Based in British Columbia, Canada, Yactraq Online Inc. is focused on fostering innovation within online video & audio. Our patent pending artificial intelligence software combines elements of speech recognition and natural language processing to convert speech to topics with a high degree of accuracy. Speech2Topics in turn enables a variety of applications & features like search, discovery, navigation, Speech2Ads and others.
Here’s the key elements:
- Convert speech in a video/audio file or stream into a set of relevant topics
- Tag video/audio files or streams with a set of time-coded topics
- Enhance user features like search, discovery & navigation
- Create a new ad revenue stream for video publishers
Who stands to gain from Yactraq:
- Live and stored video / audio publishers
- Video publisher tool & platform vendors
- Video / audio content owners
- Voice/video chat services
- Advertisers & advertising feed providers
leadership
Jeh Daruvala – Founder & CEO
Jeh has 22 years of entrepreneurial, investment banking, product management and business/systems analysis experience in information technology at startups, Microsoft, T-Mobile, TELUS, Avendus Advisors, Gateway Capital & Aditi Technologies. His specialties include corporate strategy, marketing strategy, competitive analysis, product management, business development, systems analysis & business analysis.
Before migrating to North America in 2002, Jeh played a key role in incubating Customer Asset, an India based IT infrastructure services venture that evolved into the $100 million, Firstsource Solutions (Bombay Stock Exchange – BOM:532809). Jeh sourced the acquisition of Customer Leverage, the software solution on which Firstsource offers its customer management services, and the team that developed it, into Customer Asset. Prior to that while working on Delsys, his first startup, Jeh sold the first-ever ethernet switch in India (Kalpana-Cisco).
Jeh has a Masters in Management Studies (Finance) & a Bachelors in Engineering (Electronics) from Bombay University. He is also a lifelong manned spaceflight enthusiast and believer in technology innovation as the key driver of corporate and economic growth.
Lee Iverson – CTO
Dr. Iverson’s work includes 8 years at SRI International in the AIC on Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and GIS systems where he helped build TerraVision and was one of the principals behind SRI’s attempted creation of the GeoWeb infrastructure. Lee was also Assistant Professor in Software Engineering (Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His work at UBC included research in online privacy, web engineering and CSCW. He also taught Computer Graphics, CSCW, and various other Software Engineering courses as well as the final year group project course. As Founder & Chief Scientist at Crowdtrust Technologies Inc, Lee worked on revolutionizing personal and social information management.
Lee has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from McGill (Computer Vision) and received his MEng and PhD working in Steve Zucker’s lab at the Centre for Intelligent Machines. His research focused on brain-inspired low-level vision algorithms. Lee’s PhD thesis was given the DW Ambridge Award as the outstanding PhD thesis in Science and Engineering in 1994. Lee also holds an undergrad degree in engineering from Princeton University.
Peter Mansfield – VP – Corporate Communications
Peter has played a leadership role in building awareness and credibility for fast growth companies since the early 1990’s including PropertyBridge, the leading automated payments solution in the property management industry that was acquired by MoneyGram in 2008.
A pioneer in web site development within business-to-business marketplaces, Peter has worked with companies from start-up through to market leadership. He has been actively involved in public offerings and acquisitions that have totaled more than $8 billion in value.
Peter was previously co-founder and CEO of Brand3, a breakthrough desktop marketing and Internet access solution acquired by American Express in 2001. Peter also served in senior marketing and management positions at Kodak and John Lewis Ltd in the United Kingdom.
He is a graduate of the University of East Anglia, England with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics.
advisory board
Subhash Bal
A co-founder of US start-ups, Subhash held senior marketing and sales positions in multibillion-dollar US organizations (e.g. Synopsys, Rockwell, 3Com, PMC-Sierra, National Semiconductor). Executive positions were held at startups : Excelan, SwitchOn Networks, Micom communications, Teradiant networks, Touch Communications, India West. The exits in these included IPO or acquisitions.
Steven Forth
Steven Forth is CEO & Board Member at LeveragePoint. An expert in human & organizational performance, learning and knowledge management, Steven is responsible for strategic direction, finances and key relationships at LeveragePoint. LeveragePoint was spun out of the Monitor Group in January 2009 to bring its online marketing strategy tools and the platform they are built on, to a larger market. The Monitor Group is a leading strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge MA with close ties to Harvard Business School.
Prior to leading LeveragePoint, Steven was the Vice President of Online Solutions at the eMonitor unit of Monitor Group. Steven has extensive experience with technology startups. Before joining Monitor, he co-founded the identify and social media company CrowdTrust and was CEO of Recombo. He was identified by the ASTDs magazine Training as one of the emerging leaders of the learning industry in the 21st century.
Pat Pattabhiraman
Dr. Pattabhiraman has extensive experience in Natural Language Processing and Speech Technology, in both academic- and industrial environments. At Conversay, Dr. Pattabhiraman led teams of speech engineers and computational linguists, contributing to the design and development of critical components of speech recognition and text-to-speech systems in 20 languages. His efforts resulted in commercial products deployed on over 8 million devices. At Seagate Software (now SAP Canada) in Vancouver, he architected a natural language interface to Crystal Reports and developed several of its major modules. He also has substantial R&D experience in natural language generation, automated translation and design of development environments for large-scale NLP systems. He has published and presented in major conferences, guest edited two special issues of Computational Intelligence Journal on Natural Language Generation, and has served as paper reviewer, thesis examiner and conference committee member regularly. Dr. Pattabhiraman has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a Ph.D. in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University.