About the Company

Persony's mission is to bring enterprise level applications, such as online collaboration, to the masses by leveraging the ubiquity of Web servers and Web hosting service providers. Traditionally, enterprise applications require the installation, operation, and maintenance of expensive and complicated application servers. These servers often require a staff of skilled technicians to keep them operational and, as a result, are affordable only to large enterprises. The emergence of Application Service Providers (ASP), who provide managed application hosing services for a monthly fee, brings the cost down but they are still expensive compared with the Web hosting fees charged by ISPs.

Persony's patent-pending "smart-client" technology puts the intelligence of an enterprise application on the client side and uses standard Web servers to connect remote users. By leveraging the millions of Web servers and thousands of ISPs in existence, Persony's solution can be deployed anywhere and at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. The smart-client approach is a disruptive technology that allows individuals and small businesses to afford applications that were once only available to larger corporations.

Persony was founded in 2004 by Eric Chen, a successful serial entrepreneur and co-inventor of Apple QuickTime VR. Prior to founding Persony, Eric was the founder and CEO of Presenter, Inc., a Web-based presentation company acquired by WebEx Communications, Inc. in 2003. Eric founded his first company RealSpace, Inc. in 1996 to develop software for creating online virtual tours. RealSpace was acquired by Live Picture, Inc. and Eric became CTO of Live Picture. Under Eric's direction, Live Picture created many award-winning virtual tour products, such as PhotoVista for stitching digital photos to create panoramas and Reality Studio for creating interactive virtual tours. Prior to founding RealSpace, Eric worked at Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group for 7 years as a research scientist, where he published many papers in prestigious computer graphics conferences, including two that have been selected as seminal papers by SIGGRAPH. Eric has bachelor's and master's degrees in industrial design from National Cheng-Kung University, Taiwan and the Ohio State University respectively. He received his master's degree in computer graphics from Cornell University. Eric is a prolific inventor and holds 14 US patents. One of Eric's proudest achievements is being the first to create virtual tours of the StarTrek Enterprise, the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the White House.