Greg Tseng

Greg Yuchang Tseng (born November 14, 1979) is a controversial American Internet entrepreneur. He is co-founder and current CEO of social networking website Tagged. Tagged and JumpStart, another of Tseng's companies, have been the subject of legal actions concerning allegedly deceptive or misleading e-mail practices.

Early and personal life

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, and raised in McLean, Virginia, Tseng attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and won numerous awards in mathematics and science. He placed 9th in the 1993 national MathCounts competition, tied for 1st place (with a perfect score) in the 1994 American High School Mathematics Exam, and qualified for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad every year during from 1994 to 1997. He was a Finalist in the 1997 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for a project titled "Development of a Fiber Optic Evanescent Wave Ion Sensor With Interchangeable Probes Adaptable for Field Application" and received official commendation from the Fairfax County School Board. For this project, Tseng was also featured in The American Physical Society's A Century of Physics Timeline and inducted into The National Gallery for America's Young Inventors which produced a comic strip biography of him.

Tseng is an avid runner and has completed several road marathons and trail ultramarathons.

Scientist

From 1997 to 2004, Tseng was an active researcher in nanotechnology at The MITRE Corporation, Harvard University, and Stanford University. At MITRE, he co-authored a Science journal article entitled "Toward Nanocomputers". At Harvard, he earned an A.B. in Chemistry & Physics & Mathematics in 2001 and co-authored a Science journal article entitled "Carbon Nanotube-Based Nonvolatile Random Access Memory for Molecular Computing" which is the technology behind the company Nantero. At Stanford, he conducted research in the Goldhaber-Gordon group and is currently on leave; he was pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics under a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

Entrepreneur

At Harvard, Tseng was Director of the Harvard Entrepreneurs Club (HEC) from 1998 to 2000, and co-wrote The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business (Wiley, 1999). In the fall semester of 1999, Tseng and two classmates launched flyingchickens.com, a price comparison shopping engine for Harvard textbooks. In the spring semester of 2000, flyingchickens.com was merged with Limespot.com and the textbook shopping service was revamped and expanded to over 80 college campuses. In late 2000, Tseng and three other college entrepreneurs were interviewed and featured in The New York Times and Fast Company. While at Harvard, Tseng also co-founded Jumpstart Technologies with longtime friend and business partner Johann Schleier-Smith. Jumpstart was an incubator of Internet businesses including online matchmaker CrushLink and social networking site hi5. In October 2004, Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith co-founded Tagged, and were both named by BusinessWeek as one of Tech's Best Young Entrepreneurs. They jointly received a U.S. Patent for their invention "User created tags for online social networking" which has led to over 200,000 user-created Tags on Tagged. Greg currently serves as CEO of Tagged and advises several other Silicon Valley startup companies.

Controversy

In the last four years, two of Tseng's companies have been criticized for their alleged misuse of commercial email and have been the subject of legal action. Additionally, in 2002, Salon.com published a negative review of Jumpstart's CrushLink website. The CrushLink Web site was alleged to harvest e-mail addresses for later use in spam e-mail in exchange for deceptively offering the name of a "crush" that in the vast majority of cases did not exist. In 2006, Jumpstart Technologies settled with the Federal Trade Commission on alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act which included a $900,000 fine but no admission of guilt. The FTC alleged that "in its FreeFlixTix promotion, Jumpstart violated the law by disguising its commercial e-mails as personal messages, and by misleading consumers as to the terms and conditions of the promotion" and stated "Deceptive subject lines and headers not only violate the CAN-SPAM Act, but also consumer trust.” These allegations are similar to those levied against CrushLink and Tagged.

In 2009, a Time magazine article called Tagged "The World's Most Annoying Website" and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced his intention to sue Tagged for "deceptive email marketing and invasion of privacy". Cuomo described Tagged.com as sending more than 60 million emails stating that friends had sent some photos, which in fact did not exist, and that recipients were required to sign up for Tagged.com to access them. Cuomo added that tagged.com then used these contacts to send out ever more misleading emails. Tseng responded on Tagged's company blog, blaming the mishap on a faulty registration process that was paused three days after it launched. Tseng also characterized Cuomo's announcement as "disheartening" and stated "We are dismayed that Cuomo's office, which has shown itself to be fairly well-versed in the Internet, would issue an inaccurate and inflammatory accusation. We can only believe that they have not carefully reviewed the facts." However, there is evidence that tagged.com's controversial e-mail campaign dated back to the middle of 2007. An eWeek article on the topic described tagged.com as "...a poster child for the abuse of social networking." Although Tseng publicly addressed the Tagged issue, there are no known references of him publicly addressing the similar issues dating from 2002 and 2006 involving Jumpstart. Tseng's companies have paid over $2 million in fines and legal settlements involving U.S. city, state and federal governments as well as private individuals on no less than five separate occasions. Tagged's controversial e-mail practices have provoked comment in other countries as well.

In November 2009, Tagged.com settled with Cuomo's office by paying a $500,000 fine, reforming its registration procedure and agreeing to refrain in the future from similar practices. Of the agreement, Cuomo said, "Unsuspecting users had no idea that Tagged had hijacked the e-mail addresses of their colleagues, families and friends for the purpose of blasting them with spam. This agreement holds the company accountable for its invasion of privacy and puts the proper safeguards in place to keep it from happening again." Tagged reached a similar settlement with the Texas Attorney General resulting in a $250,000 fine being levied.

More recently, in February 2010, Tagged settled a class action lawsuit about its former registration process with California residents Miriam Slater and Sara Golden and awarded them $10,000 each. "What Tagged called consumer referrals was really consumer fraud, perpetrated by Tagged," Slater and Golden argued in a motion requesting approval of the settlement. Tagged also agreed to destroy email addresses that were collected from users between April and June 2009, if those users did not intentionally mean to invite their contacts to the site. In April 2010, Tagged agreed to pay the San Francisco District Attorney's office $650,000 to settle that office's claims arising from the same practices. District Attorney Kamala Harris said, "Companies, whether they are on main street or in cyberspace cannot be allowed to deceive their customers and their consumers."