Our History:

A couple of years ago, Shahar Smirin struck upon the underlying concept for TrustedOpinion.com while attending a birthing class with his expectant wife. The daunting prospect of becoming a first-time father had Shahar's head swimming with questions for which he needed quick reliable answers. Contacting trusted friends and relatives was proving to be "hit-and-miss" and time consuming, and while there was plenty of information on the Internet, it was often impossible to determine its reliability. What was needed was a way to combine the trustworthiness of his friends with the efficiency of the Internet.

Realizing the profound potential of the idea he had stumbled upon, Shahar quickly gathered his team and got to work. The result was a uniquely intelligent online platform for sharing ratings and recommendations between trusted individuals, which serve up commercially untainted and personally tailored recommendations.

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, CEO

Shahar is the visionary spirit behind Trusted Opinion as well as its indefatigable leader. Trusted Opinion Inc. is 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.

Todd Greene, Co-founder, COO

Todd manages daily operations, marketing, and other motley jobs involved in supporting a growing and eclectic organization. He previously co-founded CascadeWorks, acquired by Elance in 2003. Since then, Todd has focused specifically on social, content, and recommendation sites at Cairo.com (now Glimpse) and NeoVillage while also providing strategy consulting to clients such as PrismVision, VeriSign, and Selectica. Todd left Price Waterhouse in the mid 90's to become one of the first employees of NetDynamics (sold to Sun Microsystems in 1998) and, much to his family's chagrin, hasn't glanced up from his browser since, except during the occasional software upgrade.

Tom Schulz, Co-founder, Business Development Consulting

Tom joined Shahar as a Business Development Executive to help Trusted Opinion navigate the waves of the Internet and find a fine, strong surf. A serial entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, Tom began his career as a researcher at DEC in Palo Alto. Tom was a Boston Consulting Group strategy consultant in Munich and San Francisco, and in 1994, founded Germany's first nationwide Internet Service Provider, Cybernet, which he took public on NASDAQ in 1997. Tom has invested in, and helped grow many start-ups as a member of the Munich Business Angels, The Angels' Forum and The Halo Funds in Palo Alto. He has also been an advisor to Earlybird Venture Capital. Tom is a co-founder of the Conscious Business Institute. He holds an MS in computer science and an MBA from Stanford University. Tom runs a marathon every year and practices Aikido just enough to be a danger to himself.

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.

Development Team

Residing in St. Petersburg, our Development team are top-notch members of Reksoft, a leading outsourcing software development center with 16 years of delivering solutions to brand-name companies around the world. Our dedicated Reksoft team works tirelessly to improve the experience for our rapidly growing list of website members. They live and dream in code (all of it bug-free, of course). They've consistently deprived our marketing team of its primary goal: to drive more web traffic than our architecture can handle. Even with TrustedOpinion.com's fast growth, the software is running like a tuned Ferrari (though Marketing ain't done yet!)

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.