing Ph.D. students in tenure-track positions at top universities and winning best paper awards. The department also ranks in the top two among all universities for faculty submissions to reputable journals and academic conferences, as determined by CSRankings.org. From before its official founding in 1964 to today, the department's faculty members and alumni have contributed to projects including the ORDVAC, PLATO, Mosaic, JavaScript and LLVM, and have founded companies including Siebel Systems, Netscape, Mozilla, PayPal, Yelp, YouTube, and Malwarebytes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qiang Yang</span> Artificial-intelligence researcher

Qiang Yang is the Chair Professor, Department Head of CSE, HKUST in Hong Kong and University New Bright Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor from 2015. He was the founding head of Noah's Ark Lab. He had taught at the University of Waterloo and Simon Fraser University. His research interests are data mining and artificial intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Reardon</span> American computational neuroscientist and co-founder of CTRL-labs

Thomas Reardon is an American computational neuroscientist and the CEO and co-founder of CTRL-labs. Formerly, he was a computer programmer and developer at Microsoft. He is credited with creating the project to build Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer (IE), which was the world's most used browser during its peak in the early 2000s. He founded CTRL-labs in 2015 with neuroscientists from Columbia University. Following the acquisition of CTRL-labs he leads the neural interfaces group at Facebook Reality Labs.

Eric Veach is a Canadian computer scientist known for his research on improvements to Monte Carlo sampling in Computer Graphics, which won him two technical academy awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Roskind</span> American software engineer

Jim Roskind is an American software engineer best known for designing the QUIC protocol in 2012 while being an employee at Google. Roskind co-founded Infoseek in 1994 with 7 other people, including Steve Kirsch. Later that year, Roskind wrote the Python profiler which is part of the standard library. From 1995 to 2003 he was chief architect at Netscape during which time he developed Netscape's Java security module.

References

  1. 1 2 "Google's Steven Woods joins Inovia as partner and CTO | BetaKit". 2021-07-13. Archived from the original on 2021-11-03. Retrieved 2021-11-03.
  2. ↑ "University of Waterloo - notable companies started by alumni". 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-13.[ permanent dead link ]
  3. ↑ "Constraint-Based Design Recovery for Software Reengineering: Theory and Experiments". Amazon. 2008. Archived from the original on 2019-12-07. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
  4. ↑ "SEI Architecture Practices Propel Successful Startup". 2008. Archived from the original on 2013-01-30. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
  5. ↑ "Risking it all for dot-com gold in California". 2008. Archived from the original on August 6, 2007. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
  6. ↑ "Voice: The Killer App". Andrew Seybold's Outlook. 2000-09-30. Archived from the original on 2009-05-11. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
  7. ↑ "System and method for voice access to internet-based information". 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
  8. ↑ "Jefferson Partners' Investment in Quack.com Pays Off, as Voice-to-Web Innovator is Acquired by AOL". 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-13.[ dead link ]
  9. ↑ "Steven Woods - P.G. Sorenson Distinguished Graduate Lecture". 2008. Archived from the original on 2008-02-24. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
  10. ↑ "Dr. Steven Woods, Ph.D". Company web site. Archived from the original on December 27, 2010. Retrieved June 11, 2013.
  11. ↑ "Steven Woods's public LinkedIn profile" . Retrieved June 11, 2013.
  12. ↑ "OUA Golf Len Shore Trophy". Archived from the original on 2008-10-19. Retrieved 2008-03-13.
  13. ↑ "J.W. Graham Medal and past recipients". Archived from the original on 2011-01-23. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  14. ↑ "Recipients of the J.W. Graham Medal in Computing & Innovation". University of Waterloo. Archived from the original on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2015-09-25.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.