About Us

Bay Prospector was founded by Cheng Tan, an avid eBay antiques collector and a Berkeley and Stanford-trained computer scientist. Frustrated by the difficulty of conducting complex searches and organizing the results the way he needed them, Cheng set out to develop a tool for the serious eBay buyer.

Prospector is the result of that quest. Cheng has maintained an ongoing dialogue with his customers and constantly improves Prospector's capabilities to find the obscure, the beautiful, and the wonderfully under-priced.

Cheng Tan has been a professional software developer since the early days of the Commodore 64/128, with GEOS 2.0 being his first commercial project. He holds Computer Science degrees - a B.A. from U. C. Berkeley, and an M.S. from Stanford University. Cheng has been part of development teams that have won multiple awards including for PC/GEOS, PC Computing's Most Valuable Product, Byte Magazine's Best Software Award, PC Magazine's Finalist Award for Technical Excellence, and InfoWorld's Product of the Year. Prior to Bay Prospector, he was Platform Architect at Rainfinity, which has been acquired by EMC. An application he co-authored on this platform was awarded Microsoft's Security Solution of the Year. Cheng can be reached at cheng@bayprospector.com.

Bay Prospector has been selected as part of the eBay Buyer Tools Pilot Program to develop applications for eBay buyers.