Vipul Ved Prakash
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Vipul Ved Prakash is a software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of anti-spam company Cloudmark, social-media search company Topsy, and open-source AI company TogetherAI.<ref>ISP Admin: Interview with Vipul Ved Prakash</ref><ref>Topsy Search Launches: ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web</ref>
In 2013, Topsy was acquired by Apple Inc. The acquisition was reported to be valued over $200M.<ref name="wsj1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In early 2000s, Prakash became widely known for creating Vipul's Razor, a popular open-source anti-spam system. He was named to the list of 2003's Top 100 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review for this work on anti-spam, at the age of 25.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Early lifeEdit
Vipul Ved Prakash grew up in New Delhi, India. He played competitive table tennis, and attended St. Stephen's College, Delhi for undergraduate studies in mathematics, physics and computer science, but dropped out to pursue his interests in software design.<ref>TR 35 Vipul Ved Prakash, Young Innovator</ref>
WorkEdit
In the late 1990s, Prakash co-founded, with Ashish Gulhati, an Internet privacy company (Sense/Net) for early Internet users in India, and wrote for computer magazines and industry journals, including a regular column, "Net Zeppelin", on networking protocols for the Indian edition of PC World Magazine.<ref>Fishy Business</ref><ref>Black Leather Jacket?</ref>
Prakash has authored several extensions to the Perl programming language that are published under open source licenses and distributed via CPAN.<ref>CPAN Modules by Ved Prakash</ref>
In May, 2000, Prakash and Rishab A. Ghosh published the Orbiten Free Software Survey, which is considered to be one of the first successful attempts at building an empirical model of contribution to open source projects.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Prakash worked at Napster as an engineer. He co-founded Cloudmark along with Napster’s co-founder Jordan Ritter, to provide a commercial alternative to his open-source filter, Vipul's Razor.<ref name="wsj1" /><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>
Prakash considers himself a cypherpunk. He created a dolphin-shaped implementation of RSA algorithm in Perl that was printed on a T-shirt and sold by ThinkGeek as a protest against restrictive exports laws.<ref>rsa-dolphin</ref><ref>Munitions T-shirt</ref>
Since Topsy's acquisition by Apple, Prakash has served as a Director of Engineering at Apple, Inc and is rumored to be leading a growing search program inside the company.<ref>Apple challenges Google with growing Web search program, fueled by Topsy acquisition.</ref> He appeared on the WWDC 2015 stage to introduce iOS Search APIs.<ref>Introducing Search APIs - WWDC 2015 - Videos</ref>