Origins of the
OnlyBoth
Benchmarking
Engine
History
In October, 1998, Raul was preparing for a family trip to Miami, Florida. As a research faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, he thought to do something while there, so he visited the University of Miami’s website to see about giving a talk on his artificial-intelligence research. A light bulb came on over his head upon reading this sentence: The University of Miami is the youngest of 23 private research universities in the country that operate both law and medical schools. Couldn’t software be programmed to come up with such insights, which he called niches, and also write them up?
He began work, later supported by a National Science Foundation research grant: Niche Finding - A New Task of Knowledge Discovery. Prototypes were developed and applied to data on colleges, baseball, members of congress, and genetics, but the writing ability was primitive.
In 2000, Raul co-founded Vivisimo with Jerome Pesenti and Christopher Palmer, using a separate technology that they developed at Carnegie Mellon. When Raul left the university in 2001 to join Vivisimo full-time, niche-finding got put on a shelf, where it lay while Raul led Vivisimo as CEO until 2009 and remained as executive chairman until 2012, when IBM acquired Vivisimo.
At Vivisimo, Raul collaborated twice with Andre Lessa, a fellow computer scientist educated in Brazil. The first collaboration gave rise to Vivisimo’s patent on remix clustering, which lets users explore the dominant topics in masses of search results with single clicks. The second, supported by the National Science Foundation, led to trend-discovery technology that revealed emerging topics in a time stream of search results.
In late 2012, Andre and Raul realized that nobody else had developed the niche-finding idea in the interim 12 years, so they lowered the technology from its shelf and resumed work: Broadening the concept, perfecting the software, collecting data, sharpening the writing, and developing a web service. They founded OnlyBoth LLC in early 2014, taking the name from unique, insightful statements that the software sometimes comes up with: Only Harvard has both as many yearly for-credit students (34,322) and as few students per faculty member (7). They launched two showcase applications to U.S. colleges and major-league baseball data, while they deliberated on what the best commercial application of this technology would be.
By June 2015 OnlyBoth had uncovered the right application for this unique technology: Benchmarking of a vendor's customers based on the usage data generated while the vendor delivers products or services, such as Cloud-based and others. Many vendors try to satisfy their customers' needs to understand how they're doing, but until now the technology wasn't available to make this happen with the push of a button.
OnlyBoth LLC became OnlyBoth Inc. in September, 2015.
Universal betterment through automated benchmarking!