Web search start-up secures €1m backing

HEYSTAKS TECHNOLOGIES, a social web search start-up, has secured €1 million in equity funding from the Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund, managed by NCB Ventures. The company will use the investment to create 10 new jobs over the next year, develop its product further and open a US office.

HeyStaks has developed a browser plug-in for sharing web searches, which is intended to reduce the time people spend searching online by connecting them to searches by people with similar interests.

“Very often people are searching for something that a friend or colleague has already found. At the moment if you find a page on a search engine, the only way to share it is to cut and paste the web address, which is a very clumsy way to do it,” said HeyStaks’s co-founder Prof Barry Smyth.

Users can create a folder called a “search stak”, containing all relevant online searches on a particular topic. These staks can be made public and shared with colleagues and friends by e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, or kept private. “We make sure the users are in control. HeyStaks doesn’t automatically opt you in to public sharing,” Prof Smyth said.

Staks are synchronised between devices so anyone using their iPhone to search will be able to see the same result in their “stak” on their laptop later, or even when using a computer in an internet cafe. The patent-protected technology works with Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines. HeyStaks will be launched before the end of the year, and plug-ins for all major browsers and mobile devices like the iPhone are in development.

Prof Smyth has been working on search technology for almost eight years and, along with HeyStaks’s co-founders Dr Maurice Coyle and Dr Peter Briggs, the team has more than 30 years of experience in social search technologies.

He had a similar part-time role with Changing Worlds, a provider of personalisation and mobile portal technology which was acquired by Amdocs for $60 million in 2008.

HeyStaks’s chief executive is Jonathan Dillon, a former vice president with Yahoo! who will be based in the firm’s offices in San Francisco. “We’re not just there for visibility. The west coast of the US is the heart of the search and social networking market where we want to play,” said Prof Smyth.

Once launched, HeyStaks plans to become known through viral marketing and partnerships with media and content providers. Prof Smyth would not reveal exact targets but said the next 12 months would be about gaining traction. “We’re a tiny Irish company but we’ve got an edge on the market and we could make a global impact. This is not about keeping it safe and growing it slowly.”

HeyStaks employs four people and plans to increase staff numbers to 14 in a year’s time and to more than 45 by the end of 2013.

Based in the NovaUCD centre, HeyStaks is a spin-out from the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Clarity Centre for Sensor Web Technologies. The centre is a joint venture between UCD, Dublin City University and Tyndall National Institute. Prof Smyth said this was proof the Government’s investment in RD produces tangible results. “Science research is creating jobs. Clarity is only up and running for two years and HeyStaks is its first fully funded spin-out,” he said.