DIGITIZED DISCOVERIES

Cooking with cicadas…the first quilter in space…U.S. drones kill Pakistani Taliban deputy…Steven Seagal in Chechnya…100 hand-made gifts for dad. These are the headlines of the articles curated just for me on a recent Wednesday afternoon by Trapit, a personalized news and features app developed in our own backyard.

Written by Lynn Peithman StockInterview and Photography by Daniel Garcia

tech

Created by Gary Griffiths and Henry “Hank” Nothhaft Jr., the concept was partly born out of Nothhaft’s father’s old habit of sending interesting articles to his son. Nothhaft quickly caught that curating bug and, thanks to his technical experience, has worked with Griffiths over the years at a multitude of Silicon Valley tech companies: they met at Everdream and worked together at WebEx, which was acquired by Cisco.

“Hank was one of these bright, hard-working, young kids who just kind of got it and who could do anything. Whatever we asked Hank to do, he just did it and did it really well,” says Griffiths, CEO and founder of Trapit. “There’s only one guy who has been with me at every company since then and it’s been Hank.” Nothhaft is now chief product officer and co-founder of Trapit.

Thanks to Trapit’s intuitive algorithms and its stable of curious human editors, the app explores any subject and gathers articles to libraries of your choosing (California, DIY, email marketing, or gardening, for instance) or

“featured traps,” articles it selects. Trapit chooses from its own growing library of blogs, journals, magazines, and newspapers, and then over time, it learns what you like to read (or not) by your interaction of giving stories a thumbs up or thumbs down.

“One of our values is we actually go out and handpick every source, so content curation and source curation and optimization was something we wanted to really invest in,” Nothhaft says. “We approached Tommy Ziemer (vice president of operations) and he started building a team of part-time post-graduate students. They’d meet at coffee shops. One of them actually has a master’s degree in library science. She’s full time with us. She’s our ontologist and so she’s developed the whole methodology we use to follow up sources.”

Griffiths adds, “This is not a question of machines vs. humans. It had to be machines AND humans. On one hand, you have this balance of precision vs. serendipity. The other balance was machine vs. human. And we do it

trapit

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“One of our values is we actually go out and handpick every source.”Henry “Hank” Nothhaft Jr.,

Chief Product Officer

and co-founder

“This is the difference between what we

call divergent and convergent

information.”Gary Griffiths,

Chief Executive Officer

and co-founder

trap.ittwitter: @trapit

facebook: gotrapitinstagram: @trapit

across the company in so many different aspects, from the way we discover sources and embed them to the way we’re looking at curation and handling content.”

On the back end, “the world’s most advanced personalized content discovery application” is “built with AI technology developed for DARPA, Trapit delivers highly relevant recommendations based on rich contextual analysis of information and user preferences. Trapit is a spinoff company of SRI International and is derived from a DARPA-funded Artificial Intelligence project known as CALO,” according to Trapits Facebook page.

For you and me, Trapit is simply a personalized magazine, delivered to your iPad on demand. Like Pandora for music, but...not really.

“This is the difference between what we call divergent and convergent information,” Griffiths says. “People say, ‘So, this is like Pandora, right?’ Yeah, it is like Pandora in a way, but the difference is Pandora is in a convergent field. Music, as broad as it is, is actually very finite, right? You can count the number of bands, you can count the number of styles of music. It is a finite number. If we all like Bob Dylan, there’s a fair chance, a better than even chance, we’re probably going to like Bruce Springsteen, too.

“And so that’s not that hard. Now, the fact that we all like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen is not going to count for the fact that you may like table tennis and I might like lacrosse, because that’s totally divergent, right? And that’s where machines can’t figure that out.”

Founded in January 2010, the company now has 18 employees and has raised $10 million in backing. Griffiths is a 25-year veteran in the tech industry, and Nothhaft developed Trapit while serving as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at SRI International. In short, they’ve been around the Silicon Valley tech block and have a bit of advice for would-be entrepreneurs: “It’s the same advice you read everywhere, but you don’t realize how valid is it until you’re knee deep in it and that is be prepared to sacrifice everything for your dream,” Nothhaft says.

“There are no boundaries. This is 24/7 and you need to be ready for a roller coaster ride. The Instagrams of the world, one year to a billion-dollar acquisition, that’s one in a billion—and (then there is) the rest of us,” he adds.

“I would also say, partner wisely, because you’re going to spend a lot of time together. You have to pick people you know you’re going to be able to go the distance with.”

And be ready to tackle the less pleasant matters, Griffiths says. “You’ve got to sense where the issues are and if you can’t fix it, assess something that can be adjusted. You’ve just got to fix it right away. Because it’s the disharmony and dysfunction that kills the company and, mind you, it’s leadership that won’t face up to the hard task of making those hard decisions.”

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