The big deal
What if you could have superhuman recall? What if you had the peace of mind knowing
that no conversational detail would ever fall through the cracks? What would that do
for your productivity?
Now, we can't guarantee the "superhuman" thing, but we can promise you that we've got you covered when it comes to important conversations. Use Cogi, and every detail from every important call will be at your fingertips.
Who we are, and how we got here
Details come at us at an ever accelerating pace – it's no wonder we often forget the content of conversations by the
end of most calls.
We set out with a simple goal – give professionals a way to effortlessly recall and track everything in their important conversations through the use of an intuitive, browser-based service that seamlessly transcribes the important parts of conversation – the 'COGent Ideas' or Cogi.
Headquartered in Santa Barbara CA, Cogi was started in 2007 by a group of local technology veterans. Their successful hands-on experience with start-ups such as CallWave, CrystalVoice Communications, ComDesign, and PulsePoint Communications gives them a solid business, marketing, and technology foundation on which to build Cogi.
Mark Cromack, Co-founder and President
Mr. Cromack brings over twenty years of entrepreneurial and technical experience to Cogi.
Prior to launching Cogi, Mr. Cromack co-founded CrystalVoice Communications, Inc., a leading provider of innovative VoIP technology, and sold the company to Global IP Solutions, Inc. in 2007. Mr. Cromack's expertise in advanced digital signal processing algorithms is one of the keys to the development of CrystalVoice's core voice technology.
Additionally, Mr. Cromack was President and Co-founder of QIC:Solutions, Inc., an engineering consulting firm specializing in embedded digital signal processing and real-time communications development. QIC:Solutions developed high-end communications systems for AltiGen, Unisys Pulse-Point and Centigram.
Mr. Cromack also served in a number of management and engineering positions at Digital Sound Corporation, where his responsibilities included the architecture, design and implementation of three generations of DSP hardware and software.
Mr. Cromack holds several patents in digital signal processing technology. He received a Bachelors and Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Palmer Jackson, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer
Mr. Jackson has over twenty years of experience in marketing, business development and fundraising.
Prior to joining Cogi, Mr. Jackson served as Chief Operating Officer for Ideocore, a marketing and brand launch consultancy, which specializes in launching new companies. His professional experience also includes six and a half years with CallWave, Inc., an Internet Telecommunications company that went public in October of 2004. As one of the first employees and a seed investor, Mr. Jackson played a key role in acquiring more than 850,000 paid subscribers. Mr. Jackson served in various marketing roles at CallWave, including Director of Corporate Communications and Director of Installed Base Marketing.
Mr. Jackson received his early training in consumer marketing and advertising at Foote, Cone & Belding/San Francisco where he worked on The Clorox, McKesson and Taco Bell brands.
As an active member of the Santa Barbara community, Mr. Jackson serves as a founding organizer and director of American Riviera Bank, a full service community bank serving Santa Barbara that opened in July of 2006. He is also President of the Board for the Lobero Theater Foundation. Mr. Jackson received his MBA from UC Berkeley and his B.A. in American Studies from Yale University.
Andreas Wittenstein, Chief Scientist
Mr. Wittenstein has over twenty years of research and development experience as chief scientist and chief architect at diverse
leading technology companies where he developed new mathematical methods and turned them into breakthrough real-time technologies.
As a UCLA PhD student, he developed WAVES, a real-time speech analysis, editing, and synthesis system installed at UCB and UCSC, and consulted for Mattel, GI, and Computalker for the first commercial speech synthesis and voicemail products.
At Speech Systems, Mr. Wittenstein invented the Phonetic Engine, the first real-time continuous-speech speaker-independent speech recognizer. This engine was the winner, with CMU's syntax component, of DARPA's Speech Understanding Competition in 1989.
At Pixar, Mr. Wittenstein invented Quick RenderMan, the fastest 3D renderer, Glimpse, the first real-time materials editor, and Pix+Pixie, the first full-screen full-motion full-color movie codec, for the blockbuster Toy Story CD-ROM games, winner of the first QuickTime Award.
At Newfire, he helped develop Torch, the fastest cross-platform virtual-reality engine. As co-founder of BitJazz, Mr. Wittenstein invented SheerVideo, the fastest lossless video codec, and Synchromy, the only lossless color converter, cross-platform products used in major studios including ABC and NBC.
Steve Kiss, Chief Information Officer
Mr. Kiss has over 18 years of experience in Information Technology, most recently as Founder and CEO of Gazos Creek, Inc.,
a twenty-five person IT consulting corporation focusing on business processes, communication engineering, and application
development. Corporate projects include enterprise designs, network operations, security, mergers and acquisitions, audits,
construction, and a wide area of voice and data deployments.
Highlighted projects for infrastructure implementations include those at UCSF supporting 30,000 nodes and at Experclick supporting 1B transactions per hour. Enterprise customers include 3Com, Adobe, Birns, Bosch, iPass, MGM, Suzuki Motors, and Sun Microsystems. Other customers include medical and educational institutions as well as a host of government agencies.
Prior to Gazos, Mr. Kiss held a variety of senior IT roles. Mr. Kiss received his Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of San Francisco – McLaren College of Business.
