HeyStaks Management

Jonathan Dillon - Chief Executive Officer

Email: jonathan.dillon@heystaks.com

Jonathan Dillon joined the HeyStaks team in early 2010 and has become CEO of HeyStaks. Jonathan is a former VP Corporate Development at Yahoo! where he completed 40 acquisitions and integrations, with notable ones in the web search and monetization and social spaces, eg, Overture, Right Media, Blue Lithium, Flickr and Delicious. Jonathan also started and ran the eBay Business Unit at Yahoo!, which grew from zero to over $100m in revenues in 18 months. More recently he has been launching numerous high potential tech start ups in Silicon Valley as an executive in residence, and is based out of San Francisco.

Barry Smyth - Chief Scientific Officer 

Email: barry.smyth@heystaks.com

Prof. Barry Smyth is a leading researcher in the recommender systems and web search space. He has published more than 400 scientific papers and received dozens of international awards for his research. Barry is an experienced entrepreneur and was a founder of ChangingWorlds, which became a leading provider of mobile personalization technologies. ChangingWorlds was acquired by Amdocs Inc in 2008.

Maurice Coyle - VP Product

Email: maurice.coyle@heystaks.com

Dr Maurice Coyle started his academic life by doing a B.Sc. (Hons) in University College Dublin, specializing in Computer Science. Following on from this, Maurice entered the Ph.D. programme under Prof. Barry Smyth, working as part of the research group on collaborative web search. Maurice's thesis focused on implementing a new, proxy-based architecture for the collaborative search technology, that allowed users to search on Google as normal but also to benefit from backend personalization technology. Along with his co-founders Barry and Peter, Maurice was passionate about this technology and together they built HeyStaks to bring social search to a wider audience.

Peter Briggs - Chief Technical Architect

Email: peter.briggs@heystaks.com

Dr Peter Briggs graduated from University College Dublin in 2002 with a B.Sc. (Hons) degree in Computer Science. Following his undergraduate degree, Peter went on to conduct postgraduate research at UCD with Prof. Barry Smyth’s collaborative search research group. Peter's thesis focussed on a number of important extensions to collaborative Web search, including a model of trust that allows collaborative search systems to assess the contribution of each searcher to the community search knowledge, improving both system robustness and result quality. Upon completing his Ph.D., Peter joined with Barry and Maurice to commercialise their work on collaborative search - the result is HeyStaks, a spinout company that brings together many years of cutting-edge social search research.

The Problem with Web Search

The average Web user spends nearly 18 hours per month using search engines, with so-called "information workers" spending up to 60 hours per month searching for information online. That's a lot of time spent searching. Wouldn't it be better to spend less time looking for information and more time using it? Often when we search we are actually looking for information that we have already found; up to 70% of our searches are seeking information that we or a friend or a colleague has previously found. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to waste time re-searching for information, or if we could take advantage of the searches of colleagues and friends to get relevant information faster? Did you realise that even with the leading search engines, such as Google, 50% of your searches are unsuccessful. That's a lot of wasted search time. Wouldn't it be so much better if search engines were better able to answer our queries first-time, everytime?

The HeyStaks Solution

HeyStaks has been developed to solve these problems and to make a real difference to the way you search. HeyStaks is not a search engine, but it does work with your favourite search engine; today that means Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, with more to follow.

HeyStaks is a browser toolbar that adds a number of missing features to existing search engines:

1. HeyStaks allows you to organise your search experiences. You can store your frequent searches, and the results you like, in a type of folder called a search Stak.
2. HeyStaks allows you to easily share your search experiences with friends and colleagues. You can invite them to share in your search Staks so that their search experiences can be added to your own.
3. HeyStaks helps you and your friends to benefit from each other's search experiences. It does this by promoting relevant results from your search Staks as you search.

The HeyStaks Technology

HeyStaks has been developed by researchers in University College Dublin. Its patent-pending technology helps HeyStaks to manage, share, and harness your search experiences. And it has been shown to improve the success rate of Google searches by up to 50%, saving you time and effort every day.

Getting Started

At the moment we're in closed beta, but if you're interested you can leave your email address here and we'll get back to you when we have more invites available!