About Us

In a nutshell, it’s a way to organize the world’s conversations.

The internet, in theory, lets us communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. At least that’s what was the driving force behind the first BBSs being created in the 1970s, followed by Usenet in the ’80s. This push to be digitally interconnected culminated with the popular adoption of the Internet in the 1990s.

But in all honesty, for the past 30 years not much has changed with online discussions. Forums and message boards have remained stagnant with virtually no added value and have been eclipsed by other, more fleeting and cloistered means of information exchange: email, IM, Facebook messages, blogging, and oh yes — Tweets. Unless you run in the right circles, you are deprived of potentially good information. That is, if you are not drowning in a sea of noise.

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This need not be the case. At Ipiqi, we think it should be easier and more efficient to talk to like-minded people, no matter where they are and how esoteric their interests. We don’t want to sift through piles of irrelevant chatter to discover things we’d find interesting. We think forums can be reinvented and put to truly good and powerful use.

We’re not satisfied with what’s already out there. If you can’t tell, we want to be piqi, and we’re pretty sure you’ll want to be, too.

Paul Capestany came up with the idea for a better type of forum while bored out of his mind with his job doing fruit fly research. Having decided that his neuroscience degree from Hopkins wasn’t going to get him anywhere anytime soon, he’s now the “business” guy at Ipiqi. Paul makes sure that the hosting bills get paid and is always looking for ways to improve Ipiqi. His official Ipiqi username is very creative: "Paul". You can also email him at paul@ipiqi.com

Brian Sloane went to Hopkins also and did CS and EE. Brian is responsible for everything you see when you surf Ipiqi.com. He’s the “front end” programmer extraordinaire. If a button isn’t working or you think our formatting could use some tweaks, he’s the guy to talk to at username "bsloane". Email is brian@ipiqi.com

Hervé Franceschi hails from the small island of Corsica and is a CS professor. He makes sure everything under the hood at Ipiqi works the right way. For example, Hervé amazingly manages to code all our algorithms (search, ranking, etc) from scratch. He posts under the mysterious guise of "x239", and his email is herve@ipiqi.com.