Steve Scherf Email Address

Vice President, Advanced Technology

Gracenote, a Nielsen company, is the world leader in entertainment data and services. Whether you know it or not, Gracenote plays a big role in your digital lifestyle, powering the most popular music, movie and TV, and sports services on the planet.At its core, Gracenote helps connect people with the digital entertainment they love. We do this by offering the largest database for music, sports, movies and TV shows, and creating best in class services and technologies, all on a highly scalable platform.

Steve Scherf serves as Vice President of Engineering, Artificial Intelligence at Stryker. Previously Steve served as Chief Technology Officer of Gauss Surgical (acquired by Stryker in 2021), an AI-enabled platform for the Operating Room. Before that Steve co-founded Gracenote, Inc. in 1998 and served as its Chief Technology Officer, Chief Architect and Chief R&D Officer through its acquisition by Nielsen in 2017. Gracenote is the entertainment industry's dominant media recognition and data provider that powers smart televisions, streaming music services, connected devices, media players and in-car entertainment systems, handling over 2.5 million media recognition transactions per second, and is embedded in 100 million cars globally. Steve started Gracenote in 1995 as the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), which displayed information about CDs being played and was one of the first crowd-sourced services, relying on millions of users from around the globe to populate the database with music information. The CDDB service became the foundation of Gracenote and helped usher in Apple iTunes and the first iPod. Gracenote was acquired by Escient in 1998, Sony in 2008, Tribune Media in 2013, and Nielsen in 2017. Following Gracenote's acquisition by Tribune, Steve drove the growth of the engineering team to a 450+ organization and helped lead nine mergers and acquisitions in four years. Prior to founding Gracenote, Steve worked as Unix kernel developer at Altos Computer Systems, Acer America and Stratus Computers, delving into file systems, I/O performance, SCSI subsystems, networking and fault tolerance. Steve received Bachelors degrees in Math and Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds over 20 U.S. patents in the field of media recognition, and is a World Technology Network fellow. Specialties: M&A (both sides of the table), organizational transformation, change management. Digital media recognition technologies. Realtime Internet services. Systems software engineering and architecture. Software as a Medical Device (SAMD). C language expert: realtime applications, drivers/OS development, networking. OS X/iOS application development.