Venky Harinarayan

In the past few months, while researching for this site’s various interviews, I’ve found Kosmix to be quite effective in providing me with a great deal of background for questions. Curious to learn more about the helpful web presence, I contacted its staff for an email interview.  They were quite open to the idea and put me in contact with Kosmix Co-Founder Venky Harinarayan. Here’s the official bio for Harinarayan from Kosmix: “Venky Harinarayan and his business partner Anand Rajaraman co-founded Kosmix in 2005 with the vision to connect people to the information that makes a difference in their lives. Together with Anand, Venky developed the first ecommerce search engine, Junglee, which was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998 for $250 million. At Amazon, Venky and Anand created the company’s search and marketplace business. In addition to Kosmix, Venky is a principal at Cambrian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. He is a graduate of Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Technology.” Regular readers know I typically run my interviews on late Wednesday evenings, but I so enjoyed the amount of ground we covered with this particular exchange, I opted to post it a day early. My thanks to Harinarayan for his time.

Tim O’Shea: Recently at the Kosmix blog, there was a mention of Sean Parker’s October speech, where one of his points about the future of the Internet was “Parker argues that the next phase is about building connections between people and things.” Is Kosmix’s acquisition of Cruxlux an effort to do just that–build stronger connections between people and things?

Venky Harinarayan: Absolutely.  At Kosmix, our mission is to connect people to the information that makes a difference in their lives. Our acquisition of Cruxlux fits perfectly with that vision.

In the early days, the Internet was about finding information, not about connecting people. Now with the advent of sites like Facebook and Twitter, the Web has an amazing capacity to illuminate social networks.  Interacting with other people has moved to the forefront our online activities.  The next step will be to connect people with information that matters to them—without you having to search for it.

We’ve made progress in this area with www.Meehive.com, our personalized news site.  You tell MeeHive your interests, and then the system scours millions of news outlets and blogs to bring you fresh stories about the people and things you want to follow.  For example, if you’re passionate about Broadway theatre, MeeHive will let you know every time there’s a review of a new musical, or breaking news about your favorite playwright’s latest work.  Facebook is about what you’re up to, and Kosmix and MeeHive are about what you’re into.

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