Booming e-business sinks Madison roots

A university computer scientist, whose software ideas are powering hot Web sites like Ask Jeeves!, hopes to find fertile ground for high-technology employees in Madison.

Raghu Ramakrishnan, a UW–Madison professor currently on leave from the computer science department, founded a company called Quiq Inc. in Madison two years ago. The company, which specializes in building online information networks, has seen fast growth in the past year, capped last month by a $15 million venture capital investment.

For the life of the company, Quiq has split its operations between Madison and Silicon Valley. Quiq has all along been a UW–Madison-inspired innovation, with four of Ramakrishnan’s former students at the core of the company. Quiq is software that essentially creates “knowledge networks” online by linking together a company’s consumers. It allows customers to interact directly with each other to answer questions or get advice about a product.

On “Ask Jeeves!,” one of the Web’s premiere question-and-answer services, Quiq developed a software program called Answer Point. If users do not get the answer they were looking for from the Ask Jeeves database, they can post to Answer Point and pose that same question to millions of Ask Jeeves’ regular users.

For companies, the technology could end up improving the quality and speed of customer service, and also help companies track customer issues with their products. It will be the first approach to customer service that actually grows as the customer base grows. Ramakrishnan says its appeal lies in a question of who consumers trust: The car salesman or the people who already bought the car?