Initiated, designed, and co-wrote the products that
brought in Inference the vast bulk of Inference's revenue.
"Most of you are here because of work that Roger David Carasso has
done. He has been responsible for many of the innovations that you
see in the product today and will see in the products going forward."
-- Ralph Barletta, President, Inference Corp.,
at the
Inference International User's Meeting 1999
- Commercialized the CBR Kernel, with Dave Adam, which formed the
basis for all of Inference's products from 1990 until 1999.
- Initiated, co-wrote, and co-designed CasePoint Windows, with David
Lee. We developed CasePoint in a few weekends and surprised Inference
with a new product. David and I later commercialized it, and it
became Inference's largest revenue generator, allowing Inference to go
public on NASDAQ.
- Initiated, designed, wrote product and initial sales plan for
CasePoint WebServer. I developed CasePoint WebServer in a few
weekends and surprised Inference with a new product. I commercialized
it over the coming months, and it generated many many millions for
Inference. From 1996 to 1999, most of Inference's customer orders
have included CasePoint WebServer, a six-figure product.
- Initiated, designed, wrote iFind (later
renamed InFind), arguably the first meta-search on the web. InFind
brings in over 250,000 unique web users each month for Inference,
introducing untold number of customers and employees to Inference over
the years. Were Inference to advertise on InFind, estimates put the
income at $50,000 per month.
- Initiated, designed, co-wrote, and managed the Summit project,
with automatic question generation, clustering, and universal gateway
access to multiple streams of data (e.g., web, database, cbr,
text-retrieval). Summit was the basis for k-Commerce Support Enterprise,
Inference's current Flagship product, developed by Ralph Barletta's
development team.
Managed 11 software engineers, working simultaneously on over 5
products, delivering products on-time.
During 1993-1994 I managed the entire CBR2 product line, with 11
engineers, and produced the beta versions that went to customer sites
for testing, on-time. Before the commercial version could be
released, Inference had a significant layoff, and the CBR2 product
line was halted. The layoff was primarily caused by
larger-than-expected expenses associated with Inference's other non-CBR
product, Art*Enterprise. As a stop-gap measure, management renamed
CBR1.3 as CBR2.0 so a new product could be released. Several years
later the CBR2 product line was given a new GUI as well as many other
improvements, and released by Inference UK as CBR3.
- Software Projects Managed At Once: CBR Express 2.0 Author,
CBR Express 2.0 Search, CBR Express 2.0 Tracking, CasePoint 2.0,
CasePoint 1.3.
- Software Engineers (including Documentation and User Interface):
Douglas Buedel, Ravi Sundaar, Gary Vrooman, Michael Amirfathi, Karen
Graham, Bruce Clayton, Nat Eisman, Dan Lee, Bob Alexander, Patrick
Ngai, and myself.
InFind (Inference Find) in the Press
Below are some quotes from John C. Dvorak of Ziff-Davis:
"I'm a serious fan of Inference Find"
"I still think Inference Find is the best search engine"
"InFind satisfies 95% of my initial searches."
"My current favorite search engine is Inference Find"...
"My current favorite search engine is Inference Find, which
consolidates information from various other engines."
ZurfRider in the Press
"PC World Editors' Pick! Explore your Web-search results in ways you never thought possible."
-- PC World, April 23rd, 1998
"Find things faster on the Internet with ZurfRider. It's easy to find just what you're looking for."
-- Yahoo Internet Life Magazine, April 15th, 1998
"ZurfRider is a well-designed program [and a] good way to merge results from multiple engines and sort them intelligently."
-- Windows Magazine, May 1998
"BEST BUY! We found ZurfRider to be surprisingly fast and accurate."
-- Home Office Computing, March 1998
"ZurfRider is colorful and fun."
-- Ziff-Davis, January 1998
"It's a search-engine interface with a brain!"
"ZurfRider is a state-of-the-art World Wide Web search bot."
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