Last modified: Friday, April 5, 2013
ChaCha co-founder Scott Jones to keynote sixth annual IU Entrepreneurial Connection Day
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 5, 2013
Editors: Reporters are welcome to cover the program. Contact George Vlahakis at 812-855-0846 or vlahakis@iu.edu for assistance.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Scott A. Jones, a veteran entrepreneur, inventor, strategist and venture capitalist, will speak at this year's IU Entrepreneurial Connection Day at 1 p.m. on April 11 in the atrium of the Godfrey Graduate and Executive Education Center of Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.
The program is sponsored by the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Jones also will receive the William L. Haeberle Legacy Award, which is given to an individual who has made a lasting impact on the Indiana entrepreneurship culture.
He is co-founder of ChaCha, today's leading free, real-time Q&A service, allowing anyone with a mobile phone to ask any question in conversational English, known as "the world's easiest-to-use and most comprehensive way to access answers and information."
Through its unique "ask a smart friend" platform that Jones developed, ChaCha has answered over 2 billion questions from more than 40 million unique users per month via the Web, iPhone app, Android app, SMS text and voice (1-800-2-ChaCha™).
Prior to ChaCha, Jones, at the age of 25, co-founded and led Boston Technology, where he invented a massively scalable, easy-to-use voicemail system. Used by more than two billion people around the world, it was later sold to Comverse for $843 million.
Subsequently, Jones founded Internet-based music service company Gracenote. Gracenote touches hundreds of millions of music fans and TV viewers every day. The Gracenote database is the largest source of music and video metadata on the planet. The database receives more than 500 million queries every day and upwards of 180 billion queries every year. If Gracenote is compared against a search engine, it would rank among the world's largest. The company was sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million.
Jones is now driven by the singular focus of making ChaCha the world's easiest to-use and most comprehensive way to get valuable info on the go.
The IU Entrepreneurial Connection Day is sponsored by the Kelley School of Business and the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship amd Innovation. The free event is open to IU students, faculty and staff, but reservations are required. For more information, call 812-855-4248, visit the Johnson Center website or register online.
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