Infonautics, Inc. was an information services company, founded in 1992 by Marvin Weinberger,[2] Lawrence Husick, and Josh Kopelman,[3][4] and had its headquarters in Wayne, Pennsylvania, United States.[5] It was a spin-out from Telebase, Inc., which retained a minority position in the company. The company's executives included Van Morris (CEO), Ram Mohan (COO/CTO),[6] Frederica O'Brien (CFO), and Gerard Lewis (General Counsel). Israel J. Melman was also a co-founder, a mentor to Marvin Weinberger and served on the boards of both Telebase and Infonautics, where he was also Chairman of the Board.
History
In 1990, Telebase founder Weinberger and outside counsel Husick conceived of Homework Helper, a $10 per month unlimited research service having a large multimedia database and a natural language user interface. Working with Brewster Kahle, a protocol was developed to run on the Thinking Machines massively parallel computer system, but in late early 1991, Conquest Software demonstrated its semantic search engine and a change in direction ensued. Hardware support was provided by Tandem Computers. Early work on the multimedia database system yielded multiple U.S. patents.
In 1996, the company was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.[7] It was delisted in 2001.[8][9]
In 2001, Tucows acquired Infonautics through a business tactic called "reverse takeover".[5] Initially, Infonautics purchased Tucows and then changed its own name to Tucows.[10] On August 26, 2002, Tucows sold eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com to HighBeam Research.
^Kyle (June 2012). "Philly: Novotorium & Seed Philly Announce Entrepreneur Summercamp". seriousstartups.com. Retrieved 2016-09-07. We've seen tremendous collaboration, innovation and camaraderie through the years by the people who were part of Infonautics," Krupit said. "We are now experiencing a resurgence of the entrepreneurial community in Philadelphia, so the timing is excellent to help a new wave of entrepreneurs learn from pioneers and see how and how much we have already achieved in our region, and the possibilities for the future.