Fwd: [Wiser-U] www.academia.edu

[Yi Zhang]

www.academia.edu may change the way that research is shared and discovered in the next few years. The trend is obvious. We should move fast.


Best

Yi

About Academia.edu

Academia.edu helps academics answer the question ‘who’s researching what?’. It applies to any research area: you can type in ‘thermophilic organisms’, or one of 12,420 other research interests, and find out who is working in that area worldwide, as well as what they are working on – the latest papers, conferences, blog posts, status updates etc.

Vision

Our vision is for every researcher in the world to be on Academia.edu, and every piece of research content to be channeled through Academia.edu, and accessible in realtime to the people who are interested in it. We are firm believers that a research platform as powerful as this will exist in 5 years’ time, and we want to be the ones to build it. The goal is to impact people’s research lives as much as Facebook has impacted people’s social lives.

Progress

Academia.edu launched just over a year ago, and is now one of the largest online communities of researchers in the world; we now have 102,080 profiles, and about 350,000 unique monthly visitors.

Team

There are three of us on the team right now:

• Richard Price CEO, did a Ph.D at Oxford in philosophy, and won the All Souls Prize Fellowship there, which is awarded to two students a year in the Humanities from Oxford's undergraduates and graduates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_College,_Oxford. Richard previously founded www.peopleradar.com, which was the largest application on the Facebook API 1.0 for 8 months, and www.liveout.co.uk, a student rental site in Oxford.
• Ben Lund CTO, did a BA at Cambridge. After that, he became project lead on Connotea, which grew to be one of the two leading academic bookmarking applications on the web (like Delicious, but for academics). Ben has built a search engine for the World Health Organization, and also integrated Google Health into Praxeon, a leading medical search engine. Both Ben and Richard are ‘aliens of extraordinary ability’ according to the US Immigration office (they are ‘aliens’ from the UK).
• Jarques Pretorius Lead front-end designer/developer. Jarques recently graduated from the Art Institute of California – San Francisco, where he won the award for best portfolio. Jarques’s designs can be seen at www.jpretorius.com.

We currently have one intern:

• Carson Roen: graduated from Pepperdine, and created the advertising startup www.eBUSlive.com, a unique and innovative blend of the online and public mediums. Carson runs Academia.edu’s marketing projects.

Investors

We have raised venture capital from:

Spark Ventures	HOWZAT Media (founders of Cheapflights.com)	The Accelerator Group
Brent Hoberman (founder of Lastminute.com)	Heidi Hsueh (founder of pAsia, formerly one of the biggest Internet companies in the greater China area).	Caravel Capital

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Francois Taddei <tad...@necker.fr>
Date: Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 11:52 AM
Subject: [Wiser-U] www.academia.edu
To: Wiser-U <us...@mail.wiser-u.net>


an interesting social network for researcher that seems to be developping fast
www.academia.edu
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--
Zhang Yi (章 益)
Dept. of Physics
and Center for Theoretical Biology
Peking University.
Address: Chang chun xin yuan 1# 636, Peking University, Beijing, P.R.China 100871
Telephone Number:+86-10-52763033
Mobile Number: +86-13811680380
Email: zhang...@gmail.com