David Karandish earned computer science degree with honors from the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis in 2005. In 2006, he and longtime friend Chris Sims, also a computer science alumnus, started AnnounceMedia with the goal of better organizing the online consumer’s retail experience. AnnounceMedia blossomed into Answers.com, a plain-language search engine and information source used by more than one-third of all Internet users. Profitable since its first year, the company has grown into a global enterprise with offices in the technology hotbeds of Silicon Valley, New York and Beijing. He spoke at the Olin Cup Competition finale Jan. 30.
Q. You are co-founder and CEO of Answers.com, a question and answer website headquartered here in St. Louis. What’s been happening with the company recently?
Three years ago, my company acquired Answers.com, one of the top Q&A destinations on the web. Since then we’ve grown Answers.com as a website and as a platform. This week, we officially announced the creation of two distinct divisions at Answers Corp. to better reflect the company as it stands today: Answers.com and Answers Cloud Services.
Answers Cloud Services is the consolidation and integration of all Answers’ category-leading SaaS businesses: ForeSee, pioneer and provider of customer experience analytics; Webcollage, a cloud-based platform for managing and publishing rich product information; Easy2 Technologies, provider of online and mobile interactive merchandising content for manufacturers and retailers; and ResellerRatings, a trusted resource for shoppers looking for ratings and reviews of online merchants. Over the next year, we’ll be focusing a lot of effort on augmenting our integrated offerings to provide clients with an even more powerful platform to serve their needs, be it customer acquisition, conversion, brand engagement or customer experience.
At the same time, we’re going to keep investing in community and content for Answers.com, making the site a richer, more informative, trustworthy and stellar experience for the 170+ million monthly users who visit the site. It will also be interesting to explore how we can leverage the unique community engagement of the site to add value to our client offerings.
Stay tuned for truly exciting things to come.
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