Joseph Smarr

Chief Technology Officer at Plaxo

San Francisco Bay Area

Current
  • Chief Technology Officer at Plaxo
Past
  • Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo
  • Architect at Plaxo
  • Senior Software Engineer at Plaxo
Education
  • Stanford University
  • Stanford University
Connections
161 connections
Industry
Internet
Websites

Joseph Smarr’s Summary

I want to transform the world for the better by building intelligent technology that empowers people to solve everday problems. Before the industrial revolution, humans had to do many menial/dangerous physical tasks because machines couldn't do them. The same is now true with information-processing tasks, and it's time for another revolution! Most of my professional experience is working for startups designing and building web applications and AI systems (SGI, WebEx, MedExpert, Plaxo).

Joseph Smarr’s Specialties:

Building intelligent applications, automated text processing, advanced interactive web apps, user interface design


Joseph Smarr’s Experience

  • Chief Technology Officer

    Plaxo

    (Privately Held; Internet industry)

    June 2009Present (2 months)

    I'm now Plaxo's CTO. In addition to continuing my push to open up the social web, I'm now also leading our internal efforts to invest in tools and infrastructure to make Plaxo more agile and competitive. I couldn't ask for a better technical team to work with, and I'm so excited about the things we're building now!

  • Chief Platform Architect

    Plaxo

    (Privately Held; Internet industry)

    June 2007June 2009 (2 years 1 month)

    Having led the development of Plaxo Online 3.0, my new role is to build out our developer platform so you can sync your information with all the sites and services you use. The address book access widget I built is already being used by tons of sites, but we can do so much more! Plaxo can already sync with Outlook, Mac, and Thunderbird--now it's time to wire up the social web!

  • Architect

    Plaxo

    (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

    September 2006June 2007 (10 months)

    Having grown our webdev team from me and Terry to a serious team, I assumed the role of architect to lead the design and development of Plaxo Online 3.0--a rich and ambitious online address book, calendar, and integrated sync dashboard that will become the centerpiece of the Plaxo 3.0 experience. It's great fun pushing the envelope of what's possible with AJAX with a team full of rockstars! :)

  • Senior Software Engineer

    Plaxo

    (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

    May 2004September 2006 (2 years 5 months)

    Having successully built the NLP e-mail parsing engine that bootstrapped Plaxo's growth, I broadened my role to work more on the server backend and Plaxo Online web site. Which is to say, of course, that I was already wearing many hats as one does at a small startup, but now it was actually my job to do so!

  • NLP Engineer

    Plaxo, Inc.

    (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

    March 2002May 2004 (2 years 3 months)

    Built a lot of Plaxo's web-based client (complex CGI/DHTML/JavaScript/etc) and also built the Natural Language Processing engine for automatically parsing e-mail messages and extracting contact information.

  • Vice President of Strategic Planning and Implementation

    MedExpert International, Inc.

    (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

    February 2000February 2002 (2 years 1 month)

    I worked with the founders and CEO to build and organize the engineering team and work as the bridge between the business and engineering teams. I accompanied the CEO to several fund-raising meetings with VCs as the technical lead. I was also working as a web engineer.

  • Internet Innovation Technologist

    WebEx Communications, Inc.

    (Public Company; 51-200 employees; WEBX; Internet industry)

    October 1999March 2000 (6 months)

    Consulted for WebEx while at Stanford University on building a variant of the business-targeted WebEx platform for college use (interactive grading, meeting with TAs, remote student collaboration on projects, etc.). Wrote specs for several use cases and set up meetings between WebEx and Stanford Student Enterprises for implementation.


Joseph Smarr’s Education

  • Stanford University

    MS , Symbolic Systems , 20022003

    Concentration: Natural Language Processinng
    Advisor: Chris Manning

  • Stanford University

    BS , Symbolic Systems , 19982002


Additional Information

Joseph Smarr’s Websites:


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