Diffbot is a great Stanford entrepreneurial story. The founder, Mike Tung came to Stanford to pursue his graduate degree after graduating from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He worked on projects in the Sebastian Thrun ecosystem such as image recognition "Smilifying Images", and Web Crawling Stanford Events. He started working on something called Diffbot as a tool to help himself: it would send him alerts if the web pages for his courses changed. This was a good idea for a company, and really got going as part of the Stanford StartX program that was just picking up steam. Diffbot raised $2 million in May, 2012 and continues to release new features like the just-announced Product Pages API.
