Overview:

At Relona Research Labs we develop innovations in Internet technology, marketplaces, and information systems. Our primary business is to license these inventions to other companies.

Management:

Relona was founded by Manjula Sundharam and Kumar Ramanathan. Manjula is an experienced business strategist. She has successfully helped startup companies as well as managed large teams of over 300 people in different industries including software and manufacturing. She has an MBA from Bharathiar University, India.

Kumar Ramanathan is a graduate of IIT at Madras and he completed his graduate program at the Univ of Massachusetts which had one of the earliest research groups in Information Retrieval and Web-Search. Most recently he managed a group developing robot-control software at Transform Pharmaceuticals and helped design innovations that persuaded Johnson and Johnson to acquire them for $230 million.

Innovation & Impact:

Improvements in relevance can have a strong effect on a search-engine's market-cap. For example, Google’s market-cap in January 2008 was over $200 billion while Yahoo’s market-cap was $32 billion. The difference of $170 billion was largely due to the superiority of Google’s search algorithm. Relona’s technology can help search-engines strengthen their position by improving the quality of their results.

Relona has conducted detailed studies using AOL's search-logs to determine the exact benefits that this technology brings to each of Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN-Live. View the presentations below to learn more:

Relona's benefits for Yahoo

Relona's benefits for Ask.com

Relona's benefits for MSN-Live

Relona's benefits for Google

Methodology of Comparison Studies - This presentation describes how the studies comparing the relevance of Relona with Yahoo, Ask, Microsoft, and Google were conducted. View this to gain a deeper understanding of the numbers discussed in the above presentations.