John Frank, CEO and Co-Founder, MetaCarta

As CEO and Co-Founder of MetaCarta, an MIT startup, I was delighted to have Karen join my cofounders and me as an early advisor.  She helped us design the core user experience of our initial product and was a key member of our advisory board throughout our earliest fundraising efforts all the way through to our acquisition by Nokia.  Karen’s deep design and technical skills helped shape the initial MetaCarta product, which was the first ever map-based search experience for unstructured documents.  MetaCarta built the world’s deepest natural language geotagger, which could recognize and resolve latitude-longitude coordinates for geographic references in text, such as “60 miles northeast of Al Hamra” and undersea landmarks.  Working with me and my colleagues Doug Brenhouse and Erik Rauch, Karen contributed as a co-inventor on our first patent filings for MetaCarta’s technology.  I highly recommend Karen Donoghue for early-stage technology projects and founders seeking deep product design expertise.