GenieTown is where clever people connect to buy and sell local services. Customers find everything they need for their projects, from information and answers to their questions to people who can actually get the job done. People with skills, expertise, and passion in a wide range of areas use GenieTown to offer their services. These “Genies” build credibility and trust through answering questions from customers, submitting articles and giving competent advice. Through their contributions and jobs well done, Genies increase their ranking on GenieTown. GenieTown enables service markets to emerge and thrive by creating opportunities for people to express and demonstrate their abilities, ambitions and passions.
Today, most products can be purchased on the Internet and virtual services are available on a global level. Local services that require physical presence of the provider are still hard to find online. GenieTown leverages the power of the Web and matches consumers with local service providers in a safe, efficient, and trusted manner.
GenieTown not only features home improvement service providers in the San Francisco Bay Area but provides the opportunity to anyone to become a Genie and offer services on a local level as well as seek service providers.
Founded by a group of Stanford entrepreneurs in late 2006, GenieTown is funded by angel investors and is located in Palo Alto, CA.
Hassan founded GenieTown together with a group of Stanford entrepreneurs and alumni while working on his PhD thesis out of the very practical need of finding someone to clean his apartment while working under stringent paper deadlines.
Hassan was a member of the Transactional Coherence and Consistency project at Stanford University. Before starting GenieTown, he was a research assistant at the Stanford Computer Systems Laboratory. Hassan holds a MS in electrical engineering and will complete his PhD in 2009.
Before joining GenieTown, Mark held various executive positions at Penguin Computing, most recently VP of sales operations. Before Penguin Computing, Mark was Director of Global Alliances at Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, where he managed a $500M alliance between HP and Philips Electronics, focusing on the convergence of home electronics and consumer computing, and the "powered by Compaq" alliance with Yahoo!
Prior to that, Mark was Director of Customer Advocacy at Compaq. Mark spent the formative years of his career in engineering and product management where he was awarded seven patents for fault tolerant computing. He wrote several papers and was a speaker and panelist at various industry forums. Mark holds a BS/EECS from University of California, Berkeley.
Brian serves as technical advisor for GenieTown and will take the position of VP Engineering early in 2008. Brian returns to startup life after pursuing a PhD in computer science at Stanford University where he researched applying transactions to building scalable computer systems. Earlier, Brian was on the first engineering team at Ariba and eventually became the architect of the Buyer product for the procurement of both goods and services.
Before Ariba, Brian worked at other startups such as General Magic and Open Market, and helped several early-stage Silicon Valley startups with technology selection and early recruiting. Before Stanford, Brian received a SB and MEng in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Prior to joining GenieTown, Florian was Sr. Director of Marketing Communications at YouSendit, and, before that, Director of Marketing at A9.com, an Amazon.com company. Earlier, he was Director of Business Development at Red Herring Magazine where he drove the re-launch of the Web site and the print magazine.
Florian was co-founder and CEO of AlcheMe and has been instrumental in developing groundbreaking media solutions and communication strategies for Fortune 500 companies. Florian co-invented Voyager's Expanded Books and worked as a strategic consultant in new media for the Austrian Government and the European Community. He was a member of the Graduate Faculty of Art Center College of Design, frequently keynotes at events and is published in the field of digital media and electronic publishing. Florian studied Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Vienna and worked as researcher in computer linguistics and film theory.