Who is Alex Bäcker?

A scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. Scientist to observe the world, inventor to ideate improvement, entrepreneur to bring it to life. A native of Argentina, he represented the country twice at the International Olympiads of Informatics (after being a sub for another year). Alex holds a degree in Biology and Economics from MIT, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems and Biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the Dean’s award for ‘great contributions and outstanding qualities of Leadership and Responsibility’ while a Fellow at the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, and where he founded or co-founded the CNS Journal Club, the Da Vinci Club (including the Kitesurfing 'subdivision') and the Caltech Filmmaking Club.

He has held positions at McKinsey & Co., the Department of Computational Biology and Evolutionary Computing at the Center for Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics of Sandia National Labs, and the Biology Division of Caltech.

He is the founder of Adapt Technologies™, an emerging leader in search engine marketing technology which has boosted the reach of Search Engine Marketing campaigns by up to 580% while simultaneously reducing their cost per action by up to 78%, and raised $10M in an oversubscribed round of financing with top-tier Silicon Valley venture capitalits. Alex served as Adapt's first President, CEO and CTO, growing net revenues by more than 200% every quarter of his tenure as CEO, and served in Adapt's Board of Directors until the company's sale to WebVisible in 2008.

In 2007, Alex founded abinventio™, an invention factory  with a focus on challenging algorithmic problems, where he has since been practicing parallel entrepreneurship. abinventio has since released:

> QLess™, an award-winning wireless solution that has saved more than a hundred thousand of users from standing in line at DMVs, restaurants, shopping malls, doctors' offices, colleges and other locations across the nation, as featured in The New York Times, Mashable, Killer Startups, Mobile Marketer, Nation's Restaurant News, Retail Store Age and elsewhere --QLess was named one of the Best Business Innovations of the year by the 2009 American Business Awards and one of the ten most promising new technology companies by Vator & The Funded in a contest sponsored by Mashable, Microsoft, WSGR & others.

> Whozat™, The People Search Engine™, named one of the 100 hottest start-ups in the world by famed technology blog TechCrunch, a semantic search engine with machine vision that garnered tens of thousands of pageviews within a week of launch. Whozat beat Google and every other search engine tested 3 to 1 or more in results relevance in a blind people search comparison. Prof. Harry Lewis, endowed chair in CS at Harvard; former Dean of Harvard College, wrote in his blog: “Try whozat.com. I learned things about myself I didn’t know. Seriously. And now I’m checking on you.” Whozat has since launched SocialDiligence.com, pioneering the first search engine that can search based on a resume (or any document).

> PREPROVE™, a statistically sound behavioral way of measuring brand power and testing marketing messages which is orders of magnitude cheaper and more accurate than traditional focus groups and surveys.

> The SEM Experts™, for online marketers looking for their products to be found.

Under Alex's leadership, abinventio has consistently grown revenues every quarter since the launch of its first product, at an average 98% quarterly (1535% annual) and median 80% quarterly (1057% annual) growth.

In 2008, Alex was appointed by the President to serve in the California Institute of Technology's Information Sciences and Technology Board of Advisors together with a distinguished cadre of scientists, technologists and philantropists including Carver Mead and Phil Neches.

He has been an invited speaker at numerous conferences on diverse science and technology topics around the world. Alex is always looking for world-class entrepreneurial people to help bring about innovation through technology. Alex likes to spend his free time traveling with his family, kitesurfing, filmmaking, or kayaking.

In addition to this wiki, Alex keeps a blog of life at ab|inventio™, The Invention Factory™.

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P.S. If you want to read more:

With Ram Prayaga, Alex co-founded Cafe|Think™, which launched Choizi™, an online personalized recommendation service to help users find restaurants of their liking (most of the credit should go to Ram, says Alex). He is also the founder of Tree of Babel, a fledgling nonprofit collaborative web project to map out the genealogy of human languages.

abInventio's companies under development include:

> REPcloud™, a reputation engine which garnered tens of thousands of users within weeks of launching;

> HoundWire™, a location-aware community-powered news engine.

> 1OFTHESE.COM™, a better way to buy and sell in the world's most efficient marketplace --sign up to be notified upon launch--, and

> mynew.TV, a better way to be entertained that's all about you.