Raymond Lau
 
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On this page, you will a details of the four ventures on which Raymond has worked. A PDF copy of his resume is also available here (last updated February, 2010).

RAMP Holdings, Inc.

RAMP Holdings, Inc. (f/k/a EveryZing) is an early stage company working on a multimedia (video & audio) content optimization (publishing and merchandising) platform targetted at media companies. The platform provides for universal site search, automatic topic page generation/publication, content tagging/indexing, contextual ad targeting and content syndication via Software as a Service. Ray joined as VP of Technology in February 2008 and runs both technology and engineering teams today.

The company is backed by venture financing from General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners and Fairhaven Capital. You can see the technology in action on Boston.com.

iPhrase Technologies, Inc. (now part of IBM)

Ray was the Chief Technology Officer at iPhrase Technologies, Inc., a provider of software solutions for search and customer interaction. iPhrase was acquired by IBM in November, 2005 and became part of IBM Software's Content Discovery group. Dr. Lau remained as a Senior Technical Staff Member through Jan 2008. Ray started the company with Noam Ben-ozer, Jane Chang, Mike McCandless in June, 1999. iPhrase received its first round financing from Greylock, Sequoia and Charles River Ventures and its second round financing from Reed-Elsevier Ventures, TDCapital, RSA Ventures along with the first round investors. Today, iPhrase is headquartered in Bedford, MA with satellite offices in San Francisco, CA and Jerusalem, Israel. The iPhrase OneStep platform was first deployed in 2000 and is deployed by nearly 100 customers as of December, 2004, inclduing: Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, Country Financial, Gateway, GEICO, Intuit, Mellon Financial, Neiman Marcus, Radio Shack, Sephora, Staples, TD Waterhouse, Verizon, and Wells Fargo. Raymond also sits on iPhrase's board.

In 2002, Ray was named as a member of Technology Review's TR100: The Innovators Under 32 Who Will Create the Future, partially for his work at iPhrase and partially for his lifelong accomplishments.

Relating to his work at iPhrase, six patents have been issued (several more pending) with Lau named as an inventor:

  • U.S. pat. 7,136,846 - Wireless information retrieval (November 14, 2006): A method of accessing information from a wireless device including processing a query and a wireless identifier received from the wireless device, searching a collection of data for a set of results matching the query, selectively reducing the set of results to generate a subset of results and outputting the subset of results on the wireless device according to a style sheet.
  • U.S. pat. 7,127,450 - Intelligent discard in information access system (October 24, 2006): A method of discarding results of a search of a collection of data includes parsing a query to produce fragments, searching the collection of data for matches to the fragments, determining a number of matches, placing the matches in a hierarchical tree data structure, determining an amount of space to display the matches, eliminating matches in the hierarchical tree data structure to fit within the amount of space and summarizing the eliminated matches.
  • U.S. pat. 6,745,181 - Information Access Method (June 1, 2004): A method of accessing information includes processing a query, searching a collection of data for a set of results matching the query, selectively reducing the set of results to generate a subset of results, outputting a prose rendition of the query and outputting the subset of results.
  • U.S. pat. 6,714,905 - Parsing Ambiguous Grammar (issued March 30, 2004): A method of parsing ambiguous grammar includes pre-compiling the grammar into a binary format, parsing a query, outputting a graph by combining the parsed query and the binary format of the grammar and outputting a frame representation of potential parses in the graph.
  • U.S. pat. 6,711,561 - Prose Feedback in Information Access System (Issued March 23, 2004): A method of generating prose in response to a query includes generating a text frame from the query and processing the text frame in conjunction with grammar rules to produce a prose rendition of the query.
  • U.S. pat. 6,704,728 - Accessing Information from a Collection of Data (issued March 9, 2004): A method of accessing information from a collection of data includes receiving a query, augmenting the query with canonical non-terminal concepts, generating an inverse index of the collection of data, the inverse index including canonical non-terminal representations of the data and generating results to the augmented query in conjunction with the inverse index.

PalmCentral.com/Handango, Inc. (now part of Appia)

"One of the most useful sites recommended is PalmCentral, a haven for owners of the PalmPilot personal digital assistant."
Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1998

After a 60+ MM financing round at Handango in Sept 2006, Ray has reduced his ownership and resigned from its board but remains a close friend.

Ray established PalmCentral.com in January, 1997 as a one-stop source on the Internet for software and information dedicated to developers and users of the Palm Computing PDAs. By April, 1999, the site had over five million visitors. With venture backing from Q Ventures, PalmCentral later became Handango, Inc. Handango was the leading provider of mobile downloads bringing over 50,000 applications and 25,000 digital media titles to market through an extensive global distribution network that reaches millions of mobile customers. Handango's application management and provisioning platform, Handango AMPP, has been chosen as the mobile software delivery platform by leading handset manufacturers, mobile operators and portals. Lau also served on Handango's board of directors through 2006. In Sept 2006, Handango completed a major 60+ MM round of financing lead by IVP, at which point Ray resigned from the board but remains a close friend and a continuing investor (See Press Release and VentureWire story). More recently, Handango was sold to Appia in 2010.

For more on Ray's PalmCentral story, click here.

StuffIt (now part of Smith Micro Software)

In 1987, Ray introduced the StuffIt data compression program for the Apple Macintosh. Still being marketed by Allume Systems, now a part of Smith Micro Software, Inc., StuffIt continues to be the industry standard data compression program for the Macintosh, a distinction held since 1987. For his efforts, Lau received MacUser magazine's 1989 Editors' Choice Derek Van Alstyne Rising Star Award and MacUser UK magazine's 1995 Lifetime Achievement Award. StuffIt Deluxe has received various honors including MacUser magazine's Editors' Choice Award for best compression product in 1992, and MacWorld magazine's World Class Award for best backup/storage utility in both 1993 and 1994.

More details about his involvement with StuffIt are available here.

 > Last Updated: May, 2010> Contact: mail@raylau.com