The Team:

We are based in Palo Alto, California; However the TrustedOpinion.com team is truly global, representing three continents. Though we come from different backgrounds, we share a common vision: a passionate belief that TrustedOpinion.com has the potential to profoundly improve the reliability of recommendations that people share over the Internet.

Shahar Smirin, Founder

Shahar is the visionary spirit behind Trusted Opinion as well as it's indefatigable leader. Trusted Opinion Inc. This his 3rd venture. Shahar is experienced serial entrepreneur who successfully built and sold two Israeli startups in the late 90's. He is also a veteran corporate officer with extensive sales and business management experience in the Eastern European, Israeli and American markets. He served as Vice President of R&D at both Treeway and CommerceNet, and was CEO of [NASDAQ100: CMVT] Comverse Russia, where he achieved sales records exceeding $100M. Shahar swears he had some spare time once, but apparently he forgot where he put it.

Gene Leybzon, CTO

Gene takes a hands-on approach to driving our technology strategy. Gene was an early Java pioneer and co-author of "Java Unleashed" in 1996. Most recently, Gene was Chief Architect at Polaris Wireless, and before that focused on building large-scale web applications as a senior member of engineering teams at Xerox, HP, Siebel (now Oracle), and Bayer. He is a Silicon Valley-style socialite attending Google, Facebook, and OpenSocial meetups around Silicon Valley, reading the latest tech blogs, and exploring newly released APIs. Gene can be easily amused by an original idea, fine poetry, or elegant code.

Ilya Axelrod, Co-founder, Mathematics and Algorithms

Ilya is an expert in systems design and algorithms. He graduated cum laude M.Sc. from Moscow State University in Mathematics and Mechanics in 1994. A veteran of the mobile, telecom, and Internet business. Occupying several management positions over the past twelve years at leading mobile operator Vimpelcom - NYSE [VIP] - he has run the gamut from marketing manager to Head of Service Development and Platforms. He has managed and launched multiple messaging, telecommunication services, and content projects for 40+ million users in Russia and the CIS, establishing an extensive track record. Ilya's significant contributions to Trusted Opinion include his work in algorithms and systems design. We knew this had been a lifelong interest but didn't realize how long until his mother shared with us some of his early work from Kindergarten, which has been displayed on her refrigerator for many years.

Alexander Ershov, Mathematics and Algorithms

Graduated cum laude M.Sc. in Mathematics and Mechanics, Alexander has almost 20 years of experience in software development, system analysis and system design. The details of his first job are murky: we know he was recruited by the KGB at 11 years old to work on electronic counter-surveillance and computer modeling of nuclear reactions. His work led to the development of the world's first clean cold-fusion reactor at age 13, but the design was declared a State secret and he is unrecognized for the hero he is. Fortunately, that led to a career at Reksoft and his eventual focus on recommendation algorithms, which has benefited us at TrustedOpinion.com greatly.

Ronny Kohavi, Ph.D., Scientific Advisor

Ronny is Trusted Opinion's scientific advisor and is one of the leaders in the knowledge discovery and data mining fields. Ronny is a partner at Microsoft and serves as a General Manager, Experimentation Platform @ Windows Live. He was previously the director of data mining and personalization at Amazon.com. Features introduced during his tenure were estimated to be worth several hundred million dollars in incremental revenue. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Business Intelligence at Blue Martini Software. Ronny managed the MineSet project at Silicon Graphics and led the Machine Learning library (MLC++) effort at Stanford University and at SGI. Dr. Kohavi received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1995. He was the general chair for KDD 2004. No one knows for sure, but evidence suggests Ronny's IQ is somewhere between 500 and 1000.

Jeff Black, Advisor

Jeff is a serial entrepreneur and Internet legend. Mr. Black has built and sold three successful companies from the ground up: Hotels.com, Resorts.com, and iAtlas (AltaVista). In addition, Mr. Black has held executive position of General Manager at AltaVista. Jeff served as Chairman and CEO of Internet Marketing Inc. which launched first Yellow pages services (local search) and first Maps services on the web. During his career, Mr. Black has held Top Secret clearances at several government agencies and he currently holds six patents for his work in emerging technologies. We'd like to tell you something funny about him but then we'd have to kill you.

User Interface & Flash Designers

Shahar traveled far and wide to various corners of the world seeking out the best Flash and UI designers around. His travels were long and arduous, and included a run-in with a pack of angry firefoxes, a bout of a rare form of fungal interfacitis, and severe version-incompatabilia. The journey was well worth it though, and we've carefully hidden the UI team across the globe, feeding them minimal techno and trance music. The last known coordinates of "M" was (35.67, 139.76), "S" was seen around (37.77, -122.42), and "A" rumored to be (59.93, 30.32)… but that's as much as we'll say.