Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, serial entrepreneur, and one of the leading voices on the next-generation of search, social media, and the Web. 
Nova has founded numerous ventures including Twine.com, EarthWeb (now calledDice.com), and Live Matrix (in stealth).
He consults, angel invests (most recently in Klout.com), and develops his own new ventures through his intellectual property company, Lucid Ventures. For information about his consulting work, click here.
A serial entrepreneur, Nova worked with technology ventures like Kurzweil, Individual Inc., and Thinking Machines in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. In 1994, he co-founded one of the first Internet companies, EarthWeb (IPO: 1998), which generated DICE.com (IPO: 2007).
In 1999 he worked with SRI to co-found their business incubator, nVention. More recently, Nova founded Twine.com and leads the company as its CEO. Nova has invested in and advised numerous startups including Live Matrix, Klout, Plum and others.
Nova has also worked with SRI International on the DARPA CALO program, a distributed research program encompassing hundreds of top researchers focused on next-generation knowledge management and machine-learning applications, and in particular on the IRIS Semantic Desktop project.
Nova speaks widely on the future and has co-authored several books on Internet strategy, collective intelligence, and technology, and he speaks and writes on the future of search and the Web. He advises global corporations, governments, non-profits, start ups, and venture funds on technology strategy. He has authored nearly 30 granted and pending patents.
Nova earned his BA in Philosophy from Oberlin College (with a focus on cognitive science and artificial intelligence) and has participated in research at MIT on parallel computation and cellular automata. Nova also possesses a professional degree from the International Space University, a NASA-funded graduate-level business school for the space industry. In 1999, he flew to the edge of space in Russia to help pioneer the early days of space tourism with Space Adventures. He is also an investor in Space Adventures, which is commercializing space tourism.
Nova has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for nearly 20 years and has pursued this interest extensively in monasteries, refugee camps and communities in Nepal, India, Europe and the USA. Nova focuses his philanthropic activities on helping to fund the preservation of Tibet’s unique wisdom culture.
Nova is also currently running a $10K challenge to create unblockable, anonymous, encrypted mobile internet access, in response to recent brutal crackdowns in Tibet, Myanamar and Iran where local governments were able to block, censor, and spy on Web access by their citizens.
Nova is the grandson of the management guru, Dr. Peter F. Drucker and shares his interests in knowledge work and organizational theory.
Additional details and history related to Nova Spivack can be found at this page of the Wikipedia.
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 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, Future in Review, GigaOm’s Bunker sessions, Highlands Forum, the International Semantic Web Conference, the Island Forum, the Kleiner Perkins CIO Strategy Exchange, MIT’s Emtech, NextWeb, SDForum, the Semantic Technology Conference, 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, defense and intelligence agencies in the United States as well as Asia on the near-term and long-term future of the Web.