Greg Tseng

Last updated

Greg Tseng
Born
Greg Yuchang Tseng

November 14, 1979
OccupationAmerican Internet entrepreneur
Notable work
  • CEO of Tagged
  • Co-founder of Jumpstart Technologies

Greg Yuchang Tseng (born November 14, 1979) is a Taiwanese-American Internet entrepreneur, [1] and raised in Washington, Virginia. [2] He is co-founder and current CEO of social networking website Tagged [3] and was CEO of JumpStart Technologies, LLC. [4]

Contents

Early and personal life

Tseng attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology [5] and won numerous awards in mathematics and science. He placed 9th in the 1993 national MathCounts competition, tied for 1st place (with a perfect score) in the 1994 American High School Mathematics Exam, and qualified for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad every year from 1994 to 1997.[ citation needed ] He was a Finalist in the 1997 Westinghouse Science Talent Search [6] for a project titled "Development of a Fiber Optic Evanescent Wave Ion Sensor With Interchangeable Probes Adaptable for Field Application" and received official commendation from the Fairfax County School Board. [7] For this project, Tseng was also featured in The American Physical Society's A Century of Physics Timeline [8] and inducted into The National Gallery for America's Young Inventors [9] which produced a comic strip biography of him. [10]

Tseng is an avid runner and has completed several road marathons and trail ultramarathons. [11]

Scientist

From 1997 to 2004, Tseng was an active researcher in nanotechnology at The MITRE Corporation, Harvard University, and Stanford University. At MITRE, [12] he co-authored a Science journal article entitled "Toward Nanocomputers". [13] At Harvard, he earned an A.B. in Chemistry & Physics & Mathematics in 2001 and co-authored a Science perspective entitled "Carbon Nanotube-Based Nonvolatile Random Access Memory for Molecular Computing" [14] which is the technology behind the company Nantero. At Stanford, he conducted research in the Goldhaber-Gordon group. [15] He was pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics under a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

Entrepreneur

At Harvard, Tseng was director of the Harvard Entrepreneurs Club (HEC) from 1998 to 2000, [16] and co-wrote The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business (Wiley, 1999). [17] In the fall semester of 1999, Tseng and two classmates launched flyingchickens.com, a price comparison shopping engine for Harvard textbooks. [18] In the spring semester of 2000, flyingchickens.com was merged with Limespot.com and the textbook shopping service was revamped [19] and expanded to over 80 college campuses. [20] In late 2000, Tseng and three other college entrepreneurs were interviewed and featured in The New York Times [21] and Fast Company . [22] While at Harvard, Tseng also co-founded Jumpstart Technologies with longtime friend and business partner Johann Schleier-Smith. Jumpstart was an incubator of Internet businesses including online matchmaker CrushLink and social networking site hi5. In October 2004, Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith co-founded Tagged, and were both named by BusinessWeek as one of Tech's Best Young Entrepreneurs. [23] They jointly received a U.S. patent for their invention "User created tags for online social networking" [24] which has led to over 200,000 user-created tags on Tagged. [25] As of July 2014, Tseng is CEO of Tagged [3] and advises several other Silicon Valley startup companies. [5]

At first Tagged [3] was a site meant for just teenagers but Tseng realized that he wanted to expand and help the business grow. He expanded his demographic to those who were 13 years old up in all countries. In 2007, he decided to change Tagged's business model and evolve into a social network site that allows you to meet new people and he called it "social discovery" [26]

Controversies

Two of Tseng's companies, Jumpstart and Tagged, have been criticized for their alleged misuse of commercial email and have been the subject of legal action. [27] [28] In 2006, Jumpstart Technologies settled with the Federal Trade Commission on alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act which included a $900,000 fine but no admission of guilt. The FTC alleged that "in its FreeFlixTix promotion, Jumpstart violated the law by disguising its commercial e-mails as personal messages, and by misleading consumers as to the terms and conditions of the promotion" and stated "Deceptive subject lines and headers not only violate the CAN-SPAM Act, but also consumer trust." [27] Between April and June 2009, Tagged sent tens of millions of spam emails that falsely stated that a contact sent photographs to the recipient. State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced his intention to sue Tagged for "deceptive email marketing and invasion of privacy". [29] [30] Tagged paid or agreed to pay separate settlements of $250,000, $500,000, and $650,000 relating to these practises. [31]

Additionally, in 2002, Salon.com published a negative review of Jumpstart's CrushLink website. CrushLink was alleged to harvest e-mail addresses for later use in spam e-mail in exchange for deceptively offering the name of a "crush" that in the vast majority of cases did not exist. [32]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spamming</span> Unsolicited electronic messages, especially advertisements

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.

Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 American law to regulate bulk e-mail

The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 is a law passed in 2003 establishing the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail. The law requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. Introduced by Republican Conrad Burns, the act passed both the House and Senate during the 108th United States Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in December of 2003.

Email spam Unsolicited electronic advertising by e-mail

Email spam, also referred to as junk email or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming).

Sanford 'Spamford' Wallace is an Internet spammer. He initially sent junk faxes before coming to notoriety in 1997, promoting himself as the original "Spam King". Wallace's prolific spamming has resulted in encounters with the United States government, anti-spam activists, and large corporations such as Facebook and MySpace.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LinkedIn</span> Professional network website

LinkedIn is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job seekers to post their CVs and employers to post jobs. From 2015 most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals. Since December 2016, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. As of February 2022, LinkedIn has 830+ million registered members from over 200 countries and territories.

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

Scott Richter

Scott Richter is the CEO of Media Breakaway, formerly known as OptInRealBig.com LLC. Other related companies are Dynamic Dolphin and affiliate.com. His companies were major senders of Email spam and he was at one time referred to as the 'Spam King', as at one point his company was sending some 100 million emails a day. He and his companies have been sued several times for mass sending unsolicited advertisements.

The eCRUSH network consisted of two sites: eCRUSH.com and eSPIN.com. The network was acquired by Hearst Media on December 31, 2006. The original eCRUSH site was opened on Valentine's Day, 1999 in Chicago by Clark Benson and Karen DeMars Pillsbury. It pre-dated social networking sites such as Friendster.com, MySpace.com and Facebook.com.

Barracuda Networks, Inc. is a company providing security, networking and storage products based on network appliances and cloud services. The company's security products include products for protection against email, web surfing, web hackers and instant messaging threats such as spam, spyware, trojans, and viruses. The company's networking and storage products include web filtering, load balancing, application delivery controllers, message archiving, NG firewalls, backup services and data protection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email spoofing</span> Creating email spam or phishing messages with a forged sender identity or address

Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Masked email is a different topic, providing a "masked" email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed, but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.

Bang Bros is a pornographic film studio operating from Miami, Florida, United States. It was founded in 2000 by Kristopher Hinson while he was a student at the University of Florida. The network is now owned by WGCZ S.R.O., which purchased the network and its associated websites in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tagged (website)</span> Social discovery website

Tagged is a social discovery website based in San Francisco, California, founded in 2004. It allows members to browse the profiles of any other members, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged claims it has 300 million members as of 2014. As of September 2011, Quantcast estimates Tagged monthly unique users at 5.9 million in the United States, and 18.6 million globally. Michael Arrington wrote in April 2011 that Tagged is most notable for the ability to grow profitably during the era of Facebook.

Yesmail Interactive, is now known as Data Axle. The email marketing provider was previously headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Data Axle is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Omaha, Toronto, London and Singapore.

MyLife Online information broker

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Path (social network) Social network

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<i>United States v. Kilbride</i>

United States v. Kilbride, 584 F.3d 1240 is a case from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejecting an appeal from two individuals convicted of violating the Can Spam Act and US obscenity law. The defendants were appealing convictions on 8 counts from the District Court of Arizona for distributing pornographic spam via email. The second count which the defendants were found guilty of involved the falsification of the "From" field of email headers, which is illegal to do multiple times in commercial settings under 18 USC § 1037(a)(3). The case is particularly notable because of the majority opinion on obscenity, in which Judge Fletcher writes an argument endorsing the use of a national community obscenity standard for the internet.

Zorpia is a social networking service with customers in China. Zorpia is one of the few international social networks with a Chinese Internet Content Provider license. The social networking site reports 2 million unique users per month and a total worldwide user base of 26 million. Jeffrey Ng is the company's founder and CEO of Zorpia. The privately funded company is based in Hong Kong and has 30 employees.

Andrew Bachman American entrepreneur and investor

Andrew Bachman is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder of several companies, including Game Plan Holdings; after being charged with mobile cramming by the Federal Trade Commission, he resigned as president, chief executive officer, chief financial officer and chairman of Game Plan Holdings on February 11, 2014. He later agreed to a settlement with the FTC that includes a monetary judgment of more than $97 million. The judgment was partially suspended based on Bachman’s inability to pay the full amount, after he turned over nearly all of his assets.

References

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