My MBA is finished and my first foray back into the working world is a marketing internship at a Seattle startup called Smart Desktop. Today is day two of my internship (and the company). Today also is the day SD was officially announced to the world by way of an acquisition. Exciting stuff!

July 06, 2006 09:00 AM US Eastern Timezone
Pi Corporation Acquires Smart Desktop, Inc.; Former Microsoft Executive's Start-Up Will Help Smart Desktop Deliver Innovative Software to Make Information Workers More Productive

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 6, 2006--Pi Corporation, a software company focused on creating better ways for people to organize, share and access their data, today announced that it acquired Smart Desktop, Inc. Pi Corporation was founded two years ago by Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft executive, and Warburg-Pincus of New York. Smart Desktop, which will operate as a separate brand, will create and bring to market in early 2007 innovative new products that increase the productivity of information workers. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Smart Desktop will commercialize the results of the "TaskTracer" project of the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory at Oregon State University (OSU). The research group, directed by Professors Tom Dietterich and Jon Herlocker, developed new technology that uses machine intelligence to automatically classify, sort and organize information for people by observing and learning from their interactions with their personal computers. Smart Desktop negotiated an exclusive worldwide license to the TaskTracer technology, patents, and intellectual property from the University.

Smart Desktop's management team includes:

-- CEO John Forbes, who has more than 20 years of experience as an executive in the software industry at leading companies including Visio and Autodesk.

-- VP of Engineering Dr. Jon Herlocker, who has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and was co-inventor of the technology commercialized by Net Perceptions, a pioneering company in collaborative filtering technology.

-- Chief Scientist Dr. Tom Dietterich, who is one of the most respected experts in the field of machine learning and is the current president of the International Machine Learning Association.