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Photo by Graham Cullen
Scott Williamson is CTO and co-founder of Yakabod, one of nine local companies in the running for one of two ethics awards presented by the Rotary Club of Carroll Creek and The Frederick News-Post.
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A love for technology and a passion to make people work better brought Scott Ryser and Scott Williamson together. The two men combined their technical expertise to form Yakabod, a knowledge management technology company.Yakabod was founded in 2001, after the dot-com bust. Ryser and Williamson said it was a terrible time to launch a technology company, but they didn't want to spend another year marking time on somebody else's payroll. Yakabod is one of nine companies vying for a Frederick County Business Ethics Award. The first release of the Yakabox, the company's knowledge management system, was introduced in 2003. The U.S. Department of Defense bought the first one. Today, the Yakabox Knowledge Network is used by nearly 20,000 professionals worldwide. While most companies are founded on a business idea, Ryser said Yakabod was founded on a set of five core principles: grace, excellence, passion, consistency and integrity. Williamson and Ryser decided to build a knowledge-sharing system that would make work more interesting, people more productive and the world a better place, Williamson said. Yakabod's No. 1 competitor is e-mail, according to Chris Coleman, the company's executive vice president for marketing. "While we'll never replace e-mail, we bring all the stuff that people rely on into their inbox. We give them what they need," not hundreds of e-mail they don't need, Coleman said. For example, someone who is interested in Frederick County business statistics gets Frederick County business statistics funneled directly into the inbox. "Information is funneled to the right person based on that person's preferences. Yakabod is about content management, social networking and collaboration," Coleman said. "With Yakabod, you get what matters to you." Ryser said every business decision — marketing, sales, operations, product development — is based on one criterion: Is this action consistent with our core values? If the answer is no, the company turns down the opportunity, Ryser said. "What sets us apart from the competition is our constant measuring of those core values and constant communication with our customers," Williamson said. Yakabod is a private company in downtown Frederick with 26 employees.
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