Short Bio
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, serial Internet entrepreneur, and one of the leading voices on the next-generation of search, social media, and the Web. He works as a producer of emerging technology ventures including Klout, Bottlenose, The Daily Dot, StreamGlider, Live Matrix, and a stealth-mode new energy company with breakthrough wireless power technology, as well as others.
He also advises innovative startups including Chronos Trading, a new algorithmic trading engine, PublishThis, a content marketing company, and Sensentia, a new artificial intelligence engine for the healthcare industry.
In 1994, Nova co-founded one of the first Web startups, EarthWeb, which led to a record-breaking IPO in 1998, and a second IPO of DICE.com in 2007. Nova worked with Stanford Research International (SRI), to conceive and co-found their global business incubator, nVention, and participated in the DARPA CALO program, the most ambitious artificial intelligence project in US history. He was the founder of Radar Networks, which produced Twine, one of the first Semantic Web sites.
He is a frequent speaker and blogger, and has written guest-articles for TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM, and SiliconAngle. Nova has authored more than 30 granted and pending patents. He earned his BA in Philosophy from Oberlin College in 1991, with a focus on the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. In 1992, he attended the International Space University, a NASA-funded graduate-level professional school for the space industry.
In 1999, he flew to the edge of space with the Russian Air Force and did zero-gravity flight training with the Russian Space Agency, as one of the early pioneers of space tourism, which led to his later angel investment in Zero Gravity Corporation, which was acquired by Space Adventures.
He is chairman of The Earth Dashboard initiative, a new non-profit initiative to build a shared online dashboard to visualize the real-time state of the planet; he serves on the board of directors of the Common Crawl Foundation, a nonprofit 5+ billion page index of the Web.
Nova is the eldest grandson of the late management guru, Peter Drucker.
He writes about the emerging edge of the Web via Twitter at @novaspivack and his site, novaspivack.com. Additional details and history related to Nova Spivack can be found on his site, and his Wikipedia page.
More Details
Nova speaks internationally and advises governments and corporations on product strategy and the future of the Web. He has co-authored books on Internet strategy and collective intelligence, and has authored hundreds of articles about the Web.
During the late 1980′s and early 1990′s, while in high-school and college, Nova worked as a software engineer and product marketer with artificial intelligence and supercomputing ventures including Xerox Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and Individual Inc. He also participated in computer science research at MIT focused on cellular automata.
Nova has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for over 20 years and has pursued this interest extensively in monasteries, refugee camps and communities in Nepal, India, Europe and the USA. He focuses his philanthropic activities on helping to fund the preservation of Tibet’s unique wisdom culture.
While a student at Oberlin College, Nova did a winter term internship as a production assistant at Paramount Studios, working on Star Trek, The Next Generation.
In the mid 1990′s Nova co-authored a series of patents for early Web-TV convergence for a product called HyperTV, owned by ACTV. The patents covered simulcasting URLs and metadata on the television vertical blanking interval (VBI) in order to display relevant Web pages next to live television content on suitably instrumented TV’s and PCs. The patents were later sold to Disney.
Media & Press
Nova has been featured, cited, and has contributed guest articles in numerous media outlets such as: AdWeek, Atlantic Monthly, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, The BBC, CBS Evening News, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, CNBC, CNET, CNN, Der Spiegel, the Discovery Channel, Download Squad, the Economist, Entrepreneur, the Financial Times, Gartner, GigaOm, the Guardian, Guidewire, Industry Standard, Infoworld, Information Week, Interactive Age, International Herald Tribune, the L.A. Times, Mashable, the MIT Technology Review, the New Scientist, Newsweek, the New York Times, NPR, the Observer UK, PC Magazine, PC World, ReadWriteWeb, Red Herring, Reuters, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, SiliconAngle, TechCrunch, the Times Online, Venturebeat, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, WIRED and ZDNet
Nova has authored hundreds of articles and co-authored several books on Internet strategy and technology, and led the EarthWeb Press publishing imprint with Macmillan Computer Publishing.
Invited Talks
Nova gave over 30 talks in 2009 – 2010, both to technical and business audiences. For videos of some of these talks please click here.
He has spoken, moderated, and served as a judge at numerous conferences and industry events, including: BlogTalk, Defrag, DEMO, DigitalNow, the Financial Times Digital Media Conference, the Future in Review, GigaOm’s Bunker sessions, the Highlands Forum, Internet World, Internet Expo, the International Semantic Web Conference, the Island Forum, the Kleiner Perkins CIO Strategy Exchange, MIT’s Emtech, NextWeb, NewTeeVee, SDForum, the Semantic Technology Conference, SIBOS, the Singularity Summit, Search Engine Strategies, Stanford/MIT’s VLAB, Supernova, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, and The Web 2.0 Summit.
Nova has also given guest lectures and keynotes for the MBA programs at Harvard University, Stanford University and Berkeley, as well as to several business schools in Europe. In addition, Nova has advised governments in the United States as well as Asia on the near-term and long-term future of the Web.
Additional Headshots for Press
