Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

Today A-List blogger and emerging "media 2.0" mogul, Om Malik, dropped by our offices to get a confidential demo of what we are building. We’ve asked Om to keep a tight lid on what we showed him, but he may be releasing at least a few hints in the near future. Om was there in [...]

Today our product team met with Shel Isreal to show him the alpha version of what we are building here at Radar Networks and get his feedback. Shel had a lot of good insights. We showed him our full product and explained the vision, and gave him a tour of the new dimension of the [...]

This article from the Guardian raises the red flag about the vast amount of personal information that search engines are collecting, and the risks to individual privacy that entails. The article was really well written and made some good points. I’ve blogged about my thoughts about this issue in a previous post.

Here’s another suggestion for anyone starting a venture and/or seeking venture capital. Be careful about using funding agents or "finders" to help you locate and raise venture capital. These people will often make all kinds of promises about who they know, and what they can do for you, but in fact you usually don’t need [...]

This is just a note for other startups who are considering using technical recruiters. Be careful. At Radar Networks, we tried using what appeared to be a reputable technical recruiting firm to fill several positions. Like many tech recruiters, they required an up-front advance against their fees (which would come as a percentage of the [...]

NEWS RELEASE Radar Networks appoints Lew Tucker Ph.D. as Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer. SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — Aug. 28, 2006 — Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com) today announced the appointment of Lew Tucker, Ph.D. as its Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer. Radar Networks is building technology for enriching content that will catalyze the evolution of a [...]

I’m very pleased to announce that two distinguished Silicon Valley veterans, Lew Tucker Ph.D. and Mike Clary, have joined Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com). In addition, we have just launched a new version of the Radar Networks corporate website with these details and more. It’s been a great few weeks at Radar: As well as Lew and [...]

I haven’t blogged very much about my stealth startup, Radar Networks, yet. At the most, I’ve made a few cryptic posts and announcements in the past, but we’ve been keeping things pretty quiet. That’s been a conscious  decision because we have been working intensively on R&D  and we just weren’t ready to say much yet. [...]

My company, Radar Networks, will be announcing some news next week. Stay tuned. We’ll be issuing some press releases along with several new sections on our Website, and more clues about what we are building…

The recent negative hype about the lack of privacy in search results got me thinking about the needs of online services versus those of individuals. Is there a way to satisfy both constraints? AOL’s accidental data release was one thing that worried me. Google’s "personal search" feature, where the log of all your searches is [...]

Shel Israel and I just finished up working together for 10 days. I needed Shel’s perspective on what we are working on at Radar Networks. Shel lived up to his reviews as a brilliant thinker on strategic messaging, branding and positioning. So what are the 15 people at Radar Networks working on? It’s still a [...]

Hey everyone — the next SFWIN (San Francisco Web Innovators Networks)  event will be held at the offices of Atlassian (the makers of JIRA) in San Francisco at 375  Alabama Street, Suite 400 Advance Tickets -  $15 Door Tickets – $20 For more info check out http://www.sfwin.org Also … some goodies — At the event we [...]

My venture, Radar Networks, has received a Series A round investment from an excellent VC. We’re very pleased. This is the only announcement we’ll be making about this — we are in deep stealth, working on something big…

Hi everyone, the next SF Web Innovators Network (SFWIN) meetup is happening at the SF office of Adobe (formerly Macromedia), on April 13, 2006. We had over 140 people at our last event and a number of companies did demos as well. If you are in the SF Bay Area and in the Internet or [...]

My father, Mayer Spivack, has written an interesting piece on managing thinking styles in organizations. He points out the difference between the thinking styles in early and later stage companies, and the challenge of managing and integrating these two aspects of the organization’s cognitive process. I think that the syncretic-associative mode (curious, inventive, exploratory, enthusiastic, [...]

In an amazing scientific breakthrough, researchers have just discovered that sex before public speaking calms nerves. Phew, I’m glad they settled that burning question!

If you’re in the Web business and you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, come to the 3rd SF Web Innovators Meetup. It’s like TechCrunch, but in San Francisco. We do it every month. Last month 40 people from an array of Bay Area startups and established Internet companies showed up for a la carte [...]

My grandfather, Peter F. Drucker, passed away this morning. The news has just started to get out, but already there have been many write-ups of his life and death; but the best ones so far are by Bloomberg (summarizes his life story) and Business Week. For me it is a strange feeling to adjust to [...]

This article just came in (via Kurzweil) A little-known start-up has demonstrated wireless broadband 1000 times more efficient than WiMax – and claims the technique could also make wireless LANs that will run for years on watch batteries. xG Technology, based in Sarasota, Florida, used a transmitter not unlike a cordless phone base station, operating [...]

A truly horrible innovation. Someone has figured out how to patent storylines, for example unique plots and they have a published (but not issued) patent. Hopefully writers everywhere will blow this out of the water.

Nivi has a good post on defining the different types of Web 2.0 customers. He says: You can break down Web 2.0 customers into a fuzzy hierarchy: Creators who create an “original” work. Examples include a reporter at the New York Times, a podcaster, a blogger who is writing original content, or the author of [...]

Hey if you are in SF and developing a Web 2.0 business or product, come hang out at the first monthly Web 2.0 entrepreneurs gathering tonight! Read more here.

This study is interesting — it seems to miss the point that many blogs are loaded with content that is actually USEFUL for work — for example in-house blogs, blogs from competitors, blogs from industry pundits, blogs from software developers, blogs from users and customers … and the list goes on. Simply reading blogs cannot [...]

From Boing Boing today: Xeni Jardin: A report in this week’s issue of Science says 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States: The study (…) is the first time that a detailed map has been created to match patents to specific physical locations on the human genome. Researchers can patent [...]

Fred Wilson has an intersting post about how to keep founders engaged in the companies they started after they step out of CEO roles. He says: I’d like to find a formula (like the one Yahoo! has found) and bottle it.  Because I believe companies that can keep their founders engaged and motivated are so [...]

I’ve been at the Web 2.0 Conference here in San Francisco this week. And it’s been incredible. Not only is it completely mobbed, but the energy is just intense. There are so many new companies, so much VC interest, and it really feels like the Web industry has suddenly woken up from a 10-year slumber. [...]

Great news! Radar Networks, the venture I’ve been building, has received its first round of outside funding from Vulcan Capital. We are heavily in stealth mode.

D-Wave, a Canadian startup, claims it will have a working quantum computer within 3 years. Unlike other quantum computer designs which are based on the principle of quantum entanglement, the D-Wave design is based on quantum tunneling. While this makes it less powerful, it is still ideal for complex calculations such as the "traveling salesman [...]

I read the an article today about how Brazil is gradually losing the fight to save the Amazon. The worlds’ rainforests are a global resource — not only are they directly important to the air we all breathe, they also harbor a huge, still untapped, reservoir of species diversity which could be of profound importance [...]

Here is an interesting article about an analysis of SMS messaging versus e-mail messaging on mobile networks. The conclusion is that e-mail messaging is more efficient for mobile consumers because email networks are scale-free networks. The article predicts that services based on scale-free topologies will ultimately win out over less optimal alternatives. Thanks to Murli.