Steven Horowitz

Steven Horowitz is a founder and the current principal of the OvidianGroup, an innovation and IP business strategy consulting firm. He also advises Berkeley entrepreneurs and start ups. Before joining Ovidian, Dr. Horowitz was a Vice President at Yahoo!, where he built and led the Media Innovation Group, a team of designers and engineers pushing the boundaries of consumer experience and engagement with online content. His group filed 55 patent applications; Dr. Horowitz is an inventor on 30 of them. Also while at Yahoo!, Dr. Horowitz served as a technical and creative consultant to such notable media innovators as Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett on jointly-developed Web-based programming projects. Prior to Yahoo!, Dr. Horowitz headed product development, engineering and operations for AvantGo, a mobile app subsidiary of Sybase, delivering personalized, name-brand content to smartphones. Before that, Dr. Horowitz was CTO, Creative Director and Co-Founder of Palladium Interactive, a hybrid CD-ROM / Internet entertainment, education and productivity software developer and publisher. After Palladium’s acquisition by The Learning Company, he became a founding member and Chief Scientist of Genealogy.com, a destination website for family history content, research and community, throughout its acquisition by A&E Television Networks. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. from Princeton University.