Arthur M. Keller

Managing Partner, Startup and Intellectual Property Practice

Dr. Arthur M. Keller is Managing Partner of Minerva Consulting. His current consulting practice is to help startups get going. His client list includes Globallinx Network, Serus Corp., Propel Software Corp., Target Mining, Persistence Software, and Mergent Systems.

See the profile of Arthur Keller in TechWeb on March 10, 2000.

Dr. Keller provides technical and business strategy advice to e-commerce startups. He sometimes provides some seed funding, but only to the startups he works with directly.

Dr. Keller also works as an expert witness on patent infringement cases.

Dr. Keller is a member of the Planning and Transportation Commission of the City of Palo Alto, California. He is also co-chair of the Environmental Affinity group of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2) of the Community Foundation Silicon Valley. He is also a member of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2).

He was Chief Technical Advisor (and was formerly on the Board of Directors) of Persistence Software and still advises them on advanced technical strategy. Persistence Software is the technology leader in the Transactional Application Server market, providing a foundation for distributed computing. Persistence accelerates the development and deployment of high-performance distributed systems. The Persistence PowerTier family of Transactional Application Servers includes PowerTier for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and PowerTier for C++. Over 200 Global-1000 companies have accelerated the delivery of applications and ensured scalability using PowerTier's patented object-relational technology. Persistence Software went public on June 25, 1999.

He was also a Co-Founder (with Prof. Michael Genesereth) (and was formerly COO and CFO) of Mergent Systems, Inc., which commercialized Infomaster, later called iMerge. Mergent Systems was originally called Epistemics, Inc. Mergent develops applications for the business to business e-commerce market. Its applications address the challenge of creating, operating, and maintaining industry catalogs for Internet market makers. Mergent is unique in its ability to deal with the issues facing net market makers including sourcing data from distributed sites, dealing with unstructured, missing or incomplete information, and providing fast and easy access to catalog and related information. Mergent Systems was acquired by Commerce One in January 2000 for what was then about $200 million in cash and stock.

Dr. Keller is co-founder, Interim CEO, and chairman of the Board of Directors of Globallinx Network, which provides free Internet access to hotel guests through their in-room Internet Appliance with proprietary software using a patent-pending advertising delivery system.

Dr. Keller is an advisor to Serus Corp. The Serus Integrated Demand Profit Management System captures real-time demand data and through patent-pending applications determines optimum inventory allocation and replenishment drivers in high velocity value chains.

Dr. Keller served on the Technical Advisory Board of Propel Software Corp. Propel has a product that accelerates dialup Internet access.

Dr. Keller was Co-Founder (along with Dr. Sanjai Tiwari) and served as Chief Technical Advisor and a member of the Board of Directors of Target Mining Corp., formerly known as buyermail.com and as ccRewards.com, a startup that offered targeted promotions based on its patent-pending purchase mining technology. Target Mining ceased operations. Dr. Keller co-invented and wrote up the patent applications for their technology.

Dr. Keller was a visiting associate professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Cruz during the 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 academic years, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in databases and systems analysis and design. He continues his affiliation with UC Santa Cruz in the program of the Baskin School of Engineering.

Dr. Arthur M. Keller until 1999 managed Stanford CIT's efforts on collaborative engineering, workflow, and database security and coordinates relationships with companies. There he was project manager for Stanford's efforts on CommerceNet, including research on searchable online catalogs, providing services over the Internet, and concurrent engineering. He collaborates with the Tsimmis project on integration of heterogeneous databases for information finding and distributed constraints, and collaborated with the CEDB project on version and configuration management and distributed constraints for collaborative design. He previously managed the Penguin project on interoperability of object-oriented and relational databases, the Fauve project on federated autonomous databases, the Paradata project performing research on databases on parallel computers, and the development of DADAISM, a formally specified, modular database system in Ada that includes multiple interfaces at multiple levels as well as support for database security and integrity.

His research interests include electronic commerce, interoperability of heterogeneous databases, database integration, object-oriented databases, database implementation, databases on parallel computers, federated autonomous databases, database views including updates, incomplete information and nulls, software integration and reuse, and large system integration.

He received his B.S. summa cum laude with honors in both Mathematics and Computer and Information Science from Brooklyn College (CUNY) in 1977, his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1979, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. He was previously an assistant professor in the Computer Sciences department at the University of Texas at Austin.

He has taught over three dozen classes at Stanford University, Western Institute of Computer Science, University of California at Santa Cruz, University Blas Pascal (Cordoba, Argentina), Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), The University of Texas at Austin, Brooklyn College (City University of New York), and TeX Users Group annual conferences.

Dr. Keller is listed in Marquis' Who's Who in America, Millenium Edition.

He has over 70 publications and have given over 125 lectures at conferences, companies and universities.

His recent technical papers are available online in PostScript and Adobe Acrobat form.