Inside The Mind Of A Crazy (Rich) Inventor
You probably don’t know the name Scott Jones, but chances are his life has touched yours. Checked your voicemail lately? You’ve got Jones to thank. Pop a CD in your computer, and iTunes brings up the track names. That feature comes from another of Jones’s companies, Gracenote. When Indiana last year adopted daylight savings time, it was Jones who pushed hardest for the change.
Jones’s latest company, ChaCha, is developing a potential rival to Google – a search engine assisted by human experts who will help you find your answer.
And here’s what Jones claims to have on deck: self-propelled robotic lawn mowers, a method to sequence your entire DNA in one minute, a way to make humans fly.
From anyone else these might seem the ravings of a madman. But Jones backs up his ideas with a fortune he estimates to be worth $150 million, a brain that lets him keep pace with the geekiest of scientists, and a knack for managing startups.
His ambition is to change the way people live, and he figures that any one of his half a dozen or so new startups could do just that.
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Photo by scottajones.com.
Brad Newman on October 16th, 2007 11:48 am
What an inspirational human being. Thanks for the great post….
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