Groxis was a tech company based in
San Francisco, California
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...
that developed and marketed the web-based
federated content
Federated content is digital media content that is designed to be self-managing to support reporting and rights management in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Ex: Audio stored in a digital rights management
Digital rights management (DRM) is the ma ...
access and visual
search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
called Grokker.
History
Groxis was founded by Jean-Michel Decombe,
Paul Hawken
Paul Gerard Hawken (born February 8, 1946) is an American environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, and activist.
Biography
Hawken was born in San Mateo, California, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where his father worked at ...
,
and R.J. Pittman in 2001, and ceased operations in March 2009.
Jean-Michel Decombe was Chief Technology Officer until 2006. He conceived the vision and invented the concepts underlying Groxis' flagship product, Grokker, for which he obtained several patents, including 6,879,332, 6,888,554, 7,036,093, and 7,290,223.
Paul Hawken was Executive Chairman until 2003. He raised the initial round of capital from
angel investors
An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownersh ...
. He assembled a team of advisors including Paul Saffo and John Seely Brown.
R.J. Pittman was Chief Executive Officer until 2006. He raised capital from top-tier venture capitalists. He was responsible for all pathfinder customer wins and key partnerships. He also set overall product direction, leading the company and moving Grokker.com into the top 5000 most visited websites on the Internet.
Groxis partners and customers included
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
,
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
,
Fast Search & Transfer
Microsoft Development Center Norway (known as Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST) before 2010) is a Norwegian company, founded in 1997 and based in Oslo. FAST focused on data search technologies. It had offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lank ...
,
EBSCO
EBSCO Industries is an American company founded in 1944 by Elton Bryson Stephens Sr. and headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. The ''EBSCO'' acronym is based on ''Elton Bryson Stephens Company''. EBSCO Industries is a diverse company of over 4 ...
Information Services, the
Internet Public Library
The Internet Public Library (IPL, ipl2) was a non-profit, largely student-run website managed by a consortium, headed by Drexel University. Visitors could ask reference questions, and volunteer librarians and graduate students in library and info ...
, and
Amgen
Amgen Inc. (formerly Applied Molecular Genetics Inc.) is an American multinational biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. One of the world's largest independent biotechnology companies, Amgen was established in T ...
, as well as
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Mana ...
,
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
, and
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...
.
The company won several industry awards including DEMOgod 2003, Always On Top 100, and Wired 100.
The name Grokker is inspired by the 1961
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein (; July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific accu ...
science fiction classic ''
Stranger in a Strange Land
''Stranger in a Strange Land'' is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by ...
'',
[ in which ]Grok
''Grok'' is a neologism coined by American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel '' Stranger in a Strange Land''. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' summarizes the meaning of ''grok'' as "to understand intuitively o ...
is a Martian word meaning literally ‘to drink’ and metaphorically ‘to be one with.’ To grok something is to understand something so well that it is fully absorbed into oneself. It is to look at every problem, opportunity, action, and point of view from any and all perspectives.
References
Software companies based in California
Companies based in San Francisco
Internet search engines
Defunct software companies of the United States
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