Ben Hundley of Qbox Featured in NWABJ's Fast 15
By Mark Carter
Ben Hundley of Fayetteville's Qbox.io (formerly StackSearch) is a member of this year's Northwest Arkansas Business Journal Fast 15.
Ben is the chief architect for Qbox, which provides managed cloud hosting for Elasticsearch, an open source search and analytics engine. Qbox is an Innovate Arkansas client firm and one of three winners at the 2012 ARK Challenge.
The Fast 15 recognizes NWA movers and shakers under the age of 30.
(Whippersnappers...)
Here's a sample:
He started at the University of Arkansas in January 2010 — dropping out a couple of months later — and began learning Ruby programming language, which helped him land a software development job at Acumen Brands...
...At Acumen, he was introduced to the Northwest Arkansas startup scene, and when he quit the company in November 2011, he jumped in head-first, launching a project involving QR codes.
He then participated in The ARK Challenge in fall 2012, where he met the founders of Stacksearch Inc., who, a few months later, hired him as chief software architect.
Read the full thing here.
Qbox CEO Mark Brandon credits Ben's work with leading the StackSearch pivot to Elasticsearch.
Back in March, StackSearch officially adopted the name of its flagship search product, Qbox.io. Here's more on the name change back story from Brandon's blog:
Effective March 12, 2014, StackSearch, Inc. adopted the name of its flagship product, Qbox.io. This move was a long time coming and merely formalizes the branding by which our community knows us. Maintaining a separate brand was not only expensive and time consuming, it was also confusing to our customers and potential customers.
How did we get here? At the company’s founding in May 2012, we set out to build an ecommerce product search offering, seeking to solve the problems of slow speed, low conversions, and abandonment for ecommerce companies. Our product was good, and we were able to accomplish some great things with it. This includes being selected as a winner of the 2012 Ark Challenge, which cleared the way for a meaningful investment from some statewide investors, the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, and Governor Mike Beebe’s office. The image above is a T-shirt from that day, complete with our original logo, later teasingly referred to as a "cloud nipple".
Read the full post here, and no, it's not lost on us that the word "nipple" now appears in the IA blog. Sorry, but you'll have to click the aforementioned link to see the "cloud nipple." (It's just a logo, people, that's all. Come on...)
And finally, here's Arkansas Business coverage of the StackSearch win at the 2012 ARK Challenge.
To Ben and all the Qbox crew, keep up the good work...