Guest Speaker – Scott Jones

Scott Jones is the founding CEO of GraceNote and founder, chairman and CEO of Chacha.

ChaCha’s popular mobile service is “like calling a smart friend,” allowing users to text virtually any question to 242-242 and receive answers within minutes.  ChaCha’s unique marketing platform provides advertisers with the #1 way to engage millions of young adults and teens on their mobile phones.  Advertisers include Walmart, AT&T, ABC Family, Palm, P&G, IKEA, J&J, Coca Cola, and Paramount.  In less than two years, ChaCha has answered over 300 million questions and reaches over 12 million unique users every month. ChaCha.com was the fastest-growing website in 2009, among the Top 100 sites in the US, according to Quantcast.  And Nielsen reports that ChaCha’s popular mobile service is second only to Twitter in growth rate of the Top 10 mobile text publishers.

Proven innovator, entrepreneur, strategist, venture capitalist, pioneer, and inventor, Mr. Jones has founded and guided numerous companies to successful outcomes. At age 25, he co-founded and helped lead Boston Technology as its Chief Scientist and Chairman, where he developed the massively scalable, easy-to-use voicemail system now used by over a billion people around the world.  As founding CEO at Gracenote, Mr. Jones assembled the team and key technologies to dominate the world of music identification and discovery, which was sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million. Gracenote services are being accessed globally, tens of billions of times per year, by applications such as Apple’s iTunes.