Nagaraju Bandaru

Founder & CTO, BooRah Inc.

I'm currently Founder and CTO at BooRah, a company that develops technology to extract sentiment from user generated comments and offers recommendations for consumers & small businesses. I lead the development of natural language technology to understand user reviews and blogs and generate meta data which is highly relevant in enhancing user experience on web/mobile and improving search relevance and SEO.

BooRah was voted as a top 10 semantic application for 2008 and been featured on New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Gigaom, CNET, etc.. I also developed a Mobile Application for Restaurant Search, one of the most downloaded & top rated lifestyle applications on Google Android Platform.

Previously, I was Vice President of Engineering at MetroFi, a Residential Broadband company that deployed 802.11x mesh networks to offer ubiquitous coverage across many cities in the US. I led a team of software, network and RF engineers and was responsible for all aspects of radio vendor test/evaluation, CPE development, network design/security, OSS development and operational testing. I wrote several RFPs that MetroFi won including City of Portland . I left MetroFi in early 2006 to start BooRah.

At Covad, I was Director of Engineering and managed a 50-person software team to support $300Million wholesale business ( including customers such as AT&T, Earthlink, AOL, Sprint ). I managed various OSS aspects including Ordering, Provisioning, Trouble Ticket, Customer Care, Network Management (FCAPS) and several other strategic projects.My other past companies include Lockheed Martin ( where I worked at the AI Center in Palo Alto) and Exodus Communications

I have more than 18 years of experience in a variety of roles as chief technologist, executive, software developer, system/network designer/administrator, and technology evangelist. I'm an active researcher/innovator in the areas of semantic search and intelligent entity-extraction/crawling and keenly interested in next generation search, OSS applications, consumer experience, social media & user generated content, meta-data extraction and analytics, local search and small businesses web, search advertising and mobile applications.

Speaking, Publications, Advisory Boards and Other References

• Speaker at Search Engine Strategies Conference- Chicago 2008


• Invited Speaker at Kelsey Group's Association of Directory Marketing - San Antonio 2008


• Moderator/Speaker at Semantic Web2.0 Conference - San Jose 2008


• Speaker at Search Engine Strategies Conference - San Jose 2008


• Panelist at New Media Tastemakers Summit - San Francisco 2008


• Guest speaker at SCU - MBA programs 2007-2009


• Moderator/Speaker - IEC Global OSS - Orlando, FL, 2002


• Speaker - Cross Roads Conference - Scottsdale,AZ 2001


• A Strategic Weapon for Data CLECs in Challenging Conditions. Nagaraju Bandaru and Umesh Bellur, Book chapter in Operations Support Systems 2002: Enabling the Next-Generation Network. ISBN: 1-931695-05-9, IEC Press


• Past advisory board memberships include Azalea Networks and ASTRI technologies and technical advisor for ACCA networks,Japan