Who we are

 Ram Prayaga 
 Alex Bäcker 
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New version of Choizi.com greets the New Year
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Who we are

cafe|think, LLC is the product and effort of many people. We share values that we hold dear and we believe our success will be based on both financial terms and how much we are able to contribute to the communities we live in.

We are continuously improving cafe|think and how we do business with our customers, vendors and partners. If you'd like to join our team, email us at resumes@cafethink.com.  

Ram S. Prayaga

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Ram enjoys working on new things that will help us find what we need. He created a model for how vendors could get customers in the door, customers could get incentives to spend their money where they chose, and for both customers and vendors to be satisfied by the process. This turned into cafe|think. Ram put his developer skills to use (with many cups of black coffee) and launched choizi.com applying the model to restaurants. Soon after, he met Alex, they brainstormed together on how to improve the model, and Alex got on board. As CEO, Ram directs and manages the growth of cafe|think, LLC.

Early in his career, Ram was the Chief Technology Officer of a small start-up in Santa Monica, CA. He developed their patented technology for an interactive healthcare delivery system. This system was used by Kaiser Permenante to track and improve compliance for patients with chronic disease with dramatic results. Since then, Ram has managed the design, development and implementation of technology at leading global companies, including Nike, Zenith Insurance and marchFIRST. He has experience in a range of industries including consumer goods, insurance, pharmaceuticals and healthcare.

He holds a BS from University of Bergen, Norway and an MS from University of Southern California in Computer Science. He was a Ph.D student at the University of California, San Diego in Cognitive Science were he conducted research in the areas of bimodal speech recognition, human face recognition and general object recognition. In addition, he has done extensive research in virtual reality, information architecture and usability.

He was born in India, but grew up in several European countries before coming to Southern California. He is fluent in Danish, Norwegian and Telugu and understands Spanish, French and German. He enjoys going out to eat with his wife and two boys at Indian, Mexican and Italian restaurants around Los Angeles, CA. In his free time, he is either coaching soccer, playing soccer or watching soccer.  

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Alex Bäcker

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Alex loves both thinking and coffee --so he was naturally drawn to cafe|think. Although he loves fine dining and trying new restaurants, what attracted him most about Choizi, cafe|think's first offering, is the promise of personalized recommendations that learn from each and every user's experience, as well as Choizi's patent-pending approach to bring pay per performance to walk-in local search.

Alex is also the founder of Adapt Technologies, an emerging leader in search engine marketing technology, and raised $10M in an oversubscribed round of financing with top-tier Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Responsible for Adapt's entire IP portfolio, Alex led the development of technology which boosts the reach of Search Engine Marketing campaigns by up to 580% and reduces their cost per action by up to 78%. Alex served as Adapt's first President, CEO and CTO, growing net revenues by more than 200% every quarter of his tenure, and continues to serve in Adapt's Board of Directors. He is also the founder of Tree of Babel, a nonprofit collaborative web project to map out the genealogy of human words.

A prolific inventor, Alex has built devices ranging from an eye-tracker to an odor-making machine, has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences ranging from Neuroscience to Search Engine Strategies, and is the author of papers on topics as far-ranging as pattern recognition, coding, scientific growth, learning, vision, olfaction, sleep and dimensionality estimation, published in media as diverse as Nature and the Los Angeles Times. Alex is a Trustee of Caltech's Children Center.

A native of Argentina, Alex represented his country twice at the International Olympiads of Informatics, for the first time when he was 17. He holds degrees in Biology and Economics from MIT, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems and Biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he won the Dean's award for 'great contributions and outstanding qualities of Leadership and Responsibility'. He has held positions at McKinsey & Co., in the Department of Computational Biology and Evolutionary Computing at the Center for Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics of Sandia National Labs, and the Biology Division of Caltech.

Alex lives in South California and enjoys kitesurfing, skiing, windsurfing and filmmaking. Read Alex's blog at http://alexbacker.pbwiki.com

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