I’m really pleased to announce that a startup I helped co-found, Live Matrix, has been acquired by OVGuide, a leading video portal.

TechCrunch covered the deal here.

The new combined company is a unique powerhouse in the online video space – covering the entire life cycle of online videos from when they are upcoming, to when they go live, to when they are on-demand.

Sanjay Reddy, my co-founder, and friend, has done an amazing job bringing our vision to life. The deal with OVGuide is a big step forward in the evolution of this project. I look forward to great things from the combined company. Congratulations to the team, and my thanks to our loyal and helpful angel investors. It’s been a very interesting project to be a part of.

Today, after almost two years of work in stealth, I am proud to announce the launch of Bottlenose.

While I have co-founded and serve on the boards of several other ventures (The Daily Dot, Live Matrix, StreamGlider, and others), Bottlenose is different from all my other projects in that I am also in a full-time day-to-day role as the CEO. In short, Bottlenose is what I’m putting the bulk of my time into going forward, although I will continue to angel invest and advise other startups.

The story of Bottlenose began when my good friend and advisor, Josh Jones-Dilworth, introduced me to Dominiek ter Heide after I sold my last company, Twine.com in 2010.

Dominiek was at the time working on a new kind of personalization technology for social media. Meanwhile, I had been thinking about how to filter the Stream, and the emerging problem of the Sharepocalypse and what I have been calling “the Stream 3.0 Problem.”

Josh knew both of us and had a hunch that we were really thinking about the same problem from different angles. Dominiek and I started speaking via Skype and soon we teamed up. Bottlenose was officially born in 2010.

Working with Dominiek has been a true pleasure. He’s one of the most productive, talented, software engineers I’ve ever met. It’s been an amazing ride so far. Soon, thanks to Dominiek, we were joined by an A-team of killer engineers with expertise in natural language processing, Node.js, Javascript, HTML 5, machine learning, cloud computing, NoSQL, and more.

Our little band of hotshots has produced an amazingly robust and powerful app — something that even large companies with huge engineering teams would be hard-pressed to develop. I’m honored to be working with these guys, and very proud of the team and the what we’ve built.

We have also been fortunate to be joined by some terrific angel investors, including Andy Jenks, of Stage One Capital, and several others (see the About page on Bottlenose for the complete list).

So what is Bottlenose anyway? Well one way to find out is to visit the site and check out the Tour there. But I’ll summarize here as well:

Bottlenose is the smartest social media dashboard ever built. It’s designed for busy people who make heavy use of social media: prosumers, influencers, professionals.

Bottlenose uses next-generation “stream intelligence” technology to understand the messages that are flowing through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. It also learns about your interests.

On the basis of this knowledge, Bottlenose helps you filter your streams to find what matters to you, what’s relevant, and what’s most important. Bottlenose also includes many new features, like Sonar, which visualizes what’s going on in any stream, and powerful rules and automation capabilities to help you become more productive.

This is just the beginning of this adventure. Our roadmap for Bottlenose is very ambitious, and it’s going to be a lot of fun, and hopefully will really make a difference too. We’re super excited about this product and we hope you will be as well.

Check back here for more posts and observations about Bottlenose and where I think social media is headed.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter:

• @bottlenoseapp – the official Bottlenose Twitter account
• @novaspivack — yours truly
• @dominiek — Dominiek ter Heide, Bottlenose CTO

And come check out Bottlenose! The app is still in invite beta so you either have to have a high enough Klout score or an invite code to get in.

The first 500 readers of my blog who want to try it out, can get into Bottlenose using the invite code: novafriends

I look forward to seeing you Bottlenose!

For more about the thinking behind Bottlenose, read The Problem of Stream 3.0

Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious, has launched his newest creation, Jig.

At first glance the site seems a bit like Twitter, but it has a different focus. Instead of posting about what you are doing, you post about what you need. Then other people reply with suggestions, ideas, answers, help, or presumably commercial products and services that can meet your need.

This is not a new idea. It’s been done before, at least in print, quite successfully, in the form of “the want ads.” Want ads are classified ads, where instead of offering something, you ask for something. They are basically inverse classified ads. Like a reverse auction is an inverse auction.

But although it’s not groundbreakingly new, it’s beautifully executed and quite simple and elegant. It’s elegant enough in fact that it might catch on. And if it does, it could be quite useful.

The site has some similarities to Quora, but it’s broader. It’s not just about questions and answers – it’s about getting help with any kind of need.

Looking through the initial needs being posted by early users there are requests for restaurants suggestions, a guy asking what gift he should buy for his minimalist girlfriend, a request to understand how UFO propulsion works, requests to hire people, and even a request for affordable health insurance.

There also seems to be quite a bit of spam, or at least unhelpful questions and comments, including some harmless but irrelevant banter. Jig will need to provide for a way to rank needs, comments, and authors so that noise is filtered out. This is a problem that Schachter should be able to solve in his sleep, so I’m not worried about that being a barrier to adoption. It will be resolved soon, I’m betting.

There’s a lot of potential here, if people actively start helping to share their tips and advice for getting needs met. One challenge will be to make it easy for people to find needs they can help with. A categorization system, based on hashtags perhaps, would help to find needs that match your offers or areas of expertise.

All the product level issues are pretty easy to solve. This is not rocket science. But a harder problem to solve is, how is Jig going to make money? Who is going to have to pay for what? There’s always a catch somewhere. At least if the goal is to build a revenue business.

Will users eventually be charged to post certain kinds of needs? Or is the idea to charge companies, for example, as they are asked to do when posting job ads in Craigslist? Or will there be some kind of reverse auction or group buying angle to this – when enough people have the same need they can pool together and negotiate for a group deal?

Time will tell. But since it’s Joshua Schachter, Jig is bound to get a lot of attention. Check it out for yourself and see if it meets your needs.

By the way, if you’re reading this, tell our reporters at The Daily Dot (@dailydot) what you think of Jig, and whether it’s helped you in any interesting ways. We’re curious to hear your perspective.

Today I’m pleased to announce that, The Daily Dot, our newest “venture production,” has launched into public beta.

The Daily Dot is the first of its kind – it’s the Web’s newspaper — the first community newspaper about the Web. We cover the Web like a town paper covers its community. Here’s a video overview of the site.

This venture began with the insight that each of us is spending an increasing amount of our lives online, in various online communities, yet we have very little insight into what’s going in this new landscape. These communities are literally places, and some of them are quite large. This is beautifully illustrated in this “map” of the Web as a geography.

I believe that it’s time for the Web community to have it’s own newspaper. The launch of the Daily Dot — the web community’s first actual newspaper of record — is a turning point, a coming-of-age, for the Web as a medium, as a place, and as a community.

Our editorial focus is different than other publications that cover the Web. Instead of covering the Web as an industry, a technology or a phenomenon, we cover it as a community. We tell the stories of the people, culture, content, events and issues that are making waves in communities around the Web. And to find and report on these stories, we have embedded reporters in those communities: Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, with more communities coming soon.

Just like our physical cities and towns, our online communities are constantly moving and developing, and they are full of interesting people doing newsworthy and important things. The Daily Dot’s mission is to cover these communities just like physical community newspapers cover cities and towns.

Where a town newspaper covers the latest high school sports game, the town meeting, the local crime report, we cover the story behind the hottest viral video sweeping the planet, the latest social movement in Facebook, and important issues (like cybercrime or online bullying) that are happening in our online neighborhoods.

When a major event happens in the physical world – like the revolutions in Arab world, for example — we don’t cover the events themselves, we cover their online footprint — what’s happening online that relates to the story.

The Daily Dot will also cover what’s happening around the Web in time: just like physical community newspapers have calendar sections – The Daily Dot has an online events section, provided in partnership with Live Matrix, one of our other venture productions, that aggregates the schedule of the Web. These two companies are highly synergistic and form the beginnings of our online media network.

While those of us in the Web industry have our fingers slightly more on the pulse of the Web, the vast majority of people who use the Web do not read industry blogs and have little or no visibility into what’s going on in the online world or where it’s headed. Other than a few articles a week published by mainstream media, they are not being informed.

It’s time for that to change. The Daily Dot will be publishing dozens of articles each day about what’s happening online. We’re writing for the mainstream, not for elites or geeks. The Daily Dot is for the people who use the Web — who live in it — not just the people who are building it.

Our content is designed to be entertaining, interesting, informative — and sometimes edgy and controversial – kind of like People Magazine meets USA Today, with a little bit of TMZ thrown in.

If you want to know what’s happening online, or you’re looking to find the hottest emerging entertainment, personalities, viral videos, issues, etc — and the stories behind them — The Daily Dot is your newspaper.

But The Daily Dot is not just a newspaper, it’s also a very interesting business venture. It’s a chance to build what could become one of the largest circulation newspapers in the world someday – a global newspaper about the one community that we all share in common, no matter where we actually live.

I also want to congratulate and thank the amazing editorial and development team at the Daily Dot, who made this possible. And most importantly, I want to acknowledge Nicholas White (Daily Dot CEO), Owen Thomas (Daily Dot founding editor), and Josh Jones-Dilworth (marketing guru), my co-founders in this venture.

Nick and Owen are leading business and editorial, and running the operations, and Josh and myself are on the board, advising to help in our respective areas of expertise. Nick and Owen deserve all the credit here — they have done the heavy lifting to bring this vision to market, and I’m very proud to be working with them.

Please join me us helping to spread the word about The Daily Dot — it’s your newspaper — and we need your help to make it great (and we look forward to your feedback and participation in the comments).

This is going to be a fun ride and I can’t wait to see how it evolves.

It may look like Google+ is competing with Facebook and Twitter, but I don’t think that is what will happen in the end. I think Google+ is a very different kind of service and it’s not clear that it can or will, or should, replace these other services.

In a series of articles here on my blog, I’ve explained the differences between these services, and what Google+ is really for and what it means for the rest of the social media giants:

1. Google+ is Really for Sharing Knowledge, Not Social Networking
2. Should Facebook be Worried About Google+?
3. Why Twitter’s API Strategy Must Change in a Google+ and Facebook World
4. Why the Google+ Developer Ecosystem Will be Different from Twitter

The conclusion I draw from all this is that instead of one social network to rule them all, I think it’s more likely that the social media landscape is going to divide into different territories, with each of the major social networks playing a different role.

Here’s how I think this all going to shake out:

• Facebook is for social networking
• LinkedIn is for business networking
• Google+ is for knowledge networking
• Twitter is for notifications

They just don’t know it yet.

Here is some more detail on this idea:

• Facebook is for social networking
  • Facebook is the new social infrastructure for the planet, and Google+ is no match for it. By social, I mean non-professional, personal, friend-to-friend and group communication. There’s a lot more happening in Facebook than this however: gaming, branding, groups, marketing. But all this other activity depends on the fact that people spend so much time in Facebook, socializing. This is very different from what’s happening on Google+ and Twitter as well.
• LinkedIn is for business networking
  • It’s the infrastructure for professional networking in the old-school sense – as in getting a job, finding customers, locating partners, hiring people, doing biz dev and sales, etc. LinkedIn is the most differentiated and focused of all these players: they know what they’re good at and they’re not trying to be all things to all people. Now LinkedIn needs to build more bridges into more third-party applications and services to keep people aware of it and using it.
• Google+ is for knowledge networking
  • Google+ is an infrastructure for sharing knowledge, not social networking. Knowledge has always been Google’s strength and core focus. Knowledge is not just articles, but the conversations around them, and these conversations are one of Google+’s best features. More importantly, because Google has such a powerful search infrastructure, and such a powerful computing architecture, they are in a position to combine Google+ with search and massive analytics and machine learning, to dynamically re-organize and connect both the Web and the real-time Stream. By doing this Google+ could be a potential successor for the Blogosphere, and could leap far ahead of other competing search engines as well.
• Twitter is for notifications
  • Twitter is really a notifications infrastructure. That’s what they do best, and what they should be focusing on. They are executing on the wrong strategy right now. They are trying to be a media company, but that is not their strength and others already are far ahead of them at that. But as an infrastructure for short notifications, Twitter has an opportunity to be unique and win, if they focus on that. Twitter has replaced RSS, for better or for worse, as the primary way people and applications share and track these kinds of notifications. Twitter could leverage this position to become the notifications infrastructure for the whole world – and for all of the other networks – even for G+ and Facebook – if they played their cards right and stopped focusing on competing for eyeballs.

Everyone, including possibly even the Google+ team, is currently thinking that Google+ is a Twitter and Facebook competitor. But I think in fact, Google+ is for something entirely different.

Google+ is not really for socializing; it’s for sharing knowledge. That’s what makes it different from other social networks. It supports more flexible access permissions on content, longer form content, threaded conversations, and soon it will integrate deeply with search.

In many ways, Google+ is a potential replacement for the Blogosphere, which always suffered from the lack of an integrated commenting and search infrastructure. Blog posts and the conversations that emerge around them are fragmented around the Web, but in Google+ they are all in one place. More importantly, in Google+ the conversation around each post is something you can watch growing in real-time.

I don’t think all bloggers will move to Google+, because it certainly lacks the power or customization potential of a WordPress or Moveable Type for example, but there’s certainly a chance that good portion of lightweight blogging market share may go there.

As such, Google+ may be more competitive with lightweight blogging services like Tumblr and Posterous, and with knowledge sharing and Q&A services like Quora, than with Twitter or Facebook.

But that’s just the beginning. By combining Google+ with Google Search, a new synthesis is possible that could make both the static Web and the real-time Stream better. This could be the next evolution of Google’s “organize the world’s information” mission. And this is nothing like Twitter or Facebook: It’s a totally different value proposition.

What happens when Google connects the power of their search engine and their massive compute capabilities with Google+? Both Google+ and Google search will become smarter. This is the Holy Grail of social search that we’ve all been talking about for years.

Google started out with a mission to “organize the world’s information,” and Google+ provides them with a new way to accomplish this. I think this is actually Google’s core competency, and what could be Google+’s unique role in the ecosystem.

Knowledge is not merely information, it is organized information. Google organizes the Web’s information via a search index, but with the addition of Google+ it can start to use the Stream to organize the Web, and vice-versa.

By connecting Google+ and Google Search, Google can figure out what Web resources are important to whom, by looking at the conversations around them. And it can figure out what conversations are important to whom by looking at the Web content and people they cite.

Most importantly, by capturing all this content and conversation in an environment where it can be analyzed, Google, can data-mine to learn things. Like who is interested in what, who is an expert at what, who influences whom, who is influential about what, and which content is relevant to various people or topics.

This will make Google’s graph much richer – and it will also enable Google to begin to do some new things with their graph: things like helping to guide people to conversations they are interested in, helping to connect similar or related conversations, helping people get answers more productively, helping to distribute content to the right people.

The reason Google has the potential to do this better than anyone else is not their Search engine; it’s their backend, which effectively is the world’s largest and most powerful supercomputer.

Google has unmatched computing capacity, and unmatched data to compute on. They are in the best position to do massively distributed computations that combine search analytics, social analytics, and machine learning on both the static Web and the real-time Web (“The Stream”).

With the addition of Google+ to Google, the Web is going to get a lot smarter, and Google’s original mission may evolve from “organize the world’s information” to “organize the world’s intelligence.”

But what’s important to note here, is that Google+ is for doing smart things with knowledge – not necessarily fun things. Sure, Google+ can be used to share the same viral videos that one shares in other places too, but what makes Google+ different is the control it gives around sharing, and the discussions that emerge.

Currently using Google+ requires quite a bit of thought. It’s not easy to figure out. There are many features that are hard to find, or that don’t quite make sense, or are simply non-obvious. At this stage it is still probably not ready for mainstream consumer use. And so the people who are making the most use of it are early-adopter types. This in turn affects the content that is being shared there. It’s pretty brainy in general.

But even once Google+ irons out its wrinkles, it may never be a replacement for the social fun of Facebook or the utility of Twitter.

Google+ is no match for Facebook at Facebook’s core value proposition: socializing. Facebook is way ahead of everyone on that front. Here’s why Facebook does not have to worry about Google+.

But at the same time, Facebook is unlikely to be able to compete with Google+ for knowledge. Google+ has the advantage of being combined with all the other Google products – especially Search – and the power of the Google supercomputer behind it. Facebook doesn’t have anything equivalent.

Google+ is also no match for Twitter at what Twitter does best: enabling everyone to keep up, via short notifications. In fact, Google+ is very hard to keep up with. Their content streams are full of massive posts that take time to read, and long threads that take up a lot of space on the page. It’s not easy to quickly scan and see what’s going on. And Google+’s notification system, while useful, simply cannot scale to notifying every user of thousands of things a day – at least not in current form – it would be extremely overwhelming.

So there are very clear distinctions here. Google+ is a very different kind of animal from Facebook and Twitter; each service has certain talents that make them unique from the others. There is a possible future in which they really don’t compete: they could each play a different but complementary role.

In previous articles, I’ve written about how Google+ can build a developer ecosystem on Chrome that is different from Twitter’s ecosystem, and how Twitter must change to survive against that. It’s clear that Google+ and Twitter are very different animals.

Now what about Facebook? Should Facebook be worried about Google+? Are Facebook and Google+ really competitors? I don’t think so.

Google+ is not as geeky as Twitter, but it’s still too complicated for most consumers to want to use it.

Figuring out how to use Google+, and how to make effective use of it, at this early stage, is like trying to use an old shortwave radio. Actually, it’s like trying to figure out a shortwave radio that is only halfway built. This is not an activity my mom is going to enjoy.

It’s going to be a while before Google+ is ready for primetime consumer use. Facebook is way ahead on that front.

And there’s also the fun factor issue — Facebook has focused on fun: games, pokes, virtual gifts, and all sorts of social silliness that consumers just love.

The lack of play in the Google+ experience is actually a plus, not a minus, for many early users – there’s more signal, less noise, there – at least potentially. And this creates a self-selecting use-case: people are using Google+ for sharing ideas and having real conversations (and as of week two, not only about Google+ it turns out).

As of this article there is certainly an increase in non-serious content showing up on Google+, but it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to Facebook’s content mix. This could be an early-adopter effect that could change if more mainstream users adopt G+, but currently, my instincts are telling me G+ content is going to be more serious than fun. I’m not convinced the mainstream consumer audience is going to use G+ for fun.

Google+ is best used for sharing knowledge. This may result in Google+ filling a role that USENET used to play and that the fragmented blogosphere never really succeeded at solving: a unified knowledge sharing and conversation medium.

Hopefully the folks at Google+ will realize that the slightly more serious communication that’s happening in the service is a good thing. Instead of trying to change that by introducing more ways to play, they might want to consider celebrating it.

Keep out the silly social games, don’t introduce the fluff. This will preserve Google+ as a higher signal-to-noise communication channel and will make it unique from Facebook.

Hopefully Google+ won’t immediately integrate Zynga, for example, because that would totally ruin their differentiation from Facebook and take them in a direction they have no in-house DNA for: fun and games.

It’s just not too likely that the serious engineering and science culture of Google can replicate the lightheartedness of Facebook. And anyway if they could make Google+ fun, will anyone want it? After all they already have Facebook for that.

People are not going to use Facebook for serious conversations – it’s already too late for that. And they’re not going to use Google+ for superpoking. They can already poke each other to death perfectly well in Facebook.

Google+ is different from Facebook. And that’s a good thing for both companies. There may actually be room for both of them in this town.

TechCrunch kindly ran my most recent article today — the full version is available here.

Here is an excerpt:

I’ve been puzzling over Twitter’s recent tactical moves around their API, Ubermedia and Tweetdeck, for a few months now, and it just doesn’t add up. In fact I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in a direction where they end up missing out on their biggest potential win.

If Twitter continues to go down the media company path, without incorporating their API into the plan, that could not only force a large part of their ecosystem to go elsewhere, but it could deprive them of a much larger potential infrastructure revenue opportunity, and could even end up costing them the company.

After all, Silicon Valley is littered with the  burned out wreckage of once-great media companies that failed create and keep third-party app ecosystems: AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo – to name a few. It’s very hard to maintain leadership as an online media company without an ecosystem of outside apps increasing reach, innovation, and stickiness.

In light of this, I’ve been exploring an alternate path for Twitter that leverages their API in a much bigger way, and this path appears to be a better strategy. According to my own experimental revenue  projections for Twitter, this alternative path is not only a good tactical move, but it’s a good business move because it increases Twitter’s reach, number of active users, and revenues massively.

….. Read the rest here.

I was recently honored to be invited by President Sarkozy of France to participate in the e-G8 Summit — a new and potentially useful summit of global Internet leaders, right before this year’s G8 Summit in Paris.

This event will bring together Internet leaders and political leaders, for two days of discussions about the Internet. The goal is to advise the G8 leaders on important issues related to the Internet.

I’m looking forward to this event, and I am hopeful that it will produce useful recommendations for the G8 leaders, and perhaps lead to an ongoing process to advise them on Internet policy.

But in researching and preparing for this, I have found very little information about the event, who the other attendees will be, and what the real motivations for the event are.

In addition – for an event of this magnitude, it is somewhat surprising that there has not yet been any significant press coverage of it yet.

So, in the interest of transparency, and in helping to bring together the community of participants, and in addition, to seek suggestions from others for what issues or suggestions we should focus on, I am going to unveil the information I have received about the event publicly, for the first time.

I believe this is the first time this information has been shared publicly, and I think you will find it interesting…

Then, in the second half of this article, below, I will discuss my questions about what this event might achieve, what we might bring to the table there, and in particular what  ideas or proposals you might have as well?

The Invitation

Dear Mr. SPIVACK,

In my current capacity as President of the G8, I would like to place the issue of the Internet on the agenda of the Summit of Heads of State and Government that will be held in Deauville on 26-27 May 2011. We are all in agreement that it is essential for our States to consider the development of the Internet and its economic, political and cultural effects in our own countries and throughout the world.

This commitment from the Heads of State and Government shows that the time has come to engage in genuine dialogue with the main world players in the information and communication technologies sector, particularly in order to strengthen the Internet’s major contribution to economic growth.

It is for this reason that I have decided to organise the “e-G8 Forum” in Paris on 24-25 May. Over these two days, the CEOs and the leaders of the Internet’s most leading companies and organisations will work together before sharing their proposals with the Heads of State and Government in Deauville.

Participants in the e-G8 Forum will be able to exchange ideas about cutting-edge products and services. They will also be able to discuss the challenges and opportunities which they believe relevant to the future of the Internet, offering their opinions on a wide range of issues, including for example human rights, intellectual property and technological investment.

Given the key role you play in the field of information technology, as an entrepreneur and a leader, I would be honoured if you could attend this unprecedented conference.

Nicolas SARKOZY

 

The Fact Sheet

e-G8 Forum
The Internet: Accelerating Growth
Paris, May 24-25, 2011

The French President Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy, as current President of the Group of Eight countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – is convening an extraordinary invitation-only meeting of the best and the brightest technology leaders from the G8 and the rest of the world. He wishes to include in the G8 Summit agenda the possibilities opened up by the Internet and to enable the e-G8 Forum to contribute their viewpoint and reflections to the discussions of the Heads of State.

The e-G8 Forum will be held in Paris on May 24-25, immediately preceding the G8 Heads of State and Government Summit in Deauville on May 26-27.

The e-G8 Forum is designed to inform the G8 discussion and encourage dialogue between governments and global media/technology companies. This year, for the first time ever, the Internet’s role in society and the economy will be formally on the G8 Summit agenda. Although invited on the initiative of the President of the French Republic, the stakeholders in the digital economy will be free to choose their topics, agenda, content and conclusions which will be submitted to the discussion of the Heads of State. That is why President Sarkozy wishes the e-G8 Forum to be a private organization, placed under the presidency of Maurice Lévy, Chairman & CEO of Publicis Groupe.

e-G8 Forum Theme: The Internet: Accelerating Growth. The reach and impact of the Internet, fast-evolving technology and the roll-out of broadband across the world have been huge contributors to economic growth, job creation, education and empowerment in the last decade – and this digital ecosystem will be critically important in accelerating global growth in coming years.

Location: Stunning custom-built forum space in the Tuileries gardens, located between the Musée du Louvre and Place de la Concorde in the center of Paris.

Participants: Strictly by personal invitation only, the e-G8 Forum’s explicit goal is to gather leading global players of the digital ecosystem. This high-level community includes CEOs, technologists, entrepreneurs, and industry experts. Forum participants are invited to an extraordinary e-G8 Forum Dinner at the Louvre Museum on Tuesday May 24.

Program: Combining plenary sessions, town hall discussions and private dialogue, the e-G8 Forum will include discussions on economic growth, social issues such as human rights, intellectual property protection and privacy, and the Internet of the future.

Ideas from the e-G8 Forum will be presented at the G8 Summit, for the first time giving a voice to leading companies investing in technology and the future of the Internet.

Organization: President Sarkozy has asked Maurice Lévy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, to organize the e-G8 Forum.

Press: For press accreditation presse-eg8forum@publicislive.com

General Information: info-eg8forum@publicislive.com

Website: www.eg8forum.com

The Agenda

e-G8 Forum
The Internet: Accelerating Growth
Pre-program

 

MONDAY 23 MAY
17h00 – 21h00: Welcome and Registration -Tuileries Gardens

TUESDAY 24 MAY

08h30 – 10h00: Registration, coffee and networking

10h00 – 10h10: Welcome & Introduction, Maurice Lévy, Chairman & CEO, Publicis Groupe, Chairman of the e-G8 Forum

10h10 – 10h45: Opening Keynote
Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, current President of the G8
10h45 – 11h00: Q&A with President Sarkozy

11h00 – 12h00: Plenary I
“Silicon Power: The Internet & Economic Growth”
Information Technology and the entire digital ecosystem have been a powerful creator of jobs and wealth around the world. How to ensure this continues?

12h00 – 13h00: Plenary II
“Rewiring Societies” The Internet has empowered people around the world, most recently and most spectacularly in the Middle East, but also in many other instances. Are we seeing the emergence of a new society: more open, transparent and free?

13h00 – 14h30: Lunch

14h30 – 15h30: Plenary III
“Future of the Net: What Next?”
Broadband, booming data, video, the explosion of cloud computing, storage: the financing of infrastructures, how value is created and shared

15h30 – 16h00: Coffee break and networking
16h00 – 17h00: Content and intellectual property
17h00 – 18h00: Conversations with legendary figures of the Internet
20h00 – 22h30: e-G8 Dinner at the Louvre Museum and private visits of the museum

WEDNESDAY 25 MAY
08h00 – 09h00: Continental breakfast and networking

09h00 – 10:00: Plenary I
“Innovation and Financing”
The impact of new technologies on strategies for innovation and R&D What are the best strategies for creating innovative ecosystems and clusters?

10h00 – 10h30: Coffee break and networking

10h30 – 12h00: Parallel Workshops I
1. Fostering Innovation and Education
2. The impact of the digital revolution on small and medium-sized businesses
3. Entertainment and Culture in the Digital Age

12h00 – 13h00: Parallel Workshops II
1. Mobile Internet: how mobile is transforming commerce
2. Protection of privacy and the youth
3. The Net and the Media: the future of media in a digital society

13h00 – 14h30: Lunch

14h30 – 15h30: Parallel Workshops III
1. In the Social Media Age: the impact on society
2. Creativity and entrepreneurship on the Net
3. Trust: Creating and maintaining trust in a world of booming data

15h30 – 16h00: Coffee break

16h00 – 17h30: Plenary II
“Start-up Nations: the best and the brightest start-ups”

17h30 – 18h30: Closing Plenary of the e-G8 Forum

My Thoughts and Questions

I am honored to be among the invitees and do plan on participating. However, that said, I also have a number of thoughts and questions about this gathering, its purpose, and the results that may or may not come from it. I am certainly hopeful and optimistic – but I also think an event of this nature will face a number of challenges.

First of all, this event is being organized rather suddenly, with very little advance-notice to potential attendees. So my first question is, who will actually be going? I am definitely attending, but I’m curious to know who the other attendees will be?

In searching Twitter for the terms  “eg8“, “e-G8,” “#eg8“, “#e-G8” I have found a few others, such as Leo Laporte and Jimmy Wales who have also announced their intention to attend. If you are attending, please announce it on Twitter at the hashtag #eg8 so we all can see who the delegates will be.

My second question is about the motivation for the event. Why is President Sarkozy organizing this event at this time? Is there a political agenda at work here, or is this simply to bring one of the major drivers of global society and economics to the table at the G8 level for the first time? Perhaps both are factors in the decision to do this?

It is also interesting to note that President Sarkozy, along with the other G-8 leaders, have generally supported polices which are not always in the best-interests of the people who use the Internet – for example, around issues of privacy, freedom of speech, taxation, and net neutrality.

Is this event designed to truly bring all perspectives together in order to craft new policies, or to build support for policies that have largely already been set by the G-8 nations?

Will this event result in helping Big Corporations and Big Governments be even Bigger, or will it also provide a voice to the people, the citizens of the Web? Will the delegates be thinking about themselves and their companies, or will they try to bring larger issues to the table?

Another question is what can be achieved in only two-days, especially when dealing with multiple very different cultures with widely divergent views about privacy, free speech, taxation, etc? I think this will be perhaps the main challenge of this gathering: will it be possible to bridge these differences and have not only a meaningful dialogue, but one that results in useful and new ideas and proposals for the G8 leaders to consider?

I am skeptical that it will be possible to reach any sort of agreement on such complex and controversial issues in a short timeframe, however, perhaps it will be possible for the delegates to come up with recommendations for Internet-related issues that require urgent attention from the G8 leaders, at least.

Another useful output of this event could be a new network of relationships that connect a broad cross-section of Internet leaders with government leaders at a very high level. The new relationships and communication channels that result from this could perhaps become very important in influencing and shaping policy in the future. In the end, this may be one of the key long-term benefits of this gathering.

What Should We Discuss?

As a participant in the e-G8, I hope I can contribute something useful, and hopefully novel. I presume many of the other delegates will be from giant corporations, and will have viewpoints that at least to some extent reflect the goals of those corporations. In my case, I am not affiliated with any giant corporation presently; I work mainly with small, emerging technology startups.

At an event of this nature, I hope I can help to represent the viewpoint of the startup community, entrepreneurs, innovators, angel investors, incubators, and consumers on the Web. This is a perspective that is often drowned out in gatherings of leaders of multibillion dollar corporations and large governments — yet it is also one that is extremely valuable, since the technology startup sector is actually a key engine of new jobs, economic development, innovation, and growth.

I think it is of vital importance to find ways to transplant the DNA of Silicon Valley into other regions around the world, so that this kind of new economic opportunity and growth spreads and benefits more regions.

Another area that I focus on is the future of the Internet. Where is it going, and what is needed to get it there in the optimal way?

There are many issues to discuss around this ranging from identity, privacy, open standards, open-source software, and net neutrality (which should be re-branded as “net equality”), to who owns personal information, copyright law, software patent law reform, accessibility, and infrastructure – particularly infrastructure that can’t be easily controlled or compromised by any one party.

I’ve been involved with the Internet since the 1980′s, and helped to pioneer the early days of the Web, as well as the Semantic Web, “Web 3.0″ and new initiatives around the real-time Web. These technology movements have captivated me with their potential for increasing human freedom and capabilities. But there is equally great potential to use them to limit freedom and control humanity even more.

What concerns me most today is that more power over the Internet is falling into fewer hands, and this trend is continuing with the eager support of big corporations and governments.

What is of greatest importance, for the people of the world, is to find new ways to decentralize and democratize the key capabilities of the Internet (such as bandwidth, messaging infrastructures, identity infrastructures, privacy systems, data storage, on-ramps, and even the content of the Web) and to protect them from attempts to control them, co-opt them, or limit them.

If we are not extremely careful and diligent in our efforts to protect the open Internet from commercial and government interests, I think it is likely that we will end up building an Internet that is a kind of prison instead of a launchpad for greater levels of human evolution.

Here is just one example of what I’m worried about – Facebook is now considering limiting free speech in order to placate governments around the world. But Facebook isn’t alone in this – all the large global online services are having to balance complex opposing concerns – and too often in these situations, money wins out over human rights.

Social networks are the cultural nervous systems of our new 21st century civilization. The problem is, they are being created and governed by commercial interests, not by their constituents.

If commercial social networks truly do become the fabric of our new societies, what happens to our civilization? It becomes privatized and controlled by commercial interests, not elected governments. Is that a world you want to live in?

The Internet is a new global resource, which, like the oceans, the atmosphere and the rainforests, must be protected in order to be of greatest benefit. It is something which every human should be able to share in, equally, and in fact, equal access to the Internet may soon become necessary in order to participate equally in any society or government.

One thought along these lines that I have been exploring recently: Do Internet users need to be protected with certain guaranteed basic rights and freedoms in their online lives? And should we all agree to a new online social contract, or even laws, for what kinds of behavior are acceptable? Is it time for these kinds of agreements to be formed?

Civil rights, standards of behavior and laws, are necessary for any society to function, and our emerging global online society is no exception. Perhaps it is time to propose the first Internet Bill of Rights, and a standard Internet Code of Conduct?

Of course, such initiatives are risky to propose – they could easily backfire and instead of promoting freedom they could become new means of limiting freedom. So I do not believe these policies should be created in a vacuum – I think they would require broad participation and comment from the entire community of Internet constituents. I do however think it is possible that such initiatives could be very valuable in the future.

What Do You Think?

These are just a few preliminary thoughts, but really I am more interested in hearing from you — what issues should the e-G8 be thinking about? What issues should we be proposing to the G8 leaders? And do you have any specific proposals to offer?

I am very interested in hearing from you, as I am sure the other e-G8 attendees are as well. Please add your thoughts in the comments below so we can see what you suggest and are thinking about. I look forward to being able to represent a broad perspective at this event.

Sincerely,

Nova Spivack
novaspivack.com

It’s been a busy week for the team at bottlenose one of my coolest venture productions.

Bottleno.se has developed a very powerful new personalization system that is optimized for making sense of Twitter and other real-time information streams. The product is in alpha and invite beta is planned for June.

It began when TechCrunch broke the story about the company, earlier this week.

That was followed by an interesting article by Marshall Kirkpatrick on the Twitter overload problem, and then a detailed article by Jenny Zaino about how bottleno.se hopes to solve that problem.

And, there was also a false rumor that bottleno.se might get bought soon which started spreading like wildfire online – but we’ve publicly stated that we not looking to sell at this early stage, whether or not there is interest.

ff you’re curious what all the buzz is about, sign up for the invite beta this summer. We’ll start letting folks into the beta on a rolling basis in June, in order of influence on the invite list, since the product is focused on influencers.

If you want to ensure that you get in early, you can show us your level of influence by getting other people to register for the beta with you, by tweeting or inviting friends via a special link we give you in the registration form. The more people who register via your links, the higher on our invite list you rise.

More news is coming soon, so follow @bottlenoseapp on Twitter, as well as @dominiek and @novaspivack (me) to keep up with us.

I’m pleased to announce that my newest venture production is beginning to unstealth. It’s called The Daily Dot and it promises to be “the hometown newspaper of the Web ” — the community newspaper for Web.

The story of The Daily Dot began several years ago when I was thinking about where the Web was headed. At the time I was thinking a lot about the future of emerging online communities such as Digg, Facebook, the early days of Twitter, and even my own Twine.com — as well as about the growth of fully immersive games and virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life. I realized that these communities really were virtual places, and some of them literally even contained the equivalent of towns, leagues, guilds, nations.

But when I looked at how the media was covering the Web at the time, I saw a huge gap. Coverage broke out into two areas: stories aimed at an industry audience (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, Venturebeat, Techmeme) and coverage aimed at an early-adopter tech audience (Wired, Engadget, Slashdot, Boing Boing). But collectively, these audiences made up only a small slice of the overall Web audience pie.

Even more notable was that nobody was covering online communities like places — the way that newspapers cover nations, cities and towns. There were no local reporters, embedded reporters,  no stringers or correspondents in various online communities. In short, traditional media was covering the Web like a technology, not like a place.

Where was the coverage for the majority of the audience? The mainstream consumers who spent the better part of every day in this new place we call the Web? Where was the coverage of what was happening in the communities on the Web? The stories about the people on the Web? The stories for the people who used the Web?

Curiously, when I dug into this, I found that the mainstream was receiving scattered attention, in the form of only a few human interest or business articles per week in the major national media outlets (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, ABC). Mostly these articles were either curiosities or they were about big financial deals around hot companies. They too failed to address the Web as a place.

While the Internet industry audience was being deluged with thousands of geeky articles and blog posts every day, the mainstream audience was for the most part being ignored by the media. My mainstream audience member friends confirmed this – they had no clue at all about what was really going on online – even around topics they cared about like brands, celebrities, music, major privacy issues that would affect them, the birth and death of major online services, new social trends and memes, new legislation, cybercrime. The small amount of this news they were aware of, reached them weeks after it was fresh, when the major outlets finally covered it.

I realized that here was an opportunity – in fact a need – for a newspaper that covered news about the Web for the people who use the Web — mainstream people. A newspaper by and for the people of the Web (in other words, all of us). A newspaper that would cover the Web like a place and as a community. In further discussions about this concept, my wife, Kimberly Rubin, came up with the perfect name, “The Daily Dot” and I went about buying the domain name.

The idea gestated and grew. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Finally, I decided this was a good enough idea to actively produce it in my new “venture production studio” — And so with that in mind I began looking for the right CEO and co-founders to produce the venture around.

As fate would have it, I had been introduced to Nicholas White through my longtime friend and PR guru, Josh Jones-Dilworth. Nick and I had been circling for a while. He had this “young Richard Branson” vibe — which everyone comments on after they meet him. I knew he was going to be someone important but I wasn’t sure exactly in what way.  Then it hit me.

Nick grew up in a newspaper family, working in the print newspaper biz. For over a century his family has been running community newspapers; Today they own 22 newspapers and radio stations. Like me and Josh, Nick had been thinking about the same problem — how to evolve community news reporting for the new millennium, but from the perspective of the newspaper business.

Nick was thinking about how to save the newspaper business — thoughts which he has elaborated on this week in  a new article about how he hopes to save the newspaper business by leaving it. As we spoke about the Daily Dot and his own ideas, I realized Nick had both the pedigree and the passion to build what I had envisioned. Nick was the perfect CEO for the Daily Dot. And so we invited him to co-found the venture.

With Nick’s experience at the helm, we are already making great progress. An example of this is last week’s announcement that the widely-followed editor, Owen Thomas, has left his position as executive editor at Venturebeat (a terrific publication that I read every day), to join Nick and the team as founding editor of the Daily Dot. And around Nick and Owen we are already growing a team of really awesome editors, writers, designers, coders, marketers and investors. It’s really starting to take shape, rapidly.

Owen in particular brings a strong editorial background, and is already helping to focus our strategy. We were all impressed by Owen’s incredible network of connections to the movers and shakers of the Web, as well as to the users of the Web — and also with his knowledge of all things media, pop culture, gossip, fashion, design, entertainment and more. He really understands what people use the Web for, and he’s got a great nose for news. In short he’s got exactly the right mix to head up the Daily Dot’s editorial strategy.

As Owen explains it, The Daily Dot, is going to cover the Web in a new way: It’s about people. We’re going to cover the Web not just as a technology or an industry, but as a community — actually a community of communities — spread across a virtual landscape of online places. Some of these communities, like Facebook, are even larger than physical nations, and contain communities within them that are larger than many cities. Others, like World of Warcraft, are complex parallel worlds complete with warring factions and their own economies.

And there are many other vibrant communities on the Web: Youtube, Etsy, Second Life, 4Chan, the Word Press blogging community, Tumblr, Reddit, and literally millions of micro communities around vertical interests. These communities have people in them — yes actual people, not just technologies and venture capitalists! And these people have stories, stories we want to know about. And so do the people who participate in them. But who is telling those stories?

Imagine a nation or city without its own daily newspaper — how would people know what’s going on, what would hold it together, would it even feel like one nation or city at all? A newspaper is a critical enabling catalyst that transforms a crowd into a community. It gives people news, but also a sense of place, a sense of belonging, a sense of community. It tells the story of the place, it holds the record of the place. On a deeper level, a newspaper provides a mirror of the whole back to the parts, enabling an essential feedback loop. In short, newspapers are the lifeblood of communities.

The Web today is like that nation or city without a newspaper. It’s missing something essential – the one key catalyst that will transform it from a crowd into an actual community. By providing the Web with its own newspaper, The Daily Dot will make the Web feel more human, more connected, and more cohesive. And this is really important.

The Daily Dot aims to be the community newspaper for the Web as a whole, as well as for each of the communities within it. And by doing this, we may just end up play a key role in the life of the Web. But that’s the just the beginning: We may also become the first truly global newspaper; the newspaper with the largest daily readership on the planet. After all, what newspaper today has 6 billion daily readers?

There is no geographic print newspaper audience that large. But The Daily Dot is not limited by geography; it has a real chance at achieving a truly global readership by covering the one community that everyone on this planet has in common: The Web. It’s the first newspaper that everyone may actually read every day.

The Daily Dot is still young – in fact we haven’t really even launched it yet. And as we launch it’s going to be a work in progress: We’ll be starting with a series of experiments, a newsletter, and some explorations of new approaches for involving the community in making its own news, and then we’ll be launching a major new site — currently in private beta.

Meanwhile, we’re hiring writers and editors, so if you share our passion for this mission (and you’re awesome) definitely apply. We look forward to hearing your stories.

I’m writing this post since many of my friends and colleagues have gotten wind of some news and asked me what I’m up to. This is just the first in a series of articles I’ll be writing on this topic.

In a nutshell, I’ve been working behind the scenes for the last year to co-found and angel invest in a number of exciting new ventures. Several of these ventures will be launching soon, and so it’s time to begin telling the story of what they do, and the big idea behind them: a new approach to building startups that borrows from how Hollywood produces movies.

And in keeping with this, I’ve moved with my wife Kimberly Rubin (a TV producer with 11 movies to her credit), from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where Hollywood production studios began. I believe LA is a great place to build this concept out.

I call this new model of venture incubation the “production studio model” and in this approach I work as a producer of ventures, not merely a founder or angel investor.

As well as being a better fit for the needs of early stage startups than the typical angel investor or VC approach, the production studio model has enabled me to start a number of really excellent ventures, for less cost, in less time, than I ever thought possible.

Production Portfolio

But before I go into more detail about the model, here is the current portfolio of companies that I am actively producing. With the exception of Live Matrix and Klout (which were started earlier), all of these companies were started in the last year and will be launching soon:

• Live Matrix — The schedule of the Web. Live Matrix is the only guide to what’s happening, when, online – across all media types (video, audio, chat, gaming, shopping, and more). I co-founded and seed-funded this venture with CEO, Sanjay Reddy, and I continue to incubate it and actively participate, in the same way as I have since we began, by serving on the board and helping on product strategy, marketing and technology. Live Matrix is launched and busy making deals and launching new features. More news coming soon.
• Klout — Klout is the standard for measuring influence. I discovered the company when I was a judge at the SXSW Accelerator in 2009. I was really impressed with the founders and soon became the company’s first outside investor. Since then I have served actively as an advisor to the company. They recently raised a terrific venture round with Kleiner Perkins and are off to the races.
• Bottlenose — You’ll be hearing a lot about this venture soon. It’s a new personalization technology designed for the realtime Web and social media. I co-founded this company with Dominiek ter Heide. As well as seed-funding the company, I’m taking an increasingly active role in helping to build this company.
• The Daily Dot — The Daily Dot is a new online newspaper about the Web, for consumers. Most of the coverage of the Web today is targeted at the tech industry, a tiny fraction of the audience, but the Daily Dot will cover the Web for the majority of the audience: consumers who spend much of their day, every day, online. The Daily Dot hasn’t launched yet but it’s going to be an exciting company. I co-founded it with newspaper-industry CEO, Nicholas White and co-founder Josh Jones-Dilworth. More news will be coming out soon!
• StreamGlider — StreamGlider is a new visual real-time dashboard for tracking interests across various types of devices, starting with the iPad. It’s got a gorgeous user-interface and some novel features that are especially suited to keeping up with streams of rich media. I co-founded this venture with two leading technologists in the information filtering and semantics space, Bill McDaniel and John Breslin. This will be launching soon as well. More news will be available at launch.
• “Project Nikola” This new venture has a breakthrough new energy technology and is totally in stealth. This isn’t even its real name; even that is a secret, for now. What I can say currently is that it really works, it’s mind-blowingly cool and just may disrupt the entire power grid someday. But there’s still a lot of R&D to do before we release it.
• The Earth Dashboard. This is a not-for-profit initiative (yes, I sometimes help produce game-changing nonprofits too) that is working to create an interactive live dashboard about the state of the planet that brings together, and visualizes, all the key global indicators, in one place for the first time. This project is led by Medard Gabel, who worked with Buckminster Fuller, and the creative director is Mia Hanak and her accomplished museum exhibit design team.The Dashboard will be available online as well as in major physical public locations around the globe.

Several of these companies have a common thread – and a common passion for me — they are focused on helping people filter the Web in potentially disruptive ways. Some are using “Big Data” analytics, data mining and extraction, natural language processing, machine learning and semantics, to understand the Web. These are areas that I am deeply familiar with from my many years working around information filtering, AI and search. The Nikola project is an exception — it is outside of the Internet space but springs from a multi-decade interest I’ve had in radical alternative energy technologies.

A History of Incubation

Since 1994, I’ve been involved in starting companies as an entrepreneur, and since 2000 I’ve also been an angel investor. Through incubating numerous ventures (my own and those I’ve angel invested in), I’ve gained some experience into the art of incubating startups.

But one of the best experiences I had was starting one of the more successful incubators, nVention, at SRI, which I conceived of and co-founded with Norman Winarsky (now head of ventures at SRI) in 1999. nVention is now global and has launched more than 40 ventures.

Unlike many incubators, nVention acts in a very hands-on way. First of all, most of nVention’s work focuses around creating ventures to commercialize intellectual property that was originated at SRI. Secondly, nVention bring teams of internal and external experts together to help incubate its companies from concept stage through commercialization. In effect, nVention acts like a production studio, and the people who work there function like producers. It’s a model I’m emulating, albeit in a more grassroots and distributed way.

The Venture Production Model

As a producer, I work actively to develop new original intellectual property, or to source it from great innovators, and then I angel invest and/or bring funding to the deal, shape products and strategies, build teams, invent and develop products, and actively grow companies and take them to market. In many cases, the ventures I’m producing are originated by me, but I also have several ventures in my portfolio that were originated by others, or in partnership with others.

The key to this approach is that I usually get involved at or even before concept stage — even before there is a real team — and I actively work to shape it into a venture, from concept through commercialization.

To accomplish this, across more than one venture at a time, I partner with excellent people to co-produce these companies. In some cases I act as the startup CEO, in other cases my partners do, or we find and partner with the right person to be CEO. Often I find myself partnering with entrepreneurs and helping to coach them to be CEO’s. But in all of these cases, we focus on producing ventures together, as a team. And we’re all in it for the long-term. Because I’ve found excellent partners to work with, including excellent CEO’s where needed, I’m personally able to focus more intensively on helping each venture. This has worked very well so far.

The production approach to venture creation is quite different from the “fire and forget” or “spray and pay” (or “pay and pray”) model that many VC’s and angel investors are engaging in. Instead of spreading lots of fairly hands-off bets across dozens of companies, in the production model I really focus and get deeply hands-on with a pipeline of projects of various stages.

This the opposite of the index fund or hedge fund approach that some funds are taking in the Valley. And I think it is a much better fit for the needs of early stage companies.

The production approach is also different from what many incubators and start-up accelerators are doing these days. Incubators and accelerators play an important role in the startup ecosystem, but the key difference is that in the Hollywood-inspired production model I’m testing, I often start earlier in the process – before there is a concept, company, product, CEO or even a team. Many incubators and accelerators start later in the process.

Here’s how it works. My associates and I source candidate ideas both from our own stream of inventions, as well as from people in our network, and from other innovators we find or who find us. Next we “option” the best ideas with joint R&D agreements and/or with initial prototype funding to test them out. We then filter these prototypes and choose the best ones to produce.

We then form companies, build teams, develop business plans, branding and strategy, and bring additional funding together to develop the commercial offerings, launch, market, and grow them into full ventures. It’s a very hands-on process – and just like movie production, and we usually have a number of projects going on at each stage in our pipeline at once.

The process is similar to producing a film. With a film, first you have to create or find the story, then hire writers and a director, recruit talent, and build a production team, get the financing and early distribution deals in place, shoot the film, do post-production, get broader distribution, market the film and release it.  In the early stages of companies, we all wear many hats, and as they grow, we specialize. In my own case, I assume different roles and levels of involvement according to the needs of the ventures as they grow.

The New Role of the Producer in Tech

A key to this process is really in understanding the new role of a producer in the venture world. It’s not exactly the same as the role of an angel or VC, or an EIR, or even a typical “superhero CEO.” It’s a new role that connects them all together.

Another key is having a model that is designed to attract excellent producers and talent to team up with. To do that, I’m working with a structure that gives my partners a better opportunity than they can find anywhere else. Whether it is an externally or internally originated venture, the model I’m working with is, by far, the most entrepreneur-friendly deal in the entire industry.

In most of my ventures today I take a minority, or at most, an equal partner position, with my cofounders – even in the ventures I originated and funded. In some of the ventures I have angel funded, I have continued to maintain the original equity split with my co-founders, even as the amount of funding I have contributed has increased over time. Where other angels and VC’s take the approach that money is everything, I take the exact opposite view. Talent is everything. Talent is rare, and it’s the lifeblood of ventures.  I don’t believe it is healthy for any company to have the investors take control away from founders — too often that results in disaster. My model is all about cultivating and facilitating the founders.

Why do I do this? Because I believe that you get the best out of people when they really feel they own their venture, and when they feel respected and valued for their contributions. Part of this is because as an entrepreneur myself I have experienced life on the other side. I know intimately what it is to be an entrepreneur, and I know how some VC’s, and even some angels, take advantage of entrepreneurs and founders, suck the life out of companies, and destroy businesses by over-controlling them, and I vowed NOT to be like that.

The terms I offer are the same terms I always wanted for myself. No bullshit and no games. We all succeed or fail together. It’s a true partnership. I’m not betting the odds across dozens of companies and expecting only 1 or 2 to survive; I’m NOT doing shotgun investing like most angels out there, I’m making extremely careful, extremely deeply involved long-term commitments to build companies side-by-side with my partners. And I don’t just talk about this, I do it – my model reflects this.

At the same time, I also spend money in a different way than angels or VC’s. For example, in many of my projects I’ll start on spec with a developer and an idea. No money is initially invested. They work on the idea and prove they have the goods. Then if that works, there is a small grant to “option” it and we develop it further, much like a production studio options a story. I then work with the technical or product teams to see what they can deliver with this initial grant – usually a prototype. This is a test.

If the test goes well and progress is good, we make a production deal in which money, and time, are invested in stages, by myself and others in my network, as needed, rather than all at once. We’re not talking about huge dollar investments early-on, it’s frugal and careful, but it’s enough, and it’s extremely value-added. Later in the process, when the time is right, more money can be brought to work.

Building out the Production Studio

Another way I help my portfolio companies is by bringing pre-negotiated deals with handpicked best-of-breed vendors for many of the services they need. I bring the top law firms and patent teams, the best PR and marketing teams in the business, and accounting and HR services, from partners I know and trust. This saves ventures valuable time and money, and protects them from making early mistakes.

Once the ventures are aimed at a clear target and have something to show, we go together to other angels and venture funds in my network to raise the roll-out money. There’s no reason to give up equity until we need to. The result is that entrepreneurs who work with me end up owning bigger stakes of their ventures than they would if they worked with traditional angels and VC’s.

On the investment side, I’ve been meeting with interesting angel investors – some are pros and some are new to this – and we’re teaming up to jointly fund these ventures together. By working with a production team such as mine, angel investors can put their money to work with less hands-on effort on their parts – because we’re doing the production work for them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t involved – we consult with them as much as they want and we actively solicit their feedback and ideas at every step — but it means they can have confidence that an experienced team is doing the groundwork day-to-day. By working with producers like myself and my team, angels and funds can spread their bets without being spread too thin. If you’re an angel investor, or even a VC, and you’re curious about working with our network, drop me a line.

On my own side, of course, I have to be very picky about what ventures I get involved with, so that I and my team are not spread too thin as well. For that reason, we only allow for about 4 ventures in any stage (from concept stage, through R&D, to beta, and commercialization) of our pipeline at once. But this is a model that I think can scale as we add more producers and team members to the mix. Scaling this is an area that I am actively thinking about right now. If you’re an exceptional venture producer and you would like to be involved, get in touch. This is not about anyone being a superhero, it’s about creating an awesome and highly collaborative team, supported by an incredible network.

There’s so much more I could say about all this, and in time, I’ll write more about it.You will be hearing a lot more about this model, as well as all of the ventures we’re producing in coming months, as well as some new ventures not listed above that are in the pipeline and will become visible in the future.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting here and on my Twitter feed, about my thoughts and what we’re learning as this goes forward. I welcome your thoughts too — this is one of the reasons I’ve written this. So please don’t hesitate to ask questions, offer advice, or observations. Stay tuned, it’s going to be an adventure!

– Nova

As of this week I am officially based in Los Angeles and I’m already loving it here.

I made the decision for many reasons. First of all my wife wanted to move back here – she lived here for 16 years (during which time she produced 11 TV movies), and she has a huge community of friends here. In addition, many of my closest friends live in LA as well. Secondly, Live Matrix, a venture I co-founded with Sanjay Reddy, is based here, and I wanted to be closer to HQ. But beyond these reasons, I think LA is on the cusp of becoming the center for Web media, and it’s a good time to move here.

After nearly 6 years in SF, it’s exciting to be in a new and larger environment. LA is a big city, like New York City, where I previously lived for 11 years. The tremendous range of businesses in LA, the cultural diversity, and the amazing talent here, are really exciting. I tend to thrive in big cities, and although San Francisco had a lot of charm, I missed the pulse of New York. LA seems to be a happy medium, with much better weather.

As an Internet entrepreneur and angel investor, moving to LA also offers a ripe new frontier. While Silicon Valley is  the center of Web technology, I believe the LA region, with Hollywood, Studio City, Santa Monica, Pasadena and Caltech within easy reach, is going to become the center for Web Media — for example online entertainment, gaming, online video, live streaming, and social media. Already there is a strong and growing community of startups in or near LA. In fact, CrunchBase lists more than 500 of them within 30 miles of LA.

There is also a growing early-stage investment community in and around LA — “the City of Angels” is becoming “The city of angel investors.” There is a long-standing culture of investing in films here, and this culture is a natural fit for investing in Web startups. In addition, there is a huge pool of talented Web savvy developers and business people here, and the costs for hiring, renting space, and building startups are significantly lower than SF or Palo Alto. In short, I think LA is prime territory for building Web ventures. And it’s close enough to get to Silicon Valley and back in a day for meetings when necessary.

As for my many friends and colleagues in San Francisco, well I’ll be back a lot, so it’s not really goodbye. I’ll probably in SF or Silicon Valley at least every month. Ironically, we’ll see each other more, now that we have to actually plan getting together.

It’s only been a few days here in LA, but I’m really looking forward to exploring my new home (there is a lot to learn) and connecting with the many interesting startups, investors and thinkers here in LA Web community.

The Scheduled Web is Here – Talk at NewTeeVee Conference

I’m soon headed to Amsterdam to keynote the SIBOS conference. SIBOS is the largest annual banking conference in the world, attracting around 10,000 attendees.

But what’s most interesting about this event is the innovation stream within the conference. It’s called the Innotribe and is focused on exploring and innovating the future of financial services.

This year the Innotribe will have an incredible “who’s who” of speakers from the tech sector coming to speak about topics like cloud computing, the Long Now, Smart Data and the Semantic Web, digital identity, mobile transactions, social media for financial services, and other hot topics. Innovation is just one track among many topics at SIBOS, but it’s bigger than many stand-alone technology conferences.

It’s going to be a fascinating week. For more background, here’s a promo video showing some coverage of last year’s Innotribe Labs. The Labs are meant to be fun, creative, and a place to think “outside of the box.” Here’s a powerpoint with more info.

In addition to the roster of A-list speakers, the Innotribe will have several Labs taking place in which participants will work interactively over several days to innovate together, culminating in a competition for the best breakthrough proposals. I will be helping to mentor the participants in the Smart Data and the Semantic Web stream.

If you are interested in where financial services are heading, the Innotribe is going to be the place to be.

The conference runs from October 25 – 29, 2010.

I encourage to participate in the Innotribe if you can make it to Holland for the event. Hope to meet you there!

Tonight I am pleased to announce that my next Big Idea has launched. It’s called Live Matrix and I invite you to come check it out.

Live Matrix is the schedule of the Web — We help you to find out “What’s When on the Web” — the hottest live online events happening on the Web: concerts, interviews, live chat sessions, game tournaments, sales, popular Webshows, tech conferences, live streaming sports coverage, and much more.

It’s like TV Guide was for TV, but it’s not for TV, it’s for the Web. There are all kinds of things happening online — and while Live Matrix includes a lot of live streaming video events, there is much more than just video in our guide. Live Matrix includes any types of scheduled online events — but we don’t include offline events — to be in Live Matrix an event must enable people to participate online.

The site combines elements of a guide, a search engine, and a DVR, to help you discover events and then get reminded to attend them, or catch them later if you missed them.

The insight that led to Live Matrix was that the time-dimension of the Web is perhaps the last big greenfield opportunity on the Web. It’s an entire dimension of the Web that nobody has made a search engine for, and nobody is providing any guidance for. Nobody owns it yet — it’s a whole new frontier of the Web.

There are millions of scheduled events taking place online every day. Some of these events are very cool, some are very relevant — but there is no easy way to find out about them. To find out what’s happening when on TV for example, we have TV Guide, but there is no equivalent for finding out what’s happening when on the Web.

In my own case I kept finding out about cool online events that I would have participated in — concerts, conference streams, webinars, online debates and interviews, and sales –  if only I had known they were happening. I think many Internet users have experienced this.

Google, Yahoo and Bing all focus on what I call the “space dimension” of the Web — they help you find what’s where — where is the best page about topic x? — But they don’t help you find out what’s when — what’s happening now, what’s coming next. They only help you find out what’s already finished and done with. How do you find out what’s happening now? How do you know what’s upcoming?

It was an “aha moment” when this all became clear — there is a new opportunity to be the Google or Yahoo for the time dimension of the Web. Or at least to be the equivalent of a TV Guide for the Web.

Furthermore, All trends point to this being a big opportunity. The continued growth of the realtime Web (Twitter, etc.) and the emerging Live Web (video and audio streaming) has been discussed extensively in the media; most recently comScore reported nearly a 650% increase in time spent viewing live video online.

So with this opportunity clearly in mind I set about looking for a co-founder who would be the right person to team up with, someone who would be the CEO.

That person was Sanjay Reddy. Soon after I met Sanjay it was clear to me that he was the exact right guy to partner with: his background in media and technology were what impressed me (for example, he was head of corp dev, strategy and M&A at Gemstar-TV Guide, where he led the $2.3 billion dollar sale of the company to Macrovision, and he had also worked at other Silicon Valley startups and investment banks as well).

Sanjay and I spent quite a bit of time just talking about ideas and eventually decided to join forces. My Lucid Ventures incubator, along with Sanjay, seed-funded the new venture and named it Live Matrix, to go after our mutual vision.

Soon after Sanjay joined we were fortunate to be joined by our two highly experienced colleagues, Edgar Fereira (formerly VP of data for TV Guide Data and TV Guide Online) and Tobias Batton (serial entrepreneur, product manager, game designer). Then others joined around us.

Eventually we formed a small (but awesome) startup team and began working on a prototype and eventually an alpha. We debuted a closed beta preview at TechCrunch Disrupt last spring and received enthusiastic reviews. Now, today, we are releasing our public beta.

Read the full press release here.

I hope you like what we’ve created so far. But please note it is still a BETA. We are interested in your feedback and we already have a lot of feedback from our private beta. Here are some of the ideas we are working on for our next few releases:

• The Number One request we have received so far is to make it easier and faster for people to find events that would interest them. So for the remainder of the year one of our big priorities will be to add in more personalization and recommendations.
• We’re also working on new UI concepts, including some more ways to view the schedule of the Web.
• And we’re going to make it easier and faster for you to add events to Live Matrix — we’ll be launching improvements to our publisher tools section, as well more ways for people to suggest events for us to list.
• And we also plan to add new categories of events — for examples, Business, Technology, Games, and more.

So stay tuned! Live Matrix is just getting started. But this could be the start of something big.

ps. Here’s a screencast with a quick tour of Live Matrix

Live Matrix Demo from Doug Freeman on Vimeo.

Kate Ray has done a terrific job illustrating and explaining Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web in her new documentary. She interviews, Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, me, and many others. If you’re interested in where the Web is headed, and the challenges and opportunities ahead, then you should watch this, and share it too!

I have started blogging about a new concept that I call The Scheduled Web. The Scheduled Web is the next evolution of the Real-Time Web, in which it will become possible to actually navigate the time dimension of the Web more productively.

There is a popular misconception that on-demand content, such as archived video, is more valuable than live content. But in fact, this may not be the case.

Live content has built-in perishability that makes it potentially more valuable than on-demand content – if relevant audiences can find it while it is live. If a piece of high-demand content is only live for a short period of time it can attract more traffic in less time, provided that people who would want to participate interactively (or even transactively) in it are notified beforehand.

More demand in less time translates to higher advertising revenues, or higher prices in time-based sales like auctions. A series of high-demand live events could actually earn more revenues than a series of on-demand content releases in any given unit of time.

A live event is only live for some limited period of time, after which even though it may later be available in archived form, the event is finished, it is no longer a live event. If you want to get the live experience and be able to actually participate in a live event, you have to be there. It isn’t the same to watch it after the fact. And in some cases, for example auctions, sales, games, contests and chats, if you miss the event you can’t participate and may not even be able to access an archived version (if you even wanted to).

Live events are the best of both worlds for several reasons:

1. They have extra perishability because they are live, giving people a stronger incentive to participate synchronously when they are actually happening. Furthermore, if a live event is also interactive in some way, it is even more valuable to those who are present. A good example of this is American Idol, where for instance, the audience can participate in the voting process that selects finalists. Interactivity makes the show more engaging and gives viewers a sense of ownership and personal investment in the content.

2. Live events can also be archived and made available on-demand, as well. The key to getting this double-layer of value out of live events is to schedule them so that they can be found before or while they are actually live. This amplifies the initial demand and attendance to the event, and also provides any archived version that follows an added social virality.

At Live Matrix we believe it is incorrect to assume that the television model carries over directly to the Web. The Web is an entirely different medium because it is two-way, interactive, both synchronous and asynchronous, and distribution is open to anyone and portable across any device. Television over the Web is going to be different than TV on cable and satellite networks. The fact that consumers can consume Web video content asynchronously is a plus, but it doesn’t obviate the need or opportunity for live synchronous content on the Web. In fact, for any event that requires or even wants to leverage interactivity, live synchronous attendance by audience members is a key part of the experience.

There are many use-cases where live synchronous content consumption cannot be replaced by asynchronous content consumption — for example a live chat, or a time-limited sale or auction, or a multiplayer live game. Even in the case of video and audio there are many cases where live synchronous content is more valuable than asynchronous on-demand content. For example who wants to watch the Superbowl months after the game is over? Who really wants to watch a major presidential address or a press conference weeks later? Who wants to watch video of election coverage months after it’s decided? These kinds of “timely” events are live by their nature, and part of the value of consuming the content is the act of doing it in a timely manner.

The value of live interactive content begins to become even more clear as on-demand content that is originally streamed live has the ability to generate more revenues over its lifetime than simply recorded, on-demand content alone. The Scheduled Web will thus even improve traffic and revenues for on-demand content, if that content can be initiated as live events, or at least paired with them in some way.

The value of the Scheduled Web will be realized as not simply a schedule of video content, but of all scheduled events of any type that take place on the Internet. While much of this content is valuable both when it initially goes live and on an ongoing basis as on-demand content after the fact, there is also a lot of content in Live Matrix that will be inherently and necessarily more valuable when it is live, such as sales and auctions or games.

In addition there is a new category of “exclusively live” online events that we may see emerge in 2011. These events will be one-time events, with no archived copies after they finish. They may be high-profile events where attendance requires paid admission for example. They will be marketed as special experiences – where not only do you have to be there to experience them, but where being there has special advantages, like being able to interact with others who are there and perhaps with the performers or celebrities involved as well. Some events may also offer backstage passes, or special break-out sessions as well.

For events like these — where the only value created is during the event’s live run — discovery must happen prior to or during the event for participation to take place. For these, the Scheduled Web is absolutely essential.

If 2010 was the year of the Real-Time Web, then 2011 is going to be the year that it evolves into the Scheduled Web.

The Real-Time Web happens in the now: it is spontaneous, overwhelming, and disorganized. Things just happen unpredictably and nobody really knows what to expect or what will happen when.

The Real-Time Web is something of a misnomer, however, because usually it’s not real-time at all –  it’s after-the-fact. Most people find out about things that happened on the Real-Time Web after they happen, or, if they are lucky, when they happen. There is no way to know what is going to happen before it happens; there is no way to prepare or ensure that you will be online when something happens on the Real-Time Web. It’s entirely hit-or-miss.

If we are going to truly realize the Real-Time Web vision, then “time” needs to be the primary focus. So far, the Real-Time Web has mainly just been about simultaneity and speed – for example how quickly people on Twitter can respond to an event in the real world such as the Haiti Earthquake or the Oscars.

This obsession with the present is a sign of the times, but it is also a form of collective myopia — the Real-Time Web really doesn’t include the past or the future – it exists in a kind of perpetual now. To put the “time” into Real-Time, we need to  provide a way to see the past, present and the future Real-Time Web at once.  For example, we need a way to search and browse the past, present, and the future of a stream – what happened, what is happening, and what is scheduled to happen in the future. And this is where what I am calling The Scheduled Web comes in. It’s the next step for the Real-Time Web.

Defining the Scheduled Web

With the Scheduled Web things will start to make sense again. There will be a return of some semblance of order thanks to schedule metadata that enables people (and software) to find out about upcoming things on the Web that matter to them, before they happen, and to find out about past things that matter, after they happen.

The Scheduled Web is a Web that has a schedule, or many schedules, which exist in some commonly accessible, open format. These schedules should be searchable, linkable, shareable, interactive, collaborative, and discoverable. And they should be able to apply to anything — not just video, but any kind of content or activity online.

Why is this needed? Well consider this example. Imagine if there was no TV Guide on digital television. How would you navigate the constantly changing programming of more than 1000 digital TV channels without an interactive program guide (IPG)? It would be extremely difficult to find shows in a timely manner. According to clickstream data from television set-top boxes, about 10% of all time spent watching TV is spent in the IPG environment. And that is not even counting additional time-spent in on-demand guidance interfaces on DVRs. The point here is that guidance is key when you have lots of streams of content happening over time.

Now extend this same problem to the Web where there are literally millions of things happening every minute. These streams of content are not just limited to video. There are myriad types of real-time streams, everything from sales, auctions, and chats, to product launches, games, and audio, to streams of RSS feeds, Web pages appearing on Web sites, photos appearing on photo sites, software releases, announcements, etc.

Without some kind of guidance it is simply impossible to navigate the firehose of live online content streams on the Web efficiently. This firehose is too much to cope with in the present moment, let alone the past, or the future. This is what the Scheduled Web will solve.

By giving people a way to see into the past, present and future of the Real-Time Web, the Scheduled Web will enable the REAL Real-Time Web to be truly actualized. People will be able to know and plan in advance to actually be online when live events they care about take place.

Instead of missing that cool live Web concert or that auction for your favorite brand of shoes, simply because you didn’t know about it beforehand, you will be able to discover it in advance, RSVP, and get reminded before it starts — so you can be there and participate in the experience, right as it happens.

We are just beginning to see the emergence of the Scheduled Web. Two new examples of startups that are at work in the space are Clicker and Live Matrix.

• Clicker, a site that mainly provides on-demand video clips of past TV episodes, this week launched a schedule for live video streams on the Web.

• Live Matrix (my new startup), is soon to launch a schedule for all types of online events, not just video streams.

Some people have compared Live Matrix to Clicker, however this is not a wholly accurate comparison. We have very different, although  intersecting, goals.

While Clicker is an interesting play to compete with TV Guide and companies like Hulu, Live Matrix is creating a broader index of all the events taking place across the Scheduled Web, not just video/TV content events.

The insight behind Live Matrix is that there is much more to the Scheduled Web than video and TV content. The Web is not just about TV or video – it is about many different kinds of content.

Applying a TV metaphor to the Web is like trying to apply a print metaphor to tablet computing. While print has many positive qualities, tablet devices should not be limited just to text should they? Likewise, while the TV metaphor has advantages, it doesn’t make sense to limit the experience of time or scheduled content on the Web just to video.

With this in mind, while Live Matrix includes scheduled live video streams, we view video and TV type content as just one of many different types of scheduled Web content that matter.

For example, Live Matrix also includes online shopping events like sales and auctions, which comprise an enormous segment of the Scheduled Web. As an illustration eBay alone lists around 10 million scheduled auctions and sales each day! Live Matrix also includes scheduling metadata for many other kinds of content — online games, online chats, online audio, and more.

Live Matrix is building something quite a bit broader than current narrow conceptions of the Real-Time Web, or the narrow metaphor of TV on the Web. We are creating a way to navigate and search the full time dimension of the Web, we are building the schedule of the Web.

This will become a valuable, even essential, layer of metadata that just about every application, service and Internet surfer will make use of every day. Because after all, life happens in time and so does the Web. By adding metadata about time to the Web, Live Matrix will help make the Web – and particularly the Real-Time Web – easier to navigate.

Online vs. Offline Events

One of the key rules of Live Matrix is that, to be included in our schedule, an event must be consumable on-line. This means that it must be possible to access and participate in an event on an Internet-connected device.

Live Matrix is not a schedule of offline events or events that cannot be consumed or participated in using Internet-connected devices.

We made this rule because we believe that in the near-future almost everything interesting will, in fact, be consumable online, even if it has an offline component to it. We want to focus attention on those events which can be consumed on Internet-connected devices, so that if you have a connected device you can know that everything in Live Matrix can be accessed directly on your device. You don’t have to get in your car and drive to some physical venue, you don’t have to leave the Internet and go to some other device and network (like a TV and cable network).

Note the shift in emphasis here: We believe that the center of an increasing number of events is going to be online, and the offline world is going to increasingly become more peripheral.

For example, if a retail sale generates more revenues from online purchases than physical in-store purchases, the center of the sale is really on-line and the physical store becomes peripheral. Similarly, if a live concert has 30,000 audience members in a physical stadium but 10,000,000 people attending it online, the bulk of the concert is in fact online. This is already starting to happen.

For example, the recent Youtube concert featuring U2 had 10 million live streams – that’s up to 10 million live people in the audience at one time, making it possibly the largest online concert in history; it’s certainly a lot more people than any physical stadium could accommodate. Similarly, online venues like Second Life and World of Warcraft can accommodate thousands of players interacting in the same virtual spaces – not only do these spaces not even have a physical analogue (they exist only in virtual space), but there are no physical spaces that could accommodate such large games. These are examples of how online events may start to eclipse offline events.

I’m not saying this trend is good or bad; I’m simply stating a fact of our changing participatory culture. The world is going increasingly online and with this shift the center of our lives is going increasingly online, as well. It is this insight that gave my co-founder, Sanjay Reddy, and I, the inspiration to start Live Matrix, and to begin building what we hope will be the backbone of the Scheduled Web.

Today I am announcing that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here.

This acquisition consolidates two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of a long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.

As the CEO and founder of Radar Networks and Twine.com, it is difficult to describe what it feels like to have reached this milestone during what has been a tumultuous period of global recession. I am very proud of my loyal and dedicated team and the incredible work and accomplishments that we have made together, and I am grateful for the unflagging support of our investors, and the huge community of Twine users and supporters.

Selling Twine.com was not something we had planned on doing at this time, but given the economy and the fact that Twine.com is a long-term project that will require significant ongoing investment and work to reach our goals, it is the best decision for the business and our shareholders.

While we received several offers for the company, and were in discussions about M&A with multiple industry leading companies in media, search and social software, we eventually selected Evri.

The Twine team is joining Evri to continue our work there. The Evri team has assured me that Twine.com’s data and users are safe and sound and will be transitioned into the Evri.com service over time, in a manner that protects privacy and data, and is minimally disruptive. I believe they will handle this with care and respect for the Twine community.

It is always an emotional experience to sell a company. Building Twine.com has been a long, intense, challenging, rewarding, and all-consuming effort. There were incredible high points and some very deep lows along the way. But most of all, it has been an adventure I will never forget. I was fortunate to help pioneer a major new technology — the Semantic Web — with an amazing team, including many good friends. Bringing something as big, as ambitious, and as risky as Twine.com to market was exhilarating.

Twine has been one of the great learning experiences of my life. I am profoundly grateful to everyone I’ve worked with, and especially to those who supported us financially and personally with their moral support, ideas and advocacy.

I am also grateful to unsung heroes behind the project — the families of all of us who worked on it, who never failed to be supportive as we worked days, nights, weekends and vacations to bring Twine to market.

What I’m Doing Next

I will advise Evri through the transition, but will not be working full-time there. Instead, I will be turning my primary focus to several new projects, including some exciting new ventures:

• Live Matrix, a new venture focusing on making the live Web more navigable. Live Matrix is led by Sanjay Reddy (CEO of Live Matrix; formerly SVP of Corp Dev for Gemstar TV Guide). Live Matrix is going to give the Web a new dimension: time. More news about this soon.
• Klout, the leading provider of social analytics about influencers on Twitter and Facebook (which I was the first angel investor in, and which I now advise). Klout is a really hot  company and it’s growing fast.
• I’m experimenting with a new way to grow ventures. It’s part incubator, part fund, part production company. I call it a Venture Production Studio. Through this initiative my partners and I are planning to produce a number of original startups, and selected outside startups as well. There is a huge gap in the early-stage arena, and to fill this we need to modify the economics and model of early stage venture investing.
• I’m looking forward to working more on my non-profit interests, particularly those related to supporting democracy and human rights around the world, and one of my particular interests, Tibetan cultural preservation.
• And last but not least, I’m getting married later this month, which may turn out to be my best project of all.

If you want to keep up with what I am thinking about and working on, you should follow me on Twitter at @novaspivack, and also keep up with my blog here at novaspivack.com and my mailing list (accessible in the upper right hand corner of this page).

The Story Behind the Story

In making this transition, it seems appropriate to tell the Twine.com story. This will provide some insight into how we got here, including some of our triumphs, and our mistakes, and some of the difficulties we faced along the way. Hopefully this will shed some light on the story behind the story, and may even be useful to other entrepreneurs out there in what is perhaps one of the most difficult venture capital and startup environments in history.

(Note: You may also be interested in viewing this presentation, “A Yarn About Twine” which covers the full history of the project with lots of pictures of various iterations of our work from the early semantic desktop app to Twine, to T2.)

The Early Years of the Project

The ideas that led to Twine were born in the 1990′s from my work as a co-founder of EarthWeb (which today continues as Dice.com), where among many things we prototyped a number of new knowledge-sharing and social networking tools, along with our primary work developing large Web portals and communities for customers, and eventually our own communities for IT professionals. My time with EarthWeb really helped me to understand that challenges and potential of sharing and growing knowledge socially on the Web. I became passionately interested in finding new ways to network people’s minds together, to solve information overload, and to enable the evolution of a future “global brain.”

After EarthWeb’s IPO I worked with SRI and Sarnoff to build their business incubator, nVention, and then eventually started my own incubator, Lucid Ventures, through which I co-founded Radar Networks with Kristin Thorisson, from the MIT Media Lab, and Jim Wissner (the continuing Chief Architect of Twine) in 2003. Our first implementation was a peer-to-peer Java-based knowledge sharing app called “Personal Radar.”

Personal Radar was a very cool app — it organized all the information on the desktop in a single semantic information space that was like an “iTunes for information” and then made it easy to share and annotate knowledge with others in a collaborative manner. There were some similarities to apps like Ray Ozzie’s Groove and the MIT Haystack project, but Personal Radar was built for consumers, entirely with Java, RDF, OWL and the standards of the emerging Semantic Web. You can see some screenshots pictures of this early work in this slideshow, here.

But due to the collapse of the first Internet bubble there was simply no venture funding available at the time and so instead, we ended up working as subcontractors on the DARPA CALO project at SRI. This kept our research alive through the downturn and also introduced us to a true Who’s Who of AI and Semantic Web gurus who worked on the CALO project. We eventually helped SRI build OpenIRIS, a personal semantic desktop application, which had many similarities to Personal Radar. All of our work for CALO was open-sourced under the LGPL license.

Becoming a Venture-Funded Company

Deborah L. McGuinness, who was one of the co-designers of the OWL language (the Web Ontology Language, one of the foundations of the Semantic Web standards at the W3C), became one of our science advisers and kindly introduced us to Paul Allen, who invited us to present our work to his team at Vulcan Capital. The rest is history. Paul Allen and Ron Conway led an angel round to seed-fund us and we moved out of consulting to DARPA and began work on developing our own products and services.

Our long-term plan was to create a major online portal powered by the Semantic Web that would provide a new generation of Web-scale semantic search and discovery features to consumers. But for this to happen, first we had to build our own Web-scale commercial semantic applications platform, because there was no platform available at that time that could meet the requirements we had. In the process of building our platform numerous technical challenges had to be overcome.

At the time (the early 2000′s) there were few development tools in existence for creating ontologies or semantic applications, and in addition there were no commercial-quality databases capable of delivering high-performance Web-scale storage and retrieval of RDF triples. So we had to develop our own development tools, our own semantic applications framework, and our own federated high-performance semantic datastore.

This turned out to be a nearly endless amount of work. However we were fortunate to have Jim Wissner as our lead technical architect and chief scientist. Under his guidance we went through several iterations and numerous technical breakthroughs, eventually developing the most powerful and developer-friendly semantic applications platform in the world. This led to the  development of a portfolio of intellectual property that provides fundamental DNA for the Semantic Web.

During this process we raised a Series A round led by Vulcan Capital and Leapfrog Ventures, and our team was joined by interface designer and product management expert, Chris Jones (now leading strategy at HotStudio, a boutique design and user-experience firm in San Francisco). Under Chris’ guidance we developed Twine.com, our first application built on our semantic platform.

The mission of Twine.com was to help people keep up with their interests more efficiently, using the Semantic Web. The basic idea was that you could add content to Twine (most commonly by bookmarking it into the site, but also by authoring directly into it), and then Twine would use natural language processing and analysis, statistical methods, and graph and social network analysis, to automatically store, organize, link and semantically tag the content into various topical areas.

These topics could easily be followed by other users who wanted to keep up with specific types of content or interests. So basically you could author or add stuff to Twine and it would then do the work of making sense of it, organizing it, and helping you share it with others who were interested. The data was stored semantically and connected to ontologies, so that it could then be searched and reused in new ways.

With the help of Lew Tucker, Sonja Erickson and Candice Nobles, as well as an amazing team of engineers, product managers, systems admins and designers, Twine was announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in October of 2007 and went into full public beta in Q1 of 2008. Twine was well-received by the press and early-adopter users.

Soon after our initial beta launch we raised a Series B round, led by Vulcan Capital and Velocity Interactive Group (now named Fuse Capital), as well as DFJ. This gave us the capital to begin to grow Twine.com rapidly to become the major online destination we envisioned.

In the course of this work we made a number of additional technical breakthroughs, resulting in more than 20 patent filings in total, including several fundamental patents related to semantic data management, semantic portals, semantic social networking, semantic recommendations, semantic advertising, and semantic search.

Four of those patents have been granted so far and the rest are still pending — and perhaps the most interesting of these patents are related to our most recent work on “T2″ and are not yet visible.

At the time of beta launch and for almost six months after, Twine was still very much a work in progress. Fortunately our users and the press were fairly forgiving as we worked through evolving the GUI and feature set from what was initially just slightly better than an alpha site to the highly refined and graphical UI we have today.

During these early days of Twine.com we were fortunate to have a devoted user-base and this became a thriving community of power-users who really helped us to refine the product and develop great content within it.

Rapid Growth, and Scaling Challenges

As Twine grew the community went through many changes and some growing pains, and eventually crossed the chasm to a more mainstream user-base. Within less than a year from launch the site grew to around 3 million monthly visitors, 300,000 registered users, 25,000 “twines” about various interests, and almost 5 million pieces of user-contributed content. It was on its way to becoming the largest semantic web on the Web.

By all accounts Twine was looking like a potential “hit.” During this period the company staff increased to more than 40 people (inclusive of contractors and offshore teams) and our monthly burn rate increased to aggressive levels of spending to keep up with growth.

Despite this growth and spending we still could not keep up with demand for new features and at times we experienced major scaling and performance challenges. We had always planned for several more iterations of our backend architecture to facilitate scaling the system. But now we could see the writing on the wall — we had to begin to develop a more powerful, more scalable backend for Twine, much sooner than we had expected we would need to.

This required us to increase our engineering spending further in order to simultaneously support the live version of Twine and its very substantial backend, and run a parallel development team working on the next generation of the backend and the next version of Twine on top of it. Running multiple development teams instead of one was a challenging and costly endeavor. The engineering team was stretched thin and we were all putting in 12 to 15 hour days every day.

Breakthrough to “T2″

We began to work in earnest on a new iteration of our back-end architecture and application framework — one that could scale fast enough to keep up with our unexpectedly fast growth rate and the increasing demands on our servers that this was causing.

This initiative yielded unexpected fruit. Not only did we solve our scaling problems, but we were able to do so to such a degree that entirely new possibilities were opened up to us — ones that had previously been out of reach for purely technical reasons. In particular, semantic search.

Semantic search had always been a long-term goal of ours, however, in the first version of Twine (the one that is currently online) search was our weakest feature area, due to the challenge of scaling a semantic datastore to handle hundreds of billions of triples. But our user-studies revealed that it was in fact the feature our users wanted us to develop the most – search slowly became the dominant paradigm within Twine, especially when the content in our system reached critical mass.

Our new architecture initiative solved the semantic search problem to such a degree that we realized that not only could we scale Twine.com, we could scale it to eventually become a semantic search engine for the entire Web.

Instead of relying on users to crowdsource only a subset of the best content into our index, we could crawl large portions of the Web automatically and ingest millions and millions of Web pages, process them, and make them semantically searchable — using a true W3C Semantic Web compliant backend. (Note: Why did we even attempt to do this? We believed strongly in supporting open-standards for the Semantic Web, despite the fact that they posed major technical challenges and required tools that did not exist yet, because they promised to enable semantic application and data interoperability, one of the main potential benefits of the Semantic Web).

Based on our newfound ability to do Web-scale semantic search, we began planning the next version of Twine — Twine 2.0 (“T2″), with the help of Bob Morgan, Mark Erickson, Sasi Reddy, and a team of great designers.

The new T2 plan would merge new faceted semantic search features with the existing social, personalization and knowledge management features of Twine 1.0. It would be the best of both worlds: semantic search + social search. We began working intensively on developing T2, along with a new hosted developer tools that would make it easy for any webmaster to easily add their site into our semantic index. We were certain that with T2 we had finally “cracked the code” to the Semantic Web — we had a product plan and a strategy that could really bring the Semantic Web to everyone on the Web. It elegantly solved the key challenges to adoption and on a technical level, using SOLR instead of a giant triplestore, we were able to scale to unprecedented levels. It was an exciting plan and everyone on the team was confident in the direction.

To see screenshots that demo T2 and our hosted development tools click here.

The Global Recession

Our growth was fast, and so was our spending, but at the time this seemed logical because the future looked bright and we were in a race to keep ahead of our own curve. We were quickly nearing a point where we would soon need to raise another round of funding to sustain our pace, but we were confident that with our growth trends steadily increasing and our exciting plans for T2, the necessary funding would be forthcoming at favorable valuations.

We were wrong.

The global economy crashed unexpectedly, throwing a major curveball in our path. We had not planned on that happening and it certainly was inconvenient to say the least.

The recession not only hit Wall Street, it hit Silicon Valley. Venture capital funding dried up almost overnight. VC funds sent alarming letters to their portfolio companies warning of dire financial turmoil ahead. Many startups were forced to close their doors, while others made drastic sudden layoffs for better or for worse. We too made spending cuts, but we were limited in our ability to slash expenses until the new T2 platform could be completed. Once that was done, we would be able to move Twine to a much more scalable and less costly architecture, and we would no longer need parallel development teams. But until that happened, we still had to maintain a sizeable infrastructure and engineering effort.

As the recession dragged on, and the clock kept ticking down, the urgency of raising a C round increased, and finally we were faced with a painful decision. We had to drastically reduce our spending in order to wait out the recession and live to raise more funding in the future.

Unfortunately, the only way to accomplish such a drastic reduction in spending was to lay off almost 30% of our staff and cut our monthly spending by almost 40%. But by doing that we could not possibly continue to work on as many fronts as we had been doing. The result was that we had to stop most work on Twine 1.0 (the version that was currently online) and focus all our remaining development cycles and spending on the team needed to continue our work on T2.

This was extremely painful for me as the CEO, and for everyone on our team. But it was necessary for the survival of the business and it did buy us valuable time. However, it also slowed us down tremendously. The irony of making this decision was that it reduced our burn-rate but slowed us down, reduced productivity, and cost us time to such a degree that in the end it may have cost us the same amount of money anyway.

While much of our traffic had been organic and direct, we also had a number of marketing partnerships and PR initiatives that we had to terminate. In addition, as part of this layoff we lost our amazing and talented marketing team, as well as half our product management team, our entire design team, our entire marketing and PR budget, and much of our support and community management team. This made it difficult to continue to promote the site, launch new features, fix bugs, or to support our existing online community. And as a result the service began to decline and usage declined along with it.

To make matters worse, at around the same time as we were making these drastic cuts, Google decided to de-index Twine. To this day we still are not sure why they decided to do this – it could have been that Google suddenly decided we were a competitive search engine, or it could be that their algorithm changed, or it could be that there was some error in our HTML markup that may have caused an indexing problem. We had literally millions of pages of topical user-generated content – but all of a sudden we saw drastic reductions in the number of pages being indexed, and in the ranking of those pages. This caused a very significant drop in organic traffic. With what little team I had remaining we spent time petitioning Google and trying to get reinstated. But we never managed to return to our former levels of index prominence.

Eventually, with all these obstacles, and the fact that we had to focus our remaining budget on T2, we put Twine.com on auto-pilot and let the traffic fall off, believing that we would have the opportunity to win it back once we launched next versipn. While painful to watch, this reduction in traffic and user activity at least had the benefit of reducing the pressure on the engineering team to scale the system and support it under load, giving us time to focus all our energy on getting T2 finished and on raising more funds.

But the recession dragged on and on and on, without end. VC’s remained extremely conservative and risk-averse. Meanwhile, we focused our internal work on growing a large semantic index of the Web in T2, vertical by vertical, starting with food, then games, and then many other topics (technology, health, sports, etc.). We were quite confident that if we could bring T2 to market it would be a turning point for Web search, and funding would follow.

Meanwhile we met with VC’s in earnest. But nobody was able to invest in anything due to the recession. Furthermore we were a pre-revenue company working on a risky advanced technology and VC partnerships were far too terrified by the recession to make such a bet. We encountered the dreaded “wait and see” response.

The only way we could get the funding we needed to continue was to launch T2, grow it, and generate revenues from it, but the only way we could reach those milestones was to launch T2 in the first place: a classic catch-22 situation.

We took comfort in the fact that we were not alone in this predicament. Almost every tech company at our stage was facing similar funding challenges. However, we were determined to find a solution despite the obstacles in our path.

Selling the Business

Had the recession not happened, I believe we would have raised a strong C round based on the momentum of the product and our technical achievements. Unfortunately, we, like many other early-stage technology ventures, found ourselves in the worst capital crunch in decades.

We eventually came to the conclusion that there was no viable path for the company but to use the runway we had left to sell to another entity that was more able to fund the ongoing development and marketing necessary to monetize T2.

While selling the company had always been a desirable exit strategy, we had hoped to do it after the launch and growth of T2. However, we could not afford to wait any longer. With some short-term bridge funding from our existing investors, we worked with Growth Point Technology Partners to sell the company.

We met with a number of the leading Internet and media companies and received numerous offers. In the end, the best and most strategically compatible offer came from Evri, one of our sibling companies in Vulcan Capital’s portfolio. While we had the option to sell to larger and more established companies with very compelling offers, it was simply the best option to join Evri.

And so we find ourselves at the present day. We got the best deal possible for our shareholders given the circumstances. Twine.com, my team, our users and their data are safe and sound. As an entrepreneur and CEO it is, as one advisor put it, of the utmost importance to always keep the company moving forward. I feel that I did manage to achieve this under extremely difficult economic circumstances. And for that I am grateful.

Outlook for the Semantic Web

I’ve been one of the most outspoken advocates of the Semantic Web during my tenure at Twine. So what about my outlook for the Semantic Web now that Twine is being sold and I’m starting to do other things? Do I still believe in the promise of the Semantic Web vision? Where is it going? These are questions I expect to be asked, so I will attempt to answer them here.

I continue to believe in the promise of semantic technologies, and in particular the approach of the W3C semantic web standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL). That said, having tried to bring them to market as hard as anyone ever has, I can truly say they present significant challenges both to developers and to end-users. These challenges all stem from one underlying problem: Data storage.

Existing SQL databases are not optimal for large-scale, high-performance semantic data storage and retrieval. Yet triplestores are still not ready for prime-time. New graph databases and column stores show a lot of promise, but they are still only beginning to emerge. This situation makes it incredibly difficult to bring Web-scale semantic applications to market cost-effectively.

Enterprise semantic applications are much more feasible today however — because existing and emerging databases and semantic storage solutions do scale to enterprise levels. But for consumer-grade, enormous, Web services, there are still challenges. This is single greatest technical obstacle that Twine faced and it cost us a large amount of our venture funding to surmount. Finally we did find a solution with our T2 architecture, but it is still not a general solution for all types of applications.

I have recently seen some new graph data storage products that may provide the levels of scale and performance needed, but pricing has not been determined yet. In short, storage and retrieval of semantic graph datasets is a big unsolved challenge that is holding back the entire industry. We need federated database systems that can handle hundreds of billions to trillions of triples under high load conditions, in the cloud, on commodity hardware and open source software. Only then will it be affordable to make semantic applications and services at Web-scale.

I believe that semantic metadata is essential for the growth and evolution of the Web. It is one of the only ways we can hope to dig out from the increasing problem of information overload. It is one of the only ways to make search, discovery, and collaboration smart enough to really be significantly better than it is today.

But the notion that everyone will learn and adopt standards for creating this metadata themselves is flawed in my opinion. They won’t. Instead, we must focus on solutions (like Twine and Evri) that make this metadata automatically by analyzing content semantically. I believe this is the most practical approach to bringing the value of semantic search and discovery to consumers, as well as Webmasters and content providers around the Web.

The major search engines are all working on various forms of semantic search, but to my knowledge none of them are fully supporting the W3C standards for the Semantic Web. In some cases this is because they are attempting to co-opt the standards for their own competitive advantage, and in other cases it is because it is simply easier not to use them. But in taking the easier path, they are giving up the long-term potential gains of a truly open and interoperable semantic ecosystem.

I do believe that whoever enables this open semantic ecosystem first will win in the end — because it will have greater and faster network effects than any closed competing system. That is the promise and beauty of open standards: everyone can feel safe using them since no single commercial interest controls them. At least that’s the vision I see for the Semantic Web.

As far as where the Semantic Web will add the most value in years to come, I think we will see it appear in some new areas. First and foremost is e-commerce, an area that is ripe with structured data that needs to be normalized, integrated and made more searchable. This is perhaps the most potentially profitable and immediately useful application of semantic technologies. It’s also one where there has been very little innovation. But imagine if eBay or Amazon or Salesforce.com provided open-standards-compliant semantic metadata and semantic search across all their data.

Another important opportunity is search and SEO — these are the areas that Twine’s T2 project focused on, by enabling webmasters to easily and semi-automatically add semantic descriptions of their content into search indexes, without forcing them to learn RDF and OWL and do it manually. This would create a better SEO ecosystem and would be beneficial not only to content providers and search engines, but also to advertisers. This is the approach that I believe the major search engines should take.

Another area where semantics could add a lot of value is social media — by providing semantic descriptions of user profiles and user profile data, as well as social relationships on the Web, it would be possible to integrate and search across all social networks in a unified manner.

Finally, another area where semantics will be beneficial is to enable easier integration of datasets and applications around the Web — currently every database is a separate island, but by using the Semantic Web appropriately data can be freed from databases and easily reused, remixed and repurposed by other applications. I look forward to the promise of a truly open data layer on the Web, when the Web becomes essentially one big open database that all applications can use.

Lessons Learned and Advice for Startups

While the outcome for Twine was decent under the circumstances, and was certainly far better than the alternative of simply running out of money, I do wonder how it could have been different. I ask myself what I learned and what I would do differently if I had the chance or could go back in time.

I think the most important lessons I learned, and the advice that I would give to other entrepreneurs can be summarized with a few key points:

1. Raise as little venture capital as possible. Raise less than you need, not more than you need. Don’t raise extra capital just because it is available. Later on it will make it harder to raise further capital when you really need it. If you can avoid raising venture capital at all, do so. It comes with many strings attached. Angel funding is far preferable. But best of all, self-fund from revenues as early as you can, if possible. If you must raise venture capital, raise as little as you can get by on — even if they offer you more. But make sure you have at least enough to reach your next funding round — and assume that it will take twice as long to close as you think. It is no easy task to get a startup funded and launched in this economy — the odds are not in your favor — so play defense, not offense, until conditions improve (years from now).
2. Build for lower exits. Design your business model and capital strategy so that you can deliver a good ROI to your investors at an exit under $30mm. Exit prices are going lower, not higher. There is less competition and fewer buyers and they know it’s a buyer’s market. So make sure your capital strategy gives the option to sell in lower price ranges. If you raise too much you create a situation where you either have to sell at a loss, or raise even more funding which only makes the exit goal that much harder to reach.
3. Spend less. Spend less than you want to, less than you need to, and less than you can. When you are flush with capital it is tempting to spend it and grow aggressively, but don’t. Assume the market will crash — downturns are more frequent and last longer than they used to. Expect that. Plan on it. And make sure you keep enough capital in reserve to spend 9 to 12 months raising your next round, because that is how long it takes in this economy to get a round done.
4. Don’t rely on user-traction to raise funding. You cannot assume that user traction is enough to get your next round done. Even millions of users and exponential growth are not enough. VC’s and their investment committees want to see revenues, and particularly at least breakeven revenues. A large service that isn’t bringing in revenues yet is not a business, it’s an experiment. Perhaps it’s one that someone will buy, but if you can’t find a buyer then what? Don’t assume that VC’s will fund it. They won’t. Venture capital investing has changed dramatically — early stage and late stage deals are the only deals that are getting real funding. Mid-stage companies are simply left to die, unless they are profitable or will soon be profitable.
5. Don’t be afraid to downsize when you have to. It sucks to fire people, but it’s sometimes simply necessary. One of the worst mistakes is to not fire people who should be fired, or to not do layoffs when the business needs require it. You lose credibility as a leader if you don’t act decisively. Often friendships and personal loyalties prevent or delay leaders from firing people that really should be fired. While friendship and loyalty are noble they unfortunately are not always the best thing for the business. It’s better for everyone to take their medicine sooner rather than later. Your team knows who should be fired. Your team knows when layoffs are needed. Ask them. Then do it. If you don’t feel comfortable firing people, or you can’t do it, or you don’t do it when you need to, don’t be the CEO.
6. Develop cheaply, but still pay market salaries. Use offshore development resources, or locate your engineering team outside of the main “tech hub” cities. It is simply too expensive to compete with large public and private tech companies to pay top dollar for engineering talent in places like San Francisco and Silicon Valley.  The cost of top-level engineers is too high in major cities to be affordable and the competition to hire and retain them is intense. If you can get engineers to work for free or for half price then perhaps you can do it, but I believe you get what you pay for. So rather thank skimp on salaries, pay people market salaries, but do it where market salaries are more affordable.
7. Only innovate on one frontier at a time. For example, either innovate by making a new platform, or a new application, or a new business model. Don’t do all of these at once, it’s just too hard. If you want to make a new platform, just focus on that, don’t try to make an application too. If you want to make a new application, use an existing platform rather than also building a platform for it. If you want to make a new business model, use an existing application and platform — they can be ones you have built in the past, but don’t attempt to do it all at once. If you must do all three, do them sequentially, and make sure you can hit cash flow breakeven at each stage, with each one. Otherwise you’re at risk in this economy.

I hope that this advice is of some use to entrepreneurs (and VC’s) who are reading this. I’ve personally made all these mistakes myself, so I am speaking from experience. Hopefully I can spare you the trouble of having to learn these lessons the hard way.

What we did Well

I’ve spent considerable time in this article focusing on what didn’t go according to plan, and the mistakes we’ve learned from. But it’s also important to point out what we did right. I’m proud of the fact that Twine accomplished many milestones, including:

• Pioneering the Semantic Web and leading the charge to make it a mainstream topic of conversation.
• Creating the most powerful, developer friendly, platform for the Semantic Web.
• Successfully completing our work on CALO, the largest Semantic Web project in the US.
• Launching the first mainstream consumer application of Semantic Web.
• Having a very successful launch, covered by hundreds of articles.
• Gaining users extremely rapidly — faster than Twitter did in it’s early years.
• Hiring and retaining an incredible team of industry veterans.
• Raising nearly $24mm of venture capital over 2 rounds, because our plan was so promising.
• Developing more than 20 patents, several of which are fundamentally important for the Semantic Web field.
• Surviving two major economic bubbles and the downturns that followed.
• Innovating and most of all, adapting to change rapidly.
• Breaking through to T2 — a truly awesome technological innovation for Web-scale semantic search.
• Selling the company in one of the most difficult economic environments in history.

I am proud of what we accomplished with Twine. It’s been “a long strange trip” but one that has been full of excitement and accomplishments to remember.

Conclusions

If you’ve actually read this far, thank you. This is a big article, but after all, Twine is a big project – One that lasted nearly 5 years (or 9 years if you include our original research phase). I’m still bullish on the Semantic Web, and genuinely very enthusiastic about what Evri will do with Twine.com going forward.

Again I want to thank the hundreds of people who have helped make Twine possible over the years – but in particular the members of our technical and management team who went far beyond the call of duty to get us to the deal we have reached with Evri.

While this is certainly the end of an era, I believe that this story has only just begun. The first chapters are complete and now we are moving into a new era. Much work remains to be done and there are certainly still challenges and unknowns, but progress continues and the Semantic Web is here to stay.

This is the story of Twine.com — our early research (with never before seen screenshots of our early semantic desktop work), and our evolution from Twine 1.0 towards Twine 2.0 (“T2″) which is focused on semantic search.

In this interview with Fast Company, I discuss my concept of "connective intelligence." Intelligence is really in the connections between things, not the things themselves. Twine facilitates smarter connections between content, and between people. This facilitates the emergence of higher levels of collective intelligence.

Video from my panel at DEMO Fall ’08 on the Future of the Web is now available.

I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:

Howard Bloom, Author, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.

Jon Udell, Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

Prabhakar Raghavan, PhD, Head of Research and Search Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.

The panel was excellent, with many DEMO attendees saying it was the best panel they had ever seen at DEMO.

Many new and revealing insights were provided by our excellent panelists. I was particularly interested in the different ways that Google and Yahoo describe what they are working on. They covered lots of new and interesting information about their thinking. Howard Bloom added fascinating comments about the big picture and John Udell helped to speak about Microsoft’s longer-term views as well.

Enjoy!!!

I have been thinking a lot about social networks lately, and why there are so many of them, and what will happen in that space.

Today I had what I think is a "big realization" about this.

Everyone, including myself, seems to think that there is only room for one big social network, and it looks like Facebook is winning that race. But what if that assumption is simply wrong from the start?

What if social networks are more like automobile brands? In other words, there can, will and should be many competing brands in the space?

Social networks no longer compete on terms of who has what members. All my friends are in pretty much every major social network.

I also don’t need more than one social network, for the same reason — my friends are all in all of them. How many different ways do I need to reach the same set of people? I only need one.

But the Big Realization is that no social network satisfies all types of users. Some people are more at home in a place like LinkedIn than they are in Facebook, for example. Others prefer MySpace.  There are always going to be different social networks catering to the common types of people (different age groups, different personalities, different industries, different lifestyles, etc.).

The Big Realization implies that all the social networks are going to be able to interoperate eventually, just like almost all email clients and servers do today. Email didn’t begin this way. There were different networks, different servers and different clients, and they didn’t all speak to each other. To communicate with certain people you had to use a certain email network, and/or a certain email program. Today almost all email systems interoperate directly or at least indirectly. The same thing is going to happen in the social networking space.

Today we see the first signs of this interoperability emerging as social networks open their APIs and enable increasing integration. Currently there is a competition going on to see which "open" social network can get the most people and sites to use it. But this is an illusion. It doesn’t matter who is dominant, there are always going to be alternative social networks, and the pressure to interoperate will grow until it happens. It is only a matter of time before they connect together.

I think this should be the greatest fear at companies like Facebook. For when it inevitably happens they will be on a level playing field competing for members with a lot of other companies large and small. Today Facebook and Google’s scale are advantages, but in a world of interoperability they may actually be disadvantages — they cannot adapt, change or innovate as fast as smaller, nimbler startups.

Thinking of social networks as if they were automotive brands also reveals interesting business opportunities. There are still several unowned opportunities in the space.

Myspace is like the car you have in high school. Probably not very expensive, probably used, probably a bit clunky. It’s fine if you are a kid driving around your hometown.

Facebook is more like the car you have in college. It has a lot of your junk in it, it is probably still not cutting edge, but its cooler and more powerful.

LinkedIn kind of feels like a commuter car to me. It’s just for business, not for pleasure or entertainment.

So who owns the "adult luxury sedan" category? Which one is the BMW of social networks?

Who owns the sportscar category? Which one is the Ferrari of social networks?

Who owns the entry-level commuter car category?

Who owns equivalent of the "family stationwagon or minivan" category?

Who owns the SUV and offroad category?

You see my point. There are a number of big segments that are not owned yet, and it is really unlikely that any one company can win them all.

If all social networks are converging on the same set of features, then eventually they will be close to equal in function. The only way to differentiate them will be in terms of the brands they build and the audience segments they focus on. These in turn will cause them to emphasize certain features more than others.

In the future the question for consumers will be "Which social network is most like me? Which social network is the place for me to base my online presence?"

Sue may connect to Bob who is in a different social network — his account is hosted in a different social network. Sue will not be a member of Bob’s service, and Bob will not be a member of Sue’s, yet they will be able to form a social relationship and communication channel. This is like email. I may use Outlook and you may use Gmail, but we can still send messages to each other.

Although all social networks will interoperate eventually, depending on each person’s unique identity they may choose to be based in — to live and surf in — a particular social network that expresses their identity, and caters to it. For example, I would probably want to be surfing in the luxury SUV of social networks at this point in my life, not in the luxury sedan, not the racecar, not in the family car, not the dune-buggy. Someone else might much prefer an open source, home-built social network account running on a server they host. It shouldn’t matter — we should still be able to connect, share stuff, get notified of each other’s posts, etc. It should feel like we are in a unified social networking fabric, even though our accounts live in different services with different brands, different interfaces, and different features.

I think this is where social networks are heading. If it’s true then there are still many big business opportunities in this space.

I highly recommend this new book on Collective Intelligence. It features chapters by a Who’s Who of thinkers on Collective Intelligence, including a chapter by me about “Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of the World Wide Web.”

Here is the full-text of my chapter, minus illustrations (the rest of the book is great and I suggest you buy it to have on your shelf. It’s a big volume and worth the read):

Harnessing the
collective intelligence

of the
World-Wide Web

Nova Spivack[1]

Introduction

We are about to enter the third decade of the Web, sometimes referred to as “Web 3.0.” During this decade, the Web will evolve from a globally distributed fileserver into a globally distributed database. This shift will be enabled by a set of emerging technologies called The Semantic Web, which add a new layer of machine-understandable metadata about the meaning of information to the content of the Web.

The Semantic Web will catalyze a new era in collective intelligence. Individuals, groups, organizations and communities will be able to create, connect, find and share knowledge more intelligently and productively than ever before. Ultimately it will enable the Web itself, and all the people and applications that participate in it, to become more collectively intelligent.

Web 3.0—The Third Decade of the Web

The third-decade of the Web, “Web 3.0,” begins officially in 2010, but we are already entering the early stages of this transition today. To understand where the Web is headed it helps to zoom out to a larger historical context.

The final decade of the PC-era (1980—1990) was largely concerned with innovation on the front-end of the personal computer: the desktop and user interface layer of the PC. The focus of this period was in making PC’s easier to use with innovations such as Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh user-interface, and more consistent
user-interfaces and integration across applications.

The first decade of the Web-era (“Web 1.0” from 1990 – 2000), was focused on the back-end of the Web: the core technologies and platforms of the Web such as HTML, HTTP, Web servers, search engines, commerce technologies, advertising technologies, and the basic architectures and business model of Web applications. This decade was mainly focused on the technology and infrastructure of the Web and most of the actual innovation dollars were spent on making things that only software developers could see.

In contrast, the second decade of the Web (“Web 2.0” from 2000—2010) has been largely focused on the front-end of the Web. Much of the innovation has not been on actual technology but rather on design patterns and user-interfaces for improving the end-user experience of the Web. During this decade we have focused on paradigms such as AJAX, which is a set of technologies and design methodologies for making Web sites more visually appealing and interactive.

Another big focus of Web 2.0 has been user-generated content, and in particular the practice of “tagging” content with subject tags. Tagging has in turn led to the concept of “folksonomies” in which taxonomies that organize data are evolved in a
bottom-up fashion by a decentralized community of users.

The coming third-decade of the Web (“Web 3.0” from 2010—2020) will shift the emphasis back to the back-end of the Web. This decade will be largely focused on upgrading the technical infrastructure and content of the Web, based on emerging
technologies such as the Semantic Web. During this decade the primary push will
be enriching the Web so that it can function more like a database.

Today the Web is composed mainly of unstructured and semistructured data such as text files and Web pages. Keyword search engines are able to provide rudimentary search capabilities over this information, but only for the most simplistic queries. Compare current Web search to the more precise capabilities of queries against a database and the difference is immediately clear. The Web does not provide anything close to the search capabilities or precision of a database today. But that is about to change.

The Semantic Web provides a way to enrich both unstructured and structured data so that it can be queried with the precision of a database. Essentially, it provides a way to tag any information with metadata that explains what it means—and this metadata can be understood by software applications, such as search engines or knowledge management applications. It’s important to note that The Semantic Web is not a new Web, it’s just a new layer of the Web we already have. The semantic metadata that comprises the knowledge of the Semantic Web won’t live in some new place—it lives right in the existing documents and data on the Web. The
knowledge of the Semantic Web is encoded using special new markup languages
such as RDF and OWL.

This metadata is invisible to users (it doesn’t appear in Web browsers) but behind the scenes it can be read by any application that is compatible with these markup languages. So when any application, such as a next-generation search engine, sees a Web page or data record that contains RDF or OWL metadata, it can then use that
metadata to understand what that page or data record means, is about, what it is
related to, and how to interpret it. With Semantic Web metadata in place, searches on the Web will be as, or even more, precise as those in any database. But that is just the beginning of what the Semantic Web enables. Beyond merely improving search, the Semantic Web actually transforms the Web into a database—a worldwide database in which data records can be moved around, shared, and linked together in new ways.

On the basis of the technologies of The Semantic Web and the Web 3.0 era, we will then be able to enter the fourth decade of the Web (“Web 4.0”—2020—2030) in which the shift will turn back to the front-end of the Web. The Semantic Web doesn’t just add metadata about the meaning of information to the Web, it also enables metadata to be added about relationships, conceptual linkages, logical connections, and even logical rules. On the basis of this additional metadata, Web users and other applications will be able to harness the power of intelligent agents that will search the Web for things that interest them, make suggestions and recommendations, and even potentially transact on their behalf. This will open the door to a new kind of user-interface to the Web that is smarter and more conversational in nature, in which users will enter into dialogues with agents and interact with them search the Web and make decisions. A conversational interface to the Web will be more appropriate in the increasingly mobile world, when users will mostly interact with the Web from small portable mobile or embedded devices.

Users on mobile devices that have little to no screen real-estate will need a more productive way to interact with the Web than through a miniature browser; nobody like sorting through pages of Google results on a cell phone. Instead, they will want to simply ask a question (perhaps through a voice interface, rather than typing with their thumbs) and have a virtual intelligent assistant dispatch agents to find the best answers and then report back to them with results or to ask further questions or for a decision.

Smart, interactive conversational interfaces and intelligent agent-based virtual assistants are possible today, but only in narrow domains. In the Web 4.0 era they may in fact be our primary way of interacting with the whole Web and may be built into the user interface of most search engines, personal email providers, and leading Websites.

The Virtualization of Knowledge and Intelligence

In the long-term, the Semantic Web provides a way to move much of the “intelligence” that currently resides in the minds of individuals, groups and organizations, and/or that is hard-coded into various software and Web applications, out onto the Web itself. It provides a way to virtualize knowledge and intelligence in an explicitly machine-readable, universally accessible form. In other words, it provides a way to start making the Web “smarter.”

Knowledge and expertise that previously only existed in people’s heads, or had to be painstakingly coded into each particular vertical software application, will be
represented in a form of universally readable metadata on the Web—just like HTML documents today. In other words, using the Semantic Web you can publish
knowledge and even the underlying conceptual frameworks, rules and heuristics
that embody domain expertise, on the Web in an abstract, machine-readable form.

There are many benefits that stem from this. For one thing, it will make it much easier to write smart software applications because much of the necessary “smarts” will not reside in the applications at all, but will rather live out there on the Web.

For example, to write an application that can intelligently assist with travel logistics, a developer will simply be able to point it at existing sets of knowledge and rules that exist for the travel domain on the Web already. The application will
be able to draw on those pools of existing domain-knowledge without having to be specifically programmed to do so, because it understands the underlying standards of the Semantic Web. Similarly, the same application could just as easily help someone trade on the stock market, by simply pointing to domain knowledge on Semantic Web about finance and investment.

As more pools of domain knowledge are added to the Web around various verticals, all applications will potentially benefit. This sets up a kind of network effect in which a global knowledge commons begins to form and self-amplify over time. For
example, first the travel domain is added to the Semantic Web. Then someone else adds domain knowledge about geography and links them together. Another group then adds domain knowledge about hotels, and another one adds domain knowledge about weather—and these all connect to each other in various ways.

With all of this interconnected knowledge on the Web in machine-readable form, application developers can then more easily and quickly write applications that understand concepts and rules related to booking travel reservations, and that can
cross-reference reservation information with knowledge about geographic places,
relevant weather, and hotels in those locations. And in the other direction, someone booking a hotel can then find information about relevant weather and
book travel to get to that hotel. This is just one example. There are an infinite range of other possibilities for these technologies across all domains.

The key point of all this is that The Semantic Web enables applications to become thinner, yet at the same time smarter, by drawing on the collective intelligence embodied by the Web itself. It will become possible to write applications that understand one or more specialized vertical domains faster, and ultimately applications will become more general—they will be able to dynamically load in specialized domain knowledge for whatever domain is needed, without having to be
specifically programmed or limited to just those domains.

Application developers will be able to draw on the knowledge added to the Web by others, instead of having to reinvent the wheel by programming all that knowledge
directly into their applications every time. And in turn, the knowledge that their applications create can, if they want to allow it, be published back onto the Web for other applications to draw on as well.

Semantic Web as The Next Leap in Human Collective
Intelligence

Looking at the evolution of the Semantic Web in historical context, we can view it as the next big step in a longer process of the evolution of human collective intelligence.

Before the invention of written language, knowledge could only be communicated verbally and was handed down through oral traditions. During this period, one had to be in immediate physical proximity of someone who had certain knowledge in order to receive it from them. This meant that the maximum effective range of human collective intelligence was quite short in space and time.

With the invention of writing, and eventually printing, humanity was able to process knowledge over longer distances in space and time, and with less reliance on particular individuals. People could now engage in dialogues and dialectics with larger groups of people in more places, across larger distances in space, and with
more precision over larger ranges of time.

The printing press took this to a new level by starting the process of mass-distribution of knowledge, but it still relied on an expensive physical manufacturing process and a paper medium that was perishable and costly to store and move around.

With advent of electronic communications of various forms, humanity achieved many milestones—the transmission of knowledge could take place at the speed of
light, and using digital storage media we were freed from the limitations of
the paper medium.

The Internet and the Web transformed the process of distributing knowledge even further—enabling a global knowledge commons to emerge. The Internet and Web enable anyone and everyone to become providers of knowledge, not just consumers—a fundamental shift in the way that knowledge transmission and media function. They are not just about the mass-distribution and mass-consumption of knowledge; they enable the mass-creation of knowledge. In some respects these technologies are analogues of the printing press in that they have democratized the process of creating, sharing and accessing knowledge by fundamentally changing the economics of the entire process—making it affordable and accessible to all.

But even on the Web, for all its many benefits, knowledge is still not free from the
limitations of the human brain. Only humans can really understand the knowledge
that is represented in Web sites and databases, for example. While all other processes related to the distribution, storage and access to knowledge can now
be done digitally, using software and the Web, the processes of creating, consuming and actually understanding knowledge are still limited only to living humans. That’s where the Semantic Web comes in.

Liberating Knowledge and Intelligence from Human
Brains

The Semantic Web virtualizes human knowledge and expertise outside of human brains, and even outside of any particular software application—knowledge becomes essentially just more data on the Web. When we speak of knowledge here we don’t just mean information—the first-order raw data that is currently on the Web—we mean the actual meaning and interpretation of the information that is not on the Web but rather exists only in human brains.

The Semantic Web provides a way to make the meaning and interpretation of information explicit in a form that is unambiguous and publishable, and shareable, on the Web. This will make all this knowledge understandable by software. It’s almost like the invention of a new language—a sort of meta-language for formally expressing what exactly you mean when you say something. The impact of this could be enormous.

For the first time in human history, we won’t have to rely only on humans to create, understand and consume knowledge—our machines will be able to help us do this. They will help us work, collaborate, create, explore, monitor, discover, search, innovate, connect, and synthesize. This will open the door to an almost unimaginable amplification of the human mind, and human collective intelligence
on this planet. At first the impact of this will largely be focused around assisting humans with simple clerical and research tasks, but the process will inevitably continue to evolve to a point where software will begin to originate new knowledge for us, advise us, and eventually to even start making certain types of decisions on our behalf.

Although the Semantic Web has barely moved from the lab to the mainstream Internet, it is in fact much farther along than most people realize. Today there are already semantic applications under development that can organize all your information automatically, make recommendations based on your dynamically changing interests, identify new connections between ideas or documents in different places, make logical inferences or discover contradictions, and even make
discoveries by doing proofs and explorations based on available data.

Within a few years these capabilities will begin to filter out to the mainstream users of the Internet, and with a decade or two at most, they will become commonplace. There are only a few billion humans today, and each of us can only cope with a small amount of information and relationships before we become overloaded. But in an era of machine understanding of human knowledge we may potentially be able to leverage thousands to millions of software agents to help us. This will vastly
increase our ability to cope with masses of information and relationships productively. In an increasingly complex, distributed, and rapidly changing world, we simply will not be able to cope in the future without help. The Semantic Web provides one path to solving these problems, enabling us to remain productive in the future.

Amplifying Human Collective Intelligence

The Semantic Web does not replace humans or take them out of the equation. It simply reduces the load on humans, freeing them from some of the pain of information overload, and providing a new path for software to begin to augment and even amplify human collective intelligence.

Today there are several barriers to human collective intelligence that arise from basic limitations of the human brain. Human individuals, and groups of humans, simply cannot process or share knowledge effectively beyond a certain level of
information or relationship complexity and change. For this reason, collaboration and collective intelligence are often easier to achieve and yield better results in small groups than large groups.

As group size increases, productive collective intelligence becomes dramatically harder to achieve. Thus, ironically even though larger groups offer the potential for
exponential increases in collective intelligence, in practice the opposite is usually the result: the larger teams get, the dumber they get. An entire industry of management consultants and facilitators exists because of these inefficiencies.

The Semantic Web may be able to help with this age-old problem. By enabling software to understand information and relationships, we may be able to begin to
automatically and intelligently facilitate interpersonal and group collaboration and knowledge management, and this may finally enable larger groups to become exponentially smarter instead of dumber.

Twine.com—A New Service for Collective Intelligence

My own company, Radar Networks, has recently introduced a new service based on the Semantic Web, called Twine (www.twine.com) that focuses on amplifying human collective intelligence. Twine helps individuals and groups manage and share knowledge more productively, using the Semantic Web.

As people use Twine it learns from them and automatically organizes and connects their information with other related information, saving them valuable time and enabling them to discover connected knowledge. Twine provides individuals and groups with a smart virtual environment for their knowledge.

Twine works with all kinds of knowledge—email, RSS, Web pages, documents, photos, videos, audio, contact records, or anything else. Regardless of where information actually resides, Twine enables users to view it as if it were in one place, and to see how it is connected and organized. Twine also automatically helps to make sense of information and to make it more easily searchable.

Twine is a Web-based online service that is completely built using the Semantic Web. Although it is only in early beta-testing at the time of this writing, it is already
demonstrating that intelligent machine-augmentation of individual and group knowledge management is possible and improves productivity and collaboration.

As Twine unfolds and spreads to more individuals, groups and teams, and organizations and communities, it has the potential to become a new backbone for collective intelligence and knowledge sharing worldwide. At least that is the vision of the project. Time will tell whether we succeed it.

From Global Knowledge Commons to Global Brain

If the Semantic Web develops as predicted, it is possible that within 20 years much, if not all, human knowledge will be represented on the Web in machine-understandable form. We have seen the beginnings of this trend with services such as the Wikipedia. More recently, another initiative called the DBpedia is creating a Semantic Web version of the Wikipedia. But this is just the start of this trend.

As more and more applications and services start producing Semantic Web metadata and exposing it back to other applications and services on the Web, we will begin to create a new global knowledge commons. At first these different services will function like islands of knowledge, but then they will begin to interconnect.

A piece of knowledge in one place will link to and from pieces of knowledge in other
places. Eventually this will become a giant associative network, not so unlike the brain, but on a global scale. And as people and applications surf through its connections and consume its knowledge, adding new knowledge and connections
back to it as they do, it will change and self-organize dynamically. Just as the first generations of the Web have enabled a global medium for “hypertext,” the Semantic Web will enable a global medium for “hyperdata.”

As one projects the future evolution of the Web and the emerging Semantic Web, one cannot help but notice certain similarities to the human mind. Some have even ventured to call this the beginning of an emerging “Global Brain.” It is too early to tell how similar it will truly be to the actual human brain. However we can already
predict with confidence that it will a system that collectively will be capable of at least rudimentary learning, memory, perception, planning and reasoning.

The human brain is a massively parallel collective intelligence engine in which billions of neurons interact across trillions of connections to process and generate
knowledge.

Similarly, the collective intelligence of the Web will involve the combined interactions and intelligence of billions of humans and machines across trillions of
relationships. These processes will not be guided centrally, and the system will most likely not be centralized around a single construct of a “self” nor will it have anything like a human body.

While it will be possible to say the system as a whole is intelligent, it will be difficult to locate any particular source of that intelligence; the intelligence will come from everywhere: from the humans, the software and even the data and links that comprise the Web.

Because the Web is quite different from the human brain, it is likely that its intelligence will be different from what we think of as human intelligence today. But it will nonetheless be intelligent—in a massively distributed, emergent, and chaotic way that we humans may not be able to even comprehend. The “thoughts” the Web will think may be just too vast and complex for us to even recognize, let alone imagine or understand. Yet perhaps in decade-long time-scales at least, we will begin to be able to see the outlines of its thinking.

This week we began letting the second wave of beta users into the Twine invite-only beta. It’s been a very busy and exciting time for the Twine team. I’ll be providing more detailed stats on an ongoing basis in a few weeks once we have more data to analyze. For now, I will just provide some qualitative observations.

Twine is still in the early beta process, but already we are seeing a rapid increase in adoption and scale. We have only let in a few hundred more users to get the process started, but we will be letting more and more in every week as we go forward.

It has been really exciting to watch Twine grow. I find that I am increasingly glued to my Interest Feed watching the fascinating information that is flowing through from all the new members. There have been many new twines created around a wide and growing range of interests and large amount of content added. The recommendations are also quite interesting — I have already discovered a wide range of new people, twines and content that I didn’t know about.

As of this writing, I now have 157 social connections in Twine. My social network in Twine has doubled in size in a week and is rapidly approaching the size of my Facebook network. That’s pretty impressive considering this happened in a week (it took about half a year for my Facebook network to grow to that size).

We also had our first outside Twine client app, called "Entwine," written spontaneously by a beta user — it browses through the RDF data from various items in Twine. That was very cool and unexpected! It really got the team jazzed to see this happen.

Twine is now full of active discussions around interests, questions, ideas, suggestions, current events, technologies and products. I have been pleasantly surprised to see so much interaction among users develop so quickly. As we had hypothesized, discussions are turning out to be a very key feature.

We have received a lot of great feedback from beta users within Twine, as well as many suggestions for how to improve Twine, streamline the user experience, and integrate Twine with other applications and services. This is exactly what we had hoped for from our beta. The team is hard at work analyzing this and prioritizing our next development sprints in light of what we are learning from our users (we do minor releases every week and major ones every 3 weeks).

Most of the press reviews and user stories point to Twine being very exciting, useful and full of potential, which has been great to hear after so much work — they also universally agree that we still have room to improve the user experience and we need to work on making Twine easier to learn and use. That’s not unexpected — we opened the beta well before the app is finished in order to understand user priorities better. We are really focusing on usability and bug fixes for the next several sprints.  All this feedback has been incredibly valuable to the team. Keep it coming!

Another interesting observation. The quality of the users in Twine is distinctly impressive. It’s a very smart community of leading-edge thinkers, builders, and technology adopters. Kind of like having your own TED Conference, 24/7 around the world. We will be inviting in a wider range of users in later phases, once the app is further along. In the meantime it is really great to see so many of my colleagues in Twine, and to be making so many new contacts and friends here. For this initial phase this is exactly the audience we need — people who will really roll up their sleeves and help us make Twine into a great application.

Twine is also rapidly aggregating most of the leading minds in the worldwide Semantic Web development and research community into a social and collaborative interest network. It is great to have this global community of people interested in building and using the Semantic Web come together in Twine, an application that is built using Semantic Web technologies on the Radar Networks Semantic Web Applications platform. I look forward to beginning to share Twine with this worldwide community, and to collaborate with others to extend it and integrate it with other semantic apps and data sets. This is definitely our goal.

It’s been a great week. I haven’t slept much. I’m having too much fun in Twine!

I am pleased to announce that my company Radar Networks, has raised a $13M Series B investment round to grow our product, Twine. The investment comes from Velocity Interactive Group, DFJ, and Vulcan. Ross Levinsohn — the man who acquired and ran MySpace for Fox Interactive — will be joining our board. I’m very excited to be working with Ross and to have his help guiding Twine as it grows.

We are planning to use these funds to begin rolling Twine out to broader consumer markets as part of our multi-year plan to build Twine into the leading service for organizing, sharing and discovering information around interests. One of the key themes of Web 3.0 is to be help people make sense of the overwhelming amount of information and change in the online world, and at Twine, we think interests are going to play a key organizing role in that process.

Your interests comprise the portion of your information and relationships that are actually important enough that you want to keep track of them and share them with others. The question that Twine addresses is how to help individuals and groups more efficiently locate, manage and communicate around their interests in the onslaught of online information they have to cope with. The solution to information overload is not to organize all the information in the world (an impossible task), it is to help individuals and groups organize THEIR information (a much more feasible goal).

In March we are going to expand the Twine beta to begin letting more people in. Currently we have around 30,000 people on the wait-list and more coming in steadily. In March we will start letting all of these people in, gradually in waves of a few thousand at a time, and letting them invite their friends in. So to get into Twine you need to sign up on the list on the Twine site, or have a friend who is already in the service invite you in. I look forward to seeing you in Twine!

The last few months of closed beta have been very helpful in getting a lot of useful feedback and testing that has helped us improve the product in many ways. This next wave will be an exciting phase for Twine as we begin to really grow the service with more users. I am sure there will be a lot of great feedback and improvements that result from this.

However, even though we will be letting more people in soon, we are still very much in beta and will be for quite some time to come — There will still be things that aren’t finished, aren’t perfect, or aren’t there yet — so your patience will be appreciated as we continue to work on Twine over the coming year. We are letting people in to help us guide the service in the right direction, and to learn from our users. Today Twine is about 10% of what we have planned for it. First we have to get the basics right — then, in the coming year, we will really start to surface more of the power of the underlying semantic platform. We’re psyched to get all this built — what we have planned is truly exciting!

This is a video of me giving commentary on my "Understanding the Semantic Web" talk and how it relates to Twine, to a group of French business school students who made a visit to our office last month.

Here is the link to the video, if the embedded version below does not play.

Nova Spivack – Semantic Web Talk from Nicolas Cynober on Vimeo.

SciVestor is a new analyst firm. This is a short video in which I answer 3 questions about the Semantic Web and Radar Networks.

The Crunchies are done. At Radar Networks we are really honored to have our product, Twine.com, nominated as a finalist for Best Technology Innovation of 2007. It was very cool to see our Twine logo up there on stage next to Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and so many other incredible companies — especially considering we were the only company that was still in closed Beta in the awards (and yes, we are coming out of closed beta in March, so get ready!).

Meanwhile, one of things that made the Crunchies fun was that every company was asked to submit a video. Not all companies did, and not all of them were that creative. Some however were really funny, including ours. Here is a link to the "director’s cut" of the Twine Crunchies video for 2007. Enjoy!!!

ps. For those who don’t live in the USA… CoolWhip is a synthetic dessert topping we have here in the States. Imagine whipped cream, made out of some kind of industrial byproduct. It actually tastes pretty good, whatever it is. And it has almost no calories — possibly because there is nothing in that is actually digestible by humans. It’s really a wonderful technological innovation. Thus our choice.