Info Insight
Naveen Jain In the years leading to the new millennium, Naveen Jain was one of the few who exhibited some foresight on wireless Internet, including the profits that go with it. Naveen Jain was actually superbly as a content provider. His company, InfoSpace, which he ferried from 1996 to 2002, flaunted great performances in Wall Street. Back then, it was the go-to provider of web content for top web brands. Lycos and AOL paid for its classified ads while NBC’s Snap used its maps and yellow pages. Like any well-meaning company, InfoSpace wanted to raise the stakes, too. At the turn of the millennium, it started providing not only content, but also the necessary services to complement wireless devices. For that, Information Week bet that Naveen Jain would change the Internet forever. However, InfoSpace was not the be-all of Naveen Jain’s entrepreneurial career. In January 2003, he founded another company, when InfoSpace was only six years old. Intelius turned out to be just as good, if not better. At a time when the market is saturated with content providers, Naveen Jain has set his sights on Intelius’ kind of business. The company leverages publicly available databases, whose personal information it repackages as checkable backgrounds. Users pay for Intelius to search people using these backgrounds, or at least look for records of their crimes and felonies. In a way, Intelius functions like an intelligence company. Naveen Jain is quite the intellectual technologist. He was a former manager at Microsoft Corporation where he undertook work on operating systems (Windows 95, Windows NT) and online services (The Microsoft Network). He worked for Bill Gates’ company from 1989 until 1996. Naveen Jain involves himself in philanthropic efforts on the side. He prioritizes causes like children, education, health, and his native India, and even has a history of contributions to the Seattle Children’s Hospital, University of Washington, United Way, and CRY India.
