Today I’m happy to announce the launch of StreamGlider, a new tablet app (initially on iPad) that provides the first live streaming dashboard for keeping up with your interests.

TechCrunch just broke the story.

The inspiration for StreamGlider was a product that launched in the early 1990′s called Pointcast. Pointcast streamed news, entertainment, ads and other updates to screensavers. Pointcast was great, and we, (myself and my co-founders, Bill McDaniel and John Breslin) wondered whether we could evolve that concept and update it for the tablet and mobile era.

We designed StreamGlider to be the ultimate live streaming newsreader. It does what you have come to expect, plus a lot more. And it does it live – it streams live updates to your tablet.

It also offers a lot of new functionality that supports new ways of using a reader.

• StreamGlider pulls live updates from content sources on the Web (RSS feeds, Google Reader, and Web API’s like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc.) onto mobile devices, and displays them in a variety of formats.
• It can function as a live digital picture frame for the Web, showing news articles, photos from friends, videos, etc. as full-screen slides that scroll past.
• It can also show streams as a live interactive filmstrips that function like tickers.
• And it can show streams in an interactive magazine format that is similar to a newspaper layout.
• You can also play and watch videos in StreamGlider.

Powerful Features

StreamGlider is fully gesture controlled – everything can be controlled by swiping, pinching, pointing, tapping, etc. You can easily customize the streams you want.

You can also create mashups of streams that pull from many different sources on a theme – for example you can pull from different news sources about sports, or different photo and video sources about a topic.

In addition to all this, you can make very personalized streams that pull from your social media accounts, and filtered streams that search for particular topics in content sources.

StreamGlider is also social. You can share individual items, or even entire streams of items, with your friends.

We designed StreamGlider to be brandable. Partners and customers can create their own private-labelled versions of StreamGlider, with their brand and their content, for their audiences. Brands can sell it or give it away free and run ads in it if they want. (Contact StreamGlider, if you’re interested in doing this for your brand).

This frees publishers, brands, and enterprises to create their own powerful readers for their audiences, with their brand, instead of having to live inside of other apps like FlipBoard or Pulse. They can have their own icon on the desktop and keep their direct relationship with their customers.

There are many use-cases for this – for example, you might want to distribute your own branded StreamGlider for your publication, or for a consumer product, or to your fans, or for a big event, or to your customers or employees. There are many reasons to do this – and you don’t have to be a software company to do it – you can almost instantly get your own branded StreamGlider.

We also designed StreamGlider to be open-source in the future. More news on that later. We hope we can become the Mozilla of newsreaders.

What’s next?

The team behind StreamGlider has a long history of making smart, semantic apps. You can expect that in future versions of StreamGlider, the app will begin to get smarter, more personalized, and even more social. This is just the beginning of our roadmap.

We will also be adding in support for more types of streams. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, you should check it out. Download it to your iPad and see what I’m talking about.

After my former project, Twine.com, was sold, I began to turn my attention to the Next Big Challenge: How to make sense of the growing real-time Web, or what many call, “the Stream.”

I could see the writing on the wall, and it was less than 140 characters: Social media’s own success was going to be its biggest challenge. The Stream was going to soon become unusable.

In the early days of the Stream, it was actually possible to keep up with your community on Twitter and Facebook effectively. Not anymore. There are just too many people messaging too often. The chances of even seeing a message before it scrolls into history are getting lower every day.

Today, the Stream is growing exponentially. Twitter famously grew by 3x in the last year and sends out more than 250 million Tweets per day. Facebook sends billions of public and private messages per day. And this is just the tip of the iceberg — or the deluge, as it were.

There are so many new and growing sources of messages in the Stream: Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Youtube, RSS feeds, and more are coming. And that’s just the consumer side of the Stream – there’s a whole other side to the Stream: Chatter, Yammer, Socialcast, Jive, and many other enterprise streams are also growing rapidly.

And on top of this there is a whole new deluge of machine and app-generated data that is just starting to join the stream, and may eventually dwarf human-generated data.

At the same time as all these new networks are popping up to enable messaging in the Stream, the barrier to creating and sharing messages has also never been lower. I call this The Sharepocalypse.

It’s never been easier to share — People are sharing more kinds of information, more often, with more people, than ever before. And it’s requiring less thought too — because the messages themselves are so short. This is resulting in a collective overshare of unimagined proportions.

With email, the messages were usually long and required some effort, so people sent relatively few emails per day. And at least with email there were some basic social rules about what you could send to everyone without being a spammer.

Not anymore. In the age of the Stream it’s quite normal to post out what you had for lunch, or some cool product you are looking at in a store window, with a photo, to the entire world. That would have been unthinkable in the email era. In the age of the Stream, it’s not even an afterthought. The Sharepocalypse is here, in spades.

The result of all this adoption and growth of the Stream is a new kind of information overload, stream overload.

Stream Overload is worse than email overload, because it includes email overload.

Email, in my opinion was “Stream 1.0.” Social media (RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) were “Stream 2.0.” And now we’re entering “Stream 3.0″ – when everything – all information, all applications, everyone, even things – become part of the Stream.

(Yes I know, version numbers are so Web 3.0, but it’s helpful to use them as handles for the discussion. Stream 3.0 is indeed a different era from the early days of the Stream.)

We’re already seeing the signs of stream overload — but this is just a preview of what’s to come as Stream 3.0 comes to maturity. The growth of the Stream is still only just beginning. Most of the planet isn’t using it yet. And most people don’t realize how integral it’s going to be in their lives in coming years.

If the Web is the planet’s brain, the Stream is its mind – it’s the living, breathing, thinking, learning, aware, acting part. And we’re all going to be part of it 24/7, whether we like it or not. So it better be good, it better be smart, it better be useable, or we’re all going to be gridlocked and buried in messages we don’t want.

And this is the Next Big Problem: The Stream is going to become both more important, and more noisy at the same time. This is a classic crisis. Either something must be done to reduce the noise, or it’s not going to be useable. And this will lead to problems, because it’s important that it actually is usable.

What happens if the Stream really breaks down under its own weight?

If the signal-to-noise problem isn’t solved, and people can’t keep up with the Stream, they’re going to give up. They’re going to stop paying attention. They’re going to stop trying to keep up. They will never be able to scroll down enough. They won’t even login to sites like Twitter and Facebook if they are too overloaded.

And if nobody is there listening, then there won’t be much point in posting news and updates to the Stream either. People will stop posting too.

And without the people there, marketers won’t post either – so the advertising money will go away. And even in the social enterprise, if streams for teams get too noisy, they will also stop being used and people will move to some new solution.

And without the people there, the Stream will become an automaton. All that will be left is machines posting to machines.

Unless something is done to solve it, of course.

And something IS being done, it turns out. We’re launching Bottlenose tonight. To read more about the history of the project, read Bottlenose has Launched!

Notes

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

Check out the what the press is saying about Bottlenose:

Bottlenose Intelligent Social Dashboard Launches Private Beta  — ReadWriteWeb

Bottlenose is a Game Changer for Social Media Consumption — Mashable

Bottlenose is a Social Media Dashboard That Makes Sense of the Stream – Venturebeat

Can This Startup Eliminate Social Media Overload? — Inc.

The Day of the Dolphin: Swim in the Personalized Stream With Bottlenose — SemanticWeb

Bottlenose Launch – A Smarter Way to Skim the Stream – SiliconAngle

Bottlenose is a Web-Based Twitter Client for Power Users — AllThingsD

Managing the Sharepocalypse — AdWeek

Can Bottlenose Help Prevent the Social Sharepocalypse? – GigaOm

Social Overload? Bottlenose Promises Intelligent Filtering — Information Week

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

Several years ago my friend Gil Elbaz (CEO of Factual; forefather of Google AdWords) approached me with an ambitious vision – he wanted to create an open not-for-profit crawl of the Web to ensure that everyone would have equal access to a Web-scale search index to build on and experiment with.

Search giants like Google and Microsoft were not likely to provide open access to their search indices because they couldn’t risk giving their crown jewels to potential competitors, and furthermore they were bound by the constraints of for-profit business models.

Gil felt that in the future it would be an important service to provide a truly open Web-scale search index that was not controlled by a for-profit company and was not bound by profit motives. This index would make it possible for startups to innovate in search, and for researchers and students to explore Web Science at scale, and furthermore it would level the playing field in search and distribute the index, preventing any one company from monopolizing the index of humanity’s knowledge.

As a longtime advocate of the open Web, I was excited by the vision Gil shared with me, and agreed to join the board of directors of what became The Common Crawl Foundation, along with Carl Malamud. Gil and lead engineer, Ahad Rana, then went to work actually building the thing. This was no small undertaking and required quite a bit of innovation and ingenuity. You can read about the cloud based solution that was developed here.

Several years later, after a lot of work, it’s starting to be ready for Prime Time, and so we’re happy to announce the Web’s first truly open, non-profit, 5 billion page search index!

With the recent addition of our director, Lisa Green, from Creative Commons, Common Crawl is now beginning a new phase in its rollout, and a new phase for the open Web. You can read our inaugural blog post announcing the project here.

We hope you will come in and take a look around, and we look forward to seeing what you dream up and build with this data set.

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.

The team at Icosystem invited me to try out their new Infomous cloud widget. You can see it on the top of the right column of this blog. It visualizes the concept graph in my blog posts. It has some cool features – click on any topic and explore the related posts. If you sign up at their site, you can get your own widgets like this. They work on your blog, or for your tweets, or any Google search. They have a very nice widget editor where you can configure everything on their site and see the changes immediately in your widget. Thanks guys! I like it.

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.

I was interviewed in a number of video segments for a project called The Future of Facebook, part of the Open Foresight initiative by Venessa Miemis and Alvis Brigis. One of the videos was just on CNN. You can see my other segments on my Videos page.

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.

10 Survival Tips for Entrepreneurs

Following up on my article about my own experience dealing with a spurious shareholder lawsuit, I put together this list of essential survival tips for entrepreneurs from what I’ve learned. I hope it’s helpful to you.

#1. If you are afraid to fail, don’t be an entrepreneur. Tech ventures often don’t make it, plain and simple.  It’s a risk that we all accept when we start companies or invest in them.  This is such a well-known fact that VC’s assume only a minority of their investments will be successful, and will hopefully be profitable enough to cover their losses. It’s almost certain that if you are involved with enough ventures, you will experience some failures. You have to realize that when you start a venture the odds are against you every step of the way. But don’t let that scare you and never give up.

#2. Lawsuits are more common than you might think. But they’re not the end of the world. If you’ve been around the Valley long enough, you know they’re a dime a dozen. Even if you do well and chalk up a big win, there’s a chance you’ll get sued (think of all the successful entrepreneurs who are being or have been sued by jealous people from the past once they finally made it).  And of course, if your company goes under or sells for a low price, there’s an even greater chance you’ll get sued. It’s just a risk we all take when we start companies. But many lawsuits are questionable and never even make it to court. Others settle. In the end, it’s usually not the end of the world.

#3. You are not alone. I had never been involved in a lawsuit personally and it really shocked me when I was named in a spurious lawsuit. But later people started coming out of the woodwork and sharing their stories.  I found out that many of my colleagues — other entrepreneurs and VCs — have had similar experiences, even though it was not public knowledge. Investor and shareholder lawsuits are rarely talked about because nobody likes to air dirty laundry, but it happens more than you probably realize. If you’ve been sued as a result of a venture deal or acquisition, you are not alone. In fact anyone successful or important becomes a target for lawsuits and it’s not uncommon to be sued. It’s just an unfortunate cost of doing business.

#4. Allegations in legal proceedings should be viewed with skepticism. What really matters is the truth that eventually comes out in court. Our society has become extremely litigious, and a person can allege anything in a lawsuit, regardless of whether or not it turns out to be true. The allegations of a lawsuit can be complete fiction or can be  deliberately overreaching – and it’s up the courts to determine the truth. The rise of spurious and frivolous lawsuits is bad for the economy (but great for lawyers!), yet unless there is legal reform that isn’t going to change. So maintain a healthy skepticism when reading any lawsuit.

#5. Turn your lemons into lemonade. It’s easy to get depressed when you’ve been sued unfairly. But as my wife advised me, “Nova, You can’t expect to take risks or try to do anything significant in the world without having some setbacks. What’s important is not that you fall down, it’s how you pick yourself back up.”  Wise advice.  So I’m staying positive and focusing on moving forward in my life with a number of terrific ventures, great investors and inspiring entrepreneurs. I’m busy working on a new model to help young innovators and entrepreneurs realize their dreams, and some of this model is based on what I’ve learned from my experiences.

#6. Losses can be your biggest teachers. From the loss of my startup I learned a lesson in humility; in how to take my lumps and move on. Losing the company was like losing a child.  It was that hard. And as an intensely loyal person, I hated feeling that I had disappointed people and failed to save the company. I’ll never totally get over it. But I can at least learn from it, and hopefully you can too. Ironically that loss has helped me refocus my life and career on new directions and new growth. Sometimes losses can be the best learning experiences of all.

#7. Be extremely careful about who you accept investment from. Just because an individual approaches you out of the blue and wants to invest in your company doesn’t mean you should accept his or her offer. Make sure they are experienced partners who are aligned with the goals of the business.  And make sure that you draft contractual agreements carefully and unambiguously to minimize the risk of problems down the road.

#8. Get D&O insurance (Directors & Officers insurance). Get as much as you can afford.  This will help to protect you in the event you are faced with the unfortunate prospect of defending a lawsuit in the future. I really don’t think any venture or board of directors should be without this protection in this high-risk economic climate.

#9. Plan for economic downturns. Expect that the economy will continue to remain volatile so make sure to keep your burn rate even lower than what you think is necessary. You’ll be glad you did when the next downturn happens and you need extra runway. Even though we are currently experiencing a new tech venture bubble, it probably won’t last and before we know it we’ll be in another downturn where venture funding will be hard to raise again. Plan your capital strategy accordingly.

#10. Start M&A way before you need to. If you think you may want to get your venture acquired in the next 18 months, start early, while you have plenty of runway, so that you have good negotiating leverage with buyers. It’s much easier to sell when you don’t need to. Don’t let yourself get pushed against the wall and low-balled down the road.

Over the past few years, the recession has negatively impacted both individuals and businesses and, as an unfortunate side effect, it has spawned numerous lawsuits of questionable merit.

Unfortunately one of them has come to my doorstep.

It is never fun to be forced to deal with such situations, but I decided it would be best to tell you all about it so that you hear it from the horse’s mouth, and so that other entrepreneurs may learn from my experience.

It has been frustrating to have this lawsuit hanging over my head, to have to defend my reputation, and to have to spend so much time on this. And it has been difficult to go through all this, without being able to say anything more detailed about all the evidence I have that demonstrates that there is no merit to the case.

But my lawyers have told me that even the most frivolous lawsuits should be fought in court, not through the media. So up until now I have avoided making any blog posts on this subject.

However, with approval of my lawyers, I am going to comment here once, to set the record straight on this.

The lawsuit in question comes from a plaintiff who was a shareholder in my old company Radar Networks, the makers of Twine.com.

The plaintiff is also the founder of a Bible Website which you can look at here, and which is highly relevant to this lawsuit.

In a nutshell, this one shareholder, out of many that we had, has filed a lawsuit against many of the other shareholders, directors and our acquirer, to try to forcefully regain part of their investment.

This kind of lawsuit is unfortunately not that uncommon when companies are sold, or shut down; It’s just not talked about that much.

The allegations in the lawsuit are simply not in synch with reality.

What’s important to know is that anyone can claim anything they want in a lawsuit, no matter how far from reality it is. All that really matters in the end is the truth that comes out in court.

Regarding the truth, I and my attorneys and everyone who is familiar with this case are confident that the lawsuit is without merit.

Radar Networks, myself, its Board of Directors, and our team, conducted its business properly and with careful oversight. And most importantly, our decisions regarding investment rounds and the eventual sale of the company were made under the extremely professional and diligent advice of several of the most respected Silicon Valley law firms. We were very careful to make sure no investor was treated improperly or unfairly and we acted on advice of counsel in all such matters.

So that’s basically it: The case has no merit. It’s that simple.

But if you are really interested to learn more, feel free to read the rest of this article where I’ll delve into some more details about our funding, the economy, and how the company was eventually sold, in the interest of transparency.

Or, if you’ve read enough, and don’t need more detail, you can just skip to part II where I share some learnings I’ve gleaned from this painful experience — hopefully they will help protect you or other entrepreneurs from going through similar tribulations: 10 Survival Tips for Entrepreneurs That Nobody Likes to Talk About.

Twine

Radar Networks was a labor of love for those involved in it. You can see the history and future of our products here — In a nutshell we were working on semantic social search, the “Holy Grail.” It was a huge technical challenge with great potential.

But was not an easy undertaking – we were going after an ambitious goal, using bleeding-edge new technologies, in a very competitive space. And then right when we were raising our last round of capital, the worst economic recession of any of our lifetimes hit.

Despite all this, all of us who worked on the venture were truly passionate about adding more structure to the Web, and making the Web smarter, based on the W3C’s vision for an open-standards based Semantic Web.

But in the end, we had to sell the company to Evri, a company owned by one of our investors, Paul Allen. It wasn’t the outcome we had hope for, but during the peak of the recession, it wasn’t the worst possible outcome either.

I wrote a postmortem about the company here when we sold the company.

Unfortunately, some ventures just don’t make it. In fact, statistics say that most ventures don’t make it, but we had hoped to be the exception not the rule. But the possibility of failure is the risk all of us took together, a risk that was disclosed and well-understood by all of our investors.

And you can’t go after big ideas and opportunities without taking risks. That’s not to say that failing was easy – it totally sucked – and we worked extremely hard to succeed. But sometimes even your best efforts just aren’t enough.

Nobody was happy with the outcome. Nobody made money from it. It was not what we had hoped and worked for, for so many years.

Selling the Company

Because this is a lawsuit, I’m not allowed to go into much detail, and much of the actual evidence that proves there is no merit to the case has to wait until it can come out in court.

But here is some background that can provide some insight on the context about the situation that Radar Networks was in when we decided to sell to Evri. I am providing this information in order to set the record straight and clarify issues that are raised in the allegations.

Typically search ventures are quite capital intensive. Twine.com’s Semantic Web approach required extensive R&D and infrastructure investment.

Fortunately we had top-tier investors including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Fuse Capital, plus a truly world-class engineering and business team. And everyone believed in the vision and opportunity. In addition, all investors – including angel investors – were informed of the risks of this investment and the both the challenges and potential of the road ahead.

We raised significant funding (in the $20mm+ range) over around 4 years, which included a combination of venture capital and venture debt.

But our funding was still less than the competition. For some comparables: Powersoft raised at least $30mm or more; Metaweb raised around $60mm or more.

It just isn’t cheap to build major semantic search infrastructure like this. So by comparison, Radar Networks raised less and spent less than other comparable companies. From this perspective, if our funding was unusual it was because it was lower than the norm for our category. Despite that, we accomplished a lot.

The first version of Twine attracted a few million monthly visitors at its peak, with around 300,000 registered users, and 25,000 “twines” about particular interests, comprising up to 5 million pieces of user-contributed content. This happened in a relatively short time frame.

We got most of our traffic organically, and via our passionate user base, and via word of mouth buzz. We did limited marketing and advertising, but mainly we focused on word of mouth, viral sharing and invitations, and PR to generate buzz. In addition the large amount of topical user-generated content we published was indexed extensively by search engines, and generated visits.

When the recession hit, investors panicked and pulled back from investing in early-stage tech ventures such as ours. This threw a wrench in our plans to raise our C round of funding which we needed in order to execute our strategy.

So, like many companies in that situation at the time, we took painful and drastic evasive action to reduce our burn and extend our runway to try to outlast the downturn: Everyone took pay cuts, we slashed budgets repeatedly, did rounds of layoffs, and cut business functions, features and goals, to reduce costs and try to last out the downturn.

Around the same time, as luck would have it, Google de-indexed us without warning and our traffic tanked. We still don’t know why they did that – perhaps they viewed us as a competitive search engine, or perhaps their algorithm changed – we don’t know. But when it happened it had a large impact on our site’s traffic.

We tried to petition to get re-indexed with limited success, but never got back to the level of index presence we had had before. This took place during the time frame when we had also drastically reduced our team and budget, and so all things considered, we eventually decided to wait until we could raise more funding, rebuild our team, and deploy the next version of Twine.

On a parallel track to reducing our burn, we were looking for more capital. As well as continuing to seek venture or strategic funding, we explored the potential for selling the company, which we felt was the fiscally responsible thing to do under the circumstances. We hadn’t planned or wanted to sell the company so soon, but we had to explore all options available to us.

Our assets included an award-winning brand, a world-class team, a uniquely powerful platform and product, a passionate user community, a large amount of semantically marked up content contributed by users, plus a a large and important portfolio of semantic web patents and patent applications.

We engaged in many months of M&A discussions with multiple industry-leading companies, and received strong interest, went through due-diligence, and got several offers, but we were running out of cash. When you have little or no cash runway acquirers view it as a firesale and so the offers we got were low-ball offers.

In a last ditch attempt to extend our runway, and improve our chances of getting a better deal done, I personally bridged the company along with several other white knights among our investors. But it just wasn’t enough to buy us the time we needed. We simply had no runway and thus no negotiating leverage.

And so due to terms and deadlines of various offers we had in hand, it was our fiduciary duty to sell the company to Evri, a company owned by one of our investors, Paul Allen. This deal resulted in the lowest risk, best outcome for our stakeholders compared to the other options we had.

But as a result of the terms of the sale, myself and the other Radar Networks shareholders and investors got washed out. We did not break even or profit from the sale in any way, by any standard, in any dimension. So who benefited? The lawsuit alleges that Radar and our Board members and I somehow benefited from the sale to Evri, but that is just not true and it’s easy to prove that.

Still, while this was not the kind of exit that I or my investors had hoped for, and we didn’t benefit from it personally or collectively, in those days, at the peak of the recession when companies were folding left and right, it was not as bad as it could have been.

We at least avoided a shutdown, were able to return some money to creditors. As a result of the deal, the technology would go forward and we believed our users and their data would transition smoothly. And many of our staff got jobs at Evri, which was important. As for myself, while I advised Evri temporarily to help with the transition, I have not had any involvement with them since.

That’s the end of the story. Some ventures don’t work out and when that happens nobody is happy.

One More Detail

Regarding the lawsuit brought by one of our investors. The situation is slightly more complex than a typical shareholder lawsuit, because in this case, the investor in question also became a client of the company in a later phase of our relationship, when we agreed to work together on a joint data visualization initiative, in concert with a second investment from her.

For this project, we worked closely with her, in partnership with several highly-regarded design firms that she approved, and we delivered excellent software that met the agreed specifications. Unfortunately this investor/client is not happy with that project.

I’m truly saddened that this investor/client has decided to go down the path of filing this highly questionable lawsuit. It cannot result in anything but waste in the end.

But, in light of all the facts and evidence we have, I and all our respective legal counsels, are confident that we will prevail on the merits, if we have to go to court. The allegations in the lawsuit just don’t hold water.

What I’ve Learned

It was an indescribably painful process to lose my company – a company I spent nearly a decade pouring blood, sweat and tears into. It felt like losing a child. And as an intensely loyal person, it was also especially difficult to feel like I had disappointed people I truly cared about and wanted to deliver value to.

But while failures are painful, they can also be some of the most fruitful learning experiences. And I would like to share some of that with you.

First of all, one of the many things I learned (the hard way), is that even doing everything correctly and ethically, with the best intentions, great investors, a great team, and with the best legal counsel, isn’t always enough to keep yourself from getting sued by a disgruntled shareholder.

Anyone can file a lawsuit, and allege anything they want in it, regardless of what turns out to be true or not. And it happens all the time. The only thing that is important is the truth that comes out in court.

But that’s just the beginning. I’ve learned about humility, about failure, about ways things can go wrong, and about what it’s like to go through selling at a loss, and a lawsuit. None of these things were really lessons I wanted to learn. But they’re probably important lessons nonetheless.

It was a major blow when I first found out about the lawsuit. I have to admit I felt very depressed about it; the allegations were upsetting because I so completely disagree with them, they are so far from the truth, and so personally hurtful.

But at least, from what I’ve learned from this so far, I’ve put together a few tips for entrepreneurs that could help them protect themselves from this kind of situation: 10 Survival Tips for Entrepreneurs That Nobody Likes to Talk About.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for all of your support, both in the past, and now. I really appreciate it. Especially as I’m going through this challenging and experience.

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.

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.

Yesterday’s acquisition by CBS of Clicker is great news for one of my ventures, Live Matrix. It shows that what Live Matrix is doing is becoming even more valuable. But that’s just the beginning of the story — Live Matrix is fundamentally different from Clicker. It targets a different, and possibly larger, opportunity.

Clicker bills itself as the next-generation of TV Guide and the majority of Clicker’s content is mostly pre-recorded rerun videos of TV shows as well as other online professional video. The team at Clicker has, to their credit, done a phenomenal job of making a nice user interface to, and database of, online TV content.

However Live Matrix is not really competing directly with Clicker. Unlike Clicker, Live Matrix focuses exclusively on first-run scheduled and live events that take place online, and many of these events are not available on TV, or on Clicker, at all.

Live Matrix includes many more types of content than just video. Live Matrix’s index includes millions of scheduled online events, and much of this index is not aggregated or easily found anywhere else, including in Clicker.

Live Matrix makes it easier to provide and find live scheduled online events of all kinds with a suite of tools for event providers and event consumers. It helps event providers list their events and schedules, and promote them to interested consumers around the Web. It helps event consumers find scheduled online events of interest, and get reminders when events are about to start.

Live Matrix is not limited to just online TV events, it includes all types of online scheduled events. This is a major difference between Live Matrix and Clicker. Live Matrix has content that nobody else has, about events that are scheduled to happen on the most important medium today, the Web.

Why did Live Matrix make this choice? Because we want to be able to show consumers all kinds of events around an interest. If they are interested in the Olympics, we want them to be able to find scheduled video, audio, chats, and online sales that relate to that interest. We want to be able to tie together all the different kinds of events that are happening online around a topic. This provides consumers with the most value around their interests.

Live Matrix includes:

• Live scheduled video streams of concerts, sports events, news, and conferences
• Scheduled audio streams
• Scheduled live chats with celebrities
• Time-limited online shopping sales and deals
• Scheduled online game tournaments
• Live online product announcements and press conferences
• Scheduled online release of pre-recorded content such as video “Webisodes” of online entertainment series, and the scheduled online releases of music videos, new albums and songs to buy, or reruns of popular TV shows.

Where Clicker and Live Matrix overlap slightly is around live video and audio events. But there are many other types of events, such as scheduled live chats and scheduled online sales, that Live Matrix covers but Clicker does not include because they are not “television.”

The Scheduled Web

Live Matrix is the first guide what I call “the Scheduled Web” — a Web of scheduled events that take place in time (for more on this trend, see: The Birth of the Scheduled Web). Of course there will always be a lot of events that happen online in a non-scheduled, spur-of-the-moment or on-demand manner, but there are and will also always be a significant number of scheduled events as well. In fact, as the technologies for streaming live content on the Web improve and bandwidth increases, the percentage of events that are live and scheduled is likely to increase in coming years. This is because the world itself is scheduled — certain types events happen in time, they have start and end times — things like sales, or live sports events, live entertainment events, shopping events, news and corporate events.

Live online events are not a temporary phenomena. In fact, as more people are connected online more of the time (thanks to mobile Internet devices), there is an even bigger potential audience for live online events than there is for live TV. Furthermore, there will always be certain kinds of content that is perishable, scheduled and live – and this is true on the Web as well. Live Matrix is the only source for finding this content right now. It’s some of the most highly-valued content on the Web.

The Clicker acquisition, along with the December 2010 acquisition of CastTV by Tribune, is evidence that media companies are starting to think about this category.  The current focus of media companies on the online TV space is going to naturally progress to the broader scope of live content online as there will be vastly greater numbers of scheduled live events happening online. As part of CBS, Clicker will undoubtedly focus even more on TV, leaving Live Matrix in an even more uncontested unique role as the best and only place to find out what’s happening now and what’s upcoming all around the Web.

Live Matrix: A Search Engine for Finding Perishable Content

One way of thinking about what Live Matrix does is that it’s a search engine for finding perishable online content, while that content is most valuable. It is also an alerting system that helps remind people to come view perishable content, while the content is still available.

In Live Matrix, not only can you find the best and most relevant upcoming perishable content (such as scheduled online events), but you can also RSVP to get reminded by email when it becomes available. This can be an advantage in some cases where knowing something first has value (you can trade on it, you can tweet it, you can make decisions based on it, you can buy it while it’s available, you can be the first to comment or ask a question, etc.).

On the other hand, Clicker focuses on less perishable content, like pre-recorded TV reruns. This content is also perishable, but not as perishable as live first-run content.

Most scheduled live online events are highly perishable — they decrease in value rapidly after they start and finish, so it matters to watch or participate in them as close to when they actually start as possible. For some live online events, it is not even possible to participate in them after they are finished (for example, you can’t participate in an online sale after it ends, you can’t play in a scheduled online game tournament once it’s over, you can’t participate and ask questions or make comments in a live chat with a celebrity after the fact.)

There are other cases where the content can be consumed later, but the experience isn’t as valuable – it is perishable because the experience is no longer as fresh or interactive.  For example, it’s just not the same to watch a sports event after the game is over and you already know who won, it’s not the same to watch a major cultural event like the dropping of the Ball on New Year’s eve in New York City after New Years has passed, it’s not the same to watch a live newscast or even sports highlights of a game days after it was first broadcast, it’s not the same to watch the unveiling a hot new product days after it’s already become old news. Not only is the information “old news” after the fact, but one also misses out on being part of the experience of sharing the event with other people – interacting with them, experiencing the suspense or drama of the event live, and being a part of the zeitgeist.

It’s important to note that perishable content can be live or pre-recorded, but in either case it is content that loses value quickly with time. It is content where there is great value to content providers and consumers in finding out about it before it becomes irrelevant or is no longer available, before it perishes.

Why Live Matrix is Needed

Live Matrix is sitting in the middle of this ecosystem, connecting the purveyors of perishable content with consumers who want it.

Perishable content has a shorter shelf-life and so providers of perishable content need to get as many eyeballs to the content as fast as they can before its value decreases. Live Matrix is an essential ally in this process, because it provides a way to inform the audience of the availability of perishable content during the time window when it is relevant and most valuable, and it actually reminds those who are interested to come while they can.

Similarly, consumers who are interested in various perishable content (such as live online sports coverage, or live online celebrity chats, or scheduled online auctions or special deals) need to find out about that content as early as they can, so they don’t miss it. They want the content before it perishes. Live Matrix helps consumers find and consume perishable content while it is available and most-valuable to them.

What’s Next for Live Matrix?

Live Matrix has been working hard on a number of new features that are going to make the site even more useful to consumers and content providers. These are launching soon. They include:

• Personalized daily reminders via email for recommended and upcoming events of interest
• A next generation widget that enables sites to use Live Matrix to provide schedules of their own events on their own sites, and to generate new ad inventory and content by including Live Matrix event schedules for topics like sports, entertainment, etc.
• A major site redesign that streamlines registration and provides a much better look and feel

As a co-founder, board member, and investor in Live Matrix – I’m optimistic about the opportunity. Live Matrix is such a unique property, and it fills such a necessary role in the ecoystem. The Clicker deal shows that the industry is starting to notice this space and as the most unique property in the space, this is good for Live Matrix.

My father, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, in the Kaplan Family House, a beautiful hospice outside of Boston. He passed away, at the young age of 74, after a difficult year and a half battle with colon cancer. During his illness he never lost his spirit of childlike curiosity, enormous compassion, and his dedication to innovation.

His passing was at times difficult, but ultimately peaceful, and took place over five days, during which he was surrounded by love from close family and friends. His presence and spirit, and the intense experiences we all shared over those last days with him are unforgettable: the most incredible experience of love and spiritual connection I have ever had. He was as great in death as he was in life.

This is the story of my relationship with my father: the things I appreciated most about him, what I learned from him, and what he gave to me at the end of his life. By sharing this, I hope to amplify and share his gifts with others.

My father was a truly unique person, and a Boston legend. He was multi-talented and worked in many fields at once, mastering them all (you can read more about his actual work here). He had a vast intelligence, a palpably original approach, and an even greater heart. He was a true Renaissance Man, a great intellectual and artist, and often an unintentionally entertaining and eccentric genius. He had a profound influence on all who knew him well.

As a father, he was a large, warm, loving, fuzzy bear of a man who never really lost his childlike innocence. He was the kind of father everyone wanted to have and when they met him they instantly wanted to hug him. His greatest accomplishment was his compassionate heart: Everyone could feel it.

But despite his brilliance, or perhaps because of it, my father never really fit in. There was no box that could contain him. He was an only child, a loner, and an outsider with little interest in conformity. He had a disdain for formality and social conventions, which always manifested, much to our embarrassment, in the most formal and conventional of settings. He described himself as an iconoclast. Despite his unconventional ways, he was loved and appreciated for his humor, his quirkiness, his unselfconscious originality, and his always out-of-the-box thinking, even (and sometimes especially) by those in the mainstream.

One funny story we recently remembered illustrates his irrepressible spirit: He was invited with his wife to a major European conference of art restorers in Italy. There was a formal reception at the home an Italian Duke. My father, never comfortable with any kind of formality, playfully took one of the candles from the reception, and wore it on his head for the entire night. During the 5 course formal dinner and the reception, he was introduced to various members of the Venetian nobility and the European art world, all the time, balancing this burning little candle on his head, yet also acting completely as if it wasn’t there and not acknowledging it at all. Everyone thought that, because of his first name, “Mayer,” he was actually the eccentric “mayor” of some city in the USA and so despite their horror they were too afraid to point out that there was a candle on his head.

In another infamous incident, my father sat on the Arts Council for the city of Newton, Massachusetts. One day a photo was taken of the Council members, none of whom were actual artists, aside from my father — they were prominent upstanding Newton business leaders and socialites. In the photo they are all wearing three piece suits and looking very formal and proud. My father is also wearing a three piece suit, except that, much to the dismay of the other Council members, his suit pants are tucked into gigantic calf-height silver moon boots (to him it was winter and it was perfectly logical to wear snow boots).

In a similar vein, whenever my father was invited to a black tie event, he would reluctantly attend, dressed appropriately, except with a black dress sock tied around his neck instead of a bow tie. Of course he would never acknowledge this to anyone, and they were all too shocked to point it out to him.

One more example of my father’s individuality: when we were children in the 1970′s in Boston, my father got a great deal on a World War One field ambulance. That was our family “car.” He also had a longstanding love affair with army surplus, to which he had special access through his position on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. From some special warehouse, he acquired a full Coast Guard extreme-weather helicopter rescue snowsuit — a bright orange practically bulletproof insulated monstrosity. To him it was extremely practical – warm, waterproof, and visible even in the worst white-out snowstorm conditions.  He was entirely unselfconscious of the fact that he looked like he had just descended from a rescue helicopter when he wore it. And so this was what he wore, along with his usual silver moon boots, all winter, every winter, through my early childhood.

My poor brother and I would have to be dropped off every morning at elementary school this way: We would pull up in an an antique white ambulance — a big man in an orange emergency jumpsuit, sunglasses, and silver moon boots would get out, tromp through the snow, and open the rear doors (where the stretcher would normally be) and then my younger brother and I would pop out, much to the shock and awe of our fellow schoolmates. Thus were the origins of my own life as an alien and outsider. While these experiences were a source of horror and embarrassment for us growing up, today we laugh hysterically when we remember them — they are what we are made of and I wouldn’t trade them back for anything.

My father was a huge influence for me as an innovator. He was a prolific, constant professional inventor and my childhood was filled with his inventions, in various stages of development. He was such a good inventor that corporations like Polaroid, Otis Elevator and others, would hire him to come up with inventions. I remember him once telling me that he made 100 inventions for Polaroid in 100 days. There was another time when my father was hired to invent new uses for Silly Putty — he received a giant vat of the stuff from the Silly Putty people. With the attention of my father, two kids, and all our friends, the Silly Putty gradually dispersed throughout our house, until little blobs of Silly Putty could be found in every corner, crevice, crack, cranny and nook.

My brother and I grew up inventing things with our father. In fact, we were not allowed to have or watch a TV as children – instead we had three rooms dedicated to making things, in which we spent most of our time: one for building things with wood, one for drawing and painting, and another was my father’s studio. These rooms were stocked with all kinds of tools and art supplies.

As an inventor, my father always had tools and various devices hanging off of him, clipped onto his belt, in fanny packs, in holsters, backpacks, special cases, and in holders of his own making. Our nickname for him at times was “Inspector Gadget.”  He was always infatuated with some new tool or device.

I remember, for example, what we refer to as his “Hot Glue Phase,” when I was in junior high school. Hot glue is a plastic that you melt through a device called a hot glue gun. It creates a white plastic goo that hardens as it cools and is unfortunately able to fasten just about anything together, much to my father’s delight, and our misfortune. I remember going to junior high school with a rip in my pants repaired visibly with hot glue, my sneakers repaired with hot glue, my book bag repaired with hot glue. There was nothing that hot glue couldn’t be used on, we discovered. Clothes. Plates. Furniture. Our house was at one time filled with little spider web strands of hot glue residue, stringing together our possessions, our home, our clothes, us.

One of my father’s most memorable inventions was “The Body Sail” – a precursor to the Windsurfer, on which the sail was not attached to the board  but rather was held by hand using a special boom. He once won the Charles River Boat Festival sailing that contraption – of course, wearing a full body scuba suit. My brother and I used to use his Body Sail on ice skates in the winter, on frozen ponds. My father, of course, preferred to sail it on roller skates, in full bodysuit, helmet and gloves, right through parting waves of startled lunchtime crowds in Harvard Square.

No story about my father would be complete without mentioning his love of sailing. It encompassed not only his Body Sail invention, but a series of boats, particularly multi-hulled boats such as catamarans and eventually trimarans. In his later years he moved to Marblehead outside of Boston, a worldwide center of sailing, where he became an avid fan of high-speed sailing, eventually designing and starting to build his own trimaran out of aerospace composite materials, which, had it ever been finished, would have been among the fastest, and certainly the most computerized and advanced, trimarans on Earth.

My father was also a classically trained artist and particularly a widely shown sculptor — I grew up surrounded by his artworks — photos, drawings, and sculptures made from found objects, industrial artifacts, natural materials. I played in his studios – surrounded by tools for making things, prototyping, and inventing. As an artist, my father was also truly unique. An early pioneer of the use of “found objects,” his artworks were made from rusty pieces of industrial machinery, wooden molds for casting pieces of ships, old rusty farm tools, pieces of found wood and materials from nature. I grew up surrounded by these artworks. There were hundreds of them and he had numerous exhibitions.

One series of works he called “Foundiron” consisted of pieces taken from the intestines of large industrial boilers and furnaces. Another series used wooden molds for casting brass for ships, appeared like a set of primitive human figures – perhaps from Easter Island. Later works included a two ton angelic shape made from the massive steel blades of a snowplow for train tracks, and gossamer drawings in air made from the unwound springs of massive clocks that reminded one of Picasso’s drawings. His Shrine Series included animal bones, bird wings, industrial spindles, parts from clocks, early computers, and metronomes, and melted industrial alloys. One of his larger installations is made from three giant steel train car hitches that he cut apart and welded back together like hands grasping each other, and now stands permanently in Boston’s new South Station.

He was also a photographer and some of his images — for example macro images of honeycombs and turtles, still remain in my mind as if I saw them yesterday. At one point his entire office was rigged up with a complicated system of prisms, blackout shades, lenses, reflective materials, and rear projection screens so that he could take photos of shapes made of pure light that he called Lumia – which he then blew up to massive size and animated with a bank of slide projectors — some of these images can be seen on his weblog.

Another area of life that my father dove into deeply was music. He had a profound connection with music. His music collection included many of the greatest works of classical music, but also Jazz and folk music, and even Indian classical music. Our childhood was filled with music, and also with musical instruments of all kinds – particularly unusual instruments: aboriginal instruments, vibraphones, banjos, harpsichords, flutes, guitars, percussion instruments. My own broad taste in music came from this. My brother, Marin Spivack, took it even further, becoming a masterful Jazz saxophone player, as well as learning to compose for and play guitar, drums, piano, bass.

My father’s fascination with science and his massive appetite for knowledge translated into a home filled with books about science, scientific journals, and discussions about physics, biology, chemistry, brain science, psychology, architecture, engineering, and anthropology. We spent countless hours discussing science, the future, the brain, and technology, and coming up with new theories and inventions.

In my own life as an innovator, my father was my biggest fan and supporter. He taught me to invent – it was his passion. He wrote about it, and refined his theories and methods for innovating and enhancing creativity over the course of his life, and as children my brother and I were his very fortunate experimental guinea pigs.

I can remember being brought by him as a child to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where my father had done his graduate studies — there my brother and I were subjects in early experiments on children and computers: we were observed as we played the early computer game, “Wumpus,” and learned how to use computers, by his colleagues. I still remember my father’s love for MIT — how he took my little brother and I on nighttime expeditions into the hidden catacombs under the campus, and the many times we met with his friends, colleagues and relatives from various MIT departments. My father wore his MIT ring proudly right until his last breath: It was the only club he ever wanted to belong to.

As I got older my father shared with me his work with architects and designers, and his “Design Log” methodology for documenting and improving any kind of design process. Later, as an adult he shared his new theories about human intelligence, learning disabilities, dyslexia, and what he called “syncretic associative thinking.” His theory of syncretic cognition proposes that there are two fundamentally different, yet complementary, forms of human intelligence — linear and syncretic. According to my father’s thinking, syncretic thought is associative and seemingly chaotic, yet out of it great creative leaps and innovations are born.

Dyslexics, of which my father was one, were examples of the extreme case of syncretic thinking: despite difficulties with linear logic, dyslexics are often brilliantly creative; in fact many great geniuses – especially artists, but also scientists — have been dyslexic. My father believed that instead of viewing dyslexics as “learning disabled” they should be viewed as “creativity enabled” and trained and taught differently, to leverage their unique cognitive abilities.

Instead of being viewed as bad at math or slow at reading, dyslexics might instead be viewed as unusually talented at associative thinking, brilliant in the arts and inventing. It was all a matter of perspective. My father advocated passionately for the often-overlooked talents hidden within dyslexia in his own writing, and also in his parallel career as a trained psychotherapist working with hundreds of people, especially learning disabled people, engineers and artists.

My father’s interest in the many flavors of intelligence extended not just to humans but also to animals: He had a long fascination with animal intelligence. His homes were always filled with animals – particularly highly intelligent parrots of various breeds, with whom he would speak, whistle, sing, and explore his theories about learning and cognition. When I was just a newborn, he had a pet crow — which he said was one of the most intelligent of birds.

My father painstakingly studied crows and eventually learned how to mimic their various kinds of calls. I can distinctly remember how, throughout our entire life together, he would suddenly start embarrassingly screeching, “Caaah  caaahhh Caaaaaaahhhh,” whenever he encountered a crow in some random tree.

In another famous story from my father’s MIT days, he became fascinated with echolocation — the form of navigation through sound used by animals bats and dolphins. Bats in particular became a bit of an obsession for my father. Bats navigate with high frequency clicks. These clicks bounce off of surfaces like walls, buildings, plants, insects, other bats and the reflections are turned into images in the bat brain.

My father decided that bat echolocation would be a great way to help the blind navigate through cities. So he invented a bat clicker device you could wear on your head. It would emit rapid loud clicks that were within the range of human hearing. He spent a week blindfolded, wearing this device, walking around the MIT and Harvard campuses, and apparently he was able to navigate successfully with it.

He recounted that after many days of using this contraption, blindfolded the whole time, his brain adapted and he was able to discern the different types of materials, objects and surfaces from the subtle differences in sound reflections. He was able to cross streets, navigate around buildings and obstacles, and could even find his way through crowds (although we all suspected the crowds were probably parting of their own volition around this strange blindfolded man with the clicking machine on his head). The astonished people of Cambridge who encountered him must have thought he was some kind of alien exploring a strange new world. And one can only wonder what the bats themselves must have thought.

At various times in my childhood my father also had pet frogs, lizards, turtles, fish, snakes, squirrels, cats, and later, his beloved pug. We grew up with enormous aquariums, terrariums, and aviaries — as kids these were wonderlands. This love of all kinds of living things would eventually guide him to his second wife: Boston artist, Louise Freedman. We knew they were made for each other when, for their first date, they chose to go to a local cemetery pond to collect pond water and frogs together.

As their lives merged, so did their always increasing menagerie of animals. And gradually there was less and less room, or time, for humans in their house. During my college years, my father and his wife had started raising African Grey parrots, and had also become close friends with Harvard/MIT animal cognition researcher, Irene Pepperberg, and her famous parrot, Alex.

When I would visit their home on school breaks, the parrots were as much a part of the family as my brother and I, and occupied a central location in the family room. A typical mealtime conversation in our family was a combination of English words, chirps, clicks and whistles, spoken by humans and parrots alike. My father and Louise eventually moved into a home that literally was like a tree — surrounded by trees on many levels, on the edge of a huge nature sanctuary on Marblehead Neck. There amongst the branches, they could almost live as birds. My brother I joked — half-seriously — that for an upcoming wedding anniversary, we would throw out their couch and instead replace it with matching human-sized perches for them.

But my father’s fascination with animals wasn’t just about intelligence, it was also about love. I remember one day as a child, while frantically evacuating from Cape Cod ahead of a fast oncoming hurricane, my father suddenly backed up miles of panicked traffic when he stopped the car in the pouring rain and lightning to scramble around on his hands and knees, risking his own life, to rescue a turtle that had strayed onto the freeway. This deep love of animals, and people, that he manifested throughout his life, was at times a source of embarrassment for me, but later became what I admired most about him. For my father, this simple love of all living things was his religion. But for most of my life, I didn’t realize what an accomplishment that was.

Although my father influenced me in so many ways, the most important facet of life that we shared — and struggled over — was spirituality.

He was a dedicated scientific materialist and rejected superstition, which to him included all institutionalized forms of religion. He even sometimes referred to himself as an atheist, although I think more accurately, he was an agnostic. I on the other hand, while also deeply interested in the sciences, had come to the conclusion that science alone could never fully explain reality or consciousness — I felt that there was a common underlying truth in all the great religions which science had so far completely missed, a truth that was essential for a complete and accurate understanding of reality. This debate between science and religion became the fulcrum on which we wrestled endlessly and in many different ways.

I had always known, even as a child, that there is something more than meets the eye about reality that is extremely subtle, yet at once vividly evident. Growing up, I had a number of spontaneous mystical experiences that I could not explain, and later I witnessed highly unusual phenomena taking place in monasteries in Nepal and India that convinced me that there must be more to the mind, and to reality, than our western scientific worldview could presently measure or explain. I was perplexed by the apparent incompatibility of these experiences, and the Western scientific framework that my father and I both lived and worked in.

In my attempts to reconcile these two worlds, I became obsessed with physics, computer science and artificial intelligence. I began searching for a grand unified theory. I sought to create software that could simulate physics, the brain, and the mind.  With some of the world’s most cutting-edge physicists and computer scientists, as well as at some of the top artificial intelligence companies, I worked on on several major initiatives in computational physics, parallel supercomputing, and artificial intelligence, as well as my own software projects and theories.

All of these attempts failed to achieve their goals so thoroughly and so repeatedly that eventually I began to question if it was even possible to do. I reached a point where I began to doubt the assumptions behind these projects — I began to question my own questions. This led me to a deeper exploration of the mind and the foundations of reality – a journey from cognitive science and physics to philosophy, and finally to spirituality. Paradoxically, I ended up back where I began, looking inwards rather than outwards, for the answers.

My quest for spiritual meaning took me through a survey of all the major Western and Eastern religions, and while traveling in Asia for a year after college, I landed in Tibetan Buddhism, with its intense focus on the nature of mind and consciousness. I was home. For me, Tibetan Buddhism had the perfect combination of rational and objective logical analysis (my father’s influence), and the mystical direct experience of the union of consciousness with divinity that I had tasted in my own experience.

In Tibetan Buddhism I finally found a rational yet holistic framework that could account for all the dimensions of observed experience: both the outer physical world and the inner dimensions of consciousness. From the Buddhist perspective, we humans are manifestations or projections of a deeper ultimate nature of reality, as are all sentient beings, and in fact all animate and inanimate things. This deeper level of reality is the origin of both the subjective and objective poles of experience, and it’s nature is transcendental, empty, yet aware.

The direct proof and experience of this can be found many ways: through logical reasoning, through prayer, through love, through nature, through art, through meditation, and perhaps most easily, by searching for the source of one’s own consciousness. Consciousness is a unique phenomena that we all have direct, equal, and immediate access to, yet which science cannot measure let alone explain. By persistently searching for the source of our own consciousness, and discovering that we can’t find it yet it is not non-existent, we are inevitably brought to a direct realization of the ultimate nature of reality.

Over decades of searching for consciousness, first through science, then through Buddhism, I had come to the conclusion that rather than consciousness emerging from the brain, it had to be the other way around: All experience, and indeed the body, brain and even the physical universe, emerge from consciousness. I had discovered that consciousness is a gateway to a sourceless, deep and endless wellspring of mysteries. And more importantly, I had found what I thought would be conclusive evidence that would finally convince my father that I was right.

But when I tried to relate these realizations to my father, he was entirely unconvinced. He argued that my experiences were not really objective, and that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain; a wonderful side-effect, a remarkable illusion that nonetheless could be reduced to neurochemistry and atoms. I countered that in the special case of consciousness, subjective observations could in fact be objective, under the right circumstances. I claimed that it was possible to scientifically and objectively observe consciousness by looking at it under the microscope of carefully trained meditation. But he cast doubts on these claims, citing numerous examples from psychology and neuroscience.

So I tried many other arguments. I cited the work of philosophers like John Searle who provided many illustrations of how conscious experiences could not be reduced to the brain or any kind of machine. I used lines of reasoning from Buddhist logic. I even cited recent findings in quantum theory that seem to imply that the act of conscious observation interacts with experimental results. But all of these arguments failed to convince my father that consciousness was fundamental or irreducible. He remained a skeptic and I felt invalidated. And so I strived even harder to find a way to map my experiences to his worldview, so I could finally prove the scientific foundations for my experience and belief in divinity to him.

This ongoing debate between my father and I — between science and religion — was not unique to us; it had been going on for millennia, and yielded many great works of both science and art. Our conversations were often frustrating and ended in exhaustion and exasperation, but we also sensed that somehow we were getting somewhere, if not mutually, then at least as individuals. We were foils to one another, worthy opponents. Like many who had come before us, the dialectical process of trying to convince one another of our conflicting views of reality, caused us to generated volumes of new writing, theories, inventions, and ideas we could not have arrived at on our own.

Nevertheless, despite my father’s strong rebukes of superstitious belief systems, and his skepticism towards my Buddhist beliefs, he was in fact a deeply spiritual man, in a very human, unembellished way. His spirituality was not tied to any system or institution — it was natural and basic: it was how he lived and the ideals he lived by: Love, Science, and Art. His spirituality was not about words, it was about actions. He expressed it in his art, his good deeds, his compassion, his joyful creativity, and his ability to love and be loved.

What I failed to see was that my father’s spirituality was immensely humble. So humble that he would not even claim to be spiritual, and certainly wouldn’t go so far as to conceptualize it. Instead, he was simply a truly good man, a mensch. While I continued to try new tactics in my campaign to convince him, and as I judged him as closed-minded and non-spiritual, he was in fact actually living my spiritual ideals better than I could understand at the time. But, not realizing this, I was certain he was missing out on something of vital importance, something that I had to convince him of before he died. And so our debate continued.

Then, in the last few months of my father’s life, we were finally able to bridge this divide. As his illness progressed, his wife called me and urged me to visit before it was too late. “He’s really getting worse, and I want you to have a chance to be together while he’s still strong enough,” she said. And so I flew to Boston and we resumed the debate.

Perhaps it was our mutual sense that time was running out, or perhaps it was that we had both exhausted all our prior arguments, but this time we reached a level of discourse that was essentially mathematical in nature; pure logic, pure set theory. Without imposing the assumptions of either science or religion, we started anew from first principles and through pure reason and observation, we derived a new common language, on neutral ground. And with this in hand, we arrived at a single nondual phenomenology — At last we had arrived at the basic nature of reality.

When we finally reached the point of agreement and mutual understanding, after decades of debate, and we both witnessed the simultaneous unification and transcendence of our prior belief systems — we saw that we had always actually agreed on a deeper level. And on that December afternoon, as we sketched out the full picture together, in a way that neither of us had done before on our own, we both breathed a sigh of relief. It was an incredibly cathartic moment for both of us.

At the conclusion of our decades long debate, we sat quietly together, just being in that understanding — a meditation on awareness and knowledge, on physics, time and space — on our mutual respect for the immensity and majesty of the universe. I will always treasure that time.

The day after that experience, before I left to return to California, I sat by my father’s bed. He was almost unable to walk at this point. As I said goodbye, thinking I might never see him again, I said, “Don’t forget what we discovered together, it is the highest realization.” He replied, “There is still one more realization that is higher.” Surprised, I asked him, “What?” He answered, “To live it!”

About a month later my wife called again. “He’s dying,” she said, “come back as soon as you can.” The cancer had advanced unexpectedly fast and so I flew back to be with him one last time.

I stayed by his side, looking into his eyes, talking to him, even though he had lost the ability to move or speak. His eyes smiled back. My brother and I kept telling him, as he labored to breathe for the final two days, “It’s ok to go now, you can let go, we love you, we’ll be ok, we’ll take care of each other.” But his drive to love and protect us all was so strong. He wasn’t ready to go. Even while in the depths of his own suffering, he was still filled with compassion, he was worried about what would happen to all of us. It was noble and beautiful to witness.

We played him the music he loved, the music he played for us as we grew up. We laughed and told him our memories and stories of him. We stroked his hair and his beard and tried to make him as comfortable as possible as he lay there, struggling, and probably frustrated that he couldn’t communicate, and at times in terrible pain. Yet through great effort he still found ways to let us know he heard us, loved us, and was still conscious.

As his breathing changed and we saw the signs of death advancing further through his body, he maintained his clarity and brilliance and even got brighter — we could feel his heart, and see his kind and intelligent spirit in his eyes. He tried to speak to us by making what little sound he could and moving his eyebrows in response to us. “Remember what we talked about, what we realized,” I said to him over and over, and I could see he was living it.

Finally, on the evening of February 12, 2011, he let go and died peacefully in his wife’s arms as she sang to him gently. All of us felt at that moment an incredible, all-embracing, boundless love and bliss, even as we grieved. It was him. My father, Mayer Spivack. Our Buddha. He went into Love.

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.

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.

I had an interesting discussion with Om Malik recently, about the realtime Web, innovation, semantics and the Stream, and the changing nature of the present. Watch the video for the details.

(Note: Thanks to Gigaom for posting up an excerpted version of this post. I also wanted to share the longer version below for those interested.)

——————————-

Introduction

The shape of Web 3.0 has finally emerged in the realization of the Stream, something I and others have written about extensively.

Twitter and Facebook, among others, through their self-consumption and propagation, feed that spring and disseminate it in an immediate and constant flow of information.

This concept is not new to the Web, however. The Web has always been a stream; in fact, it has always existed as a stream of streams, even at its earliest stages of evolution as a set of individual sites developing new content (and new content sources) over time.

What has changed is the pace of content production and distribution, which has made the underlying web-stream more evident, and the need for a Scheduled Web more intense.

Diagnosis: WIDD

The seemingly inevitable result of the surfacing of the Stream is that users are thrust into the paralysis of what I’m calling Web Intention Deficit Disorder (WIDD).

Web Intention Deficit Disorder is pressing in its implications.

WIDD is the problem of getting people to not only focus their attention on a given issue, but focus their intention to act upon it as well.

Twitter’s crowning early moment last summer as the amplification platform of the Iranian protests to the rest of the world is an ideal example. Only in brief, isolated instances did “the whole world is watching” crescendo translate to any actionable difference to the reality of the situation.

This is, of course, an extreme example, but the idea that simply changing your Facebook or Twitter icon to a different color in solidarity is of little use or encouragement if no real world action results. And while the protests held our Twitter-trending attention for a comparatively impressive length of several weeks, it faded just as quickly when the next buzz topic emerged, be it Michael Jackson or the new Twilight film.

Distraction will be somewhat assuaged over the next year simply out of the necessity of preventing user fatigue and atrophy, bolstered by the development of more precise filtering and recommendation services. (I have seen several impressive efforts in stealth that will be revealed soon).

Establishing (indeed, reestablishing) a true Web of Intent, however, will ultimately require a different form of interacting with the Stream, one that more concretely insists on active participation and creative work, rather than mere passive consumption.

This exact concept is the nexus of a new endeavor called Trailmeme, from Xerox. Approaches such as the one they are taking are precisely what I find so vital to the useful development of the next generation of Web technologies.

We need intent-centric products and services that contextualize the Stream, and propel publishing in a more meaningful and actionable form.

Solving Intention Deficit: Trailmeme

Trailmeme is still in very early development and the UI is rough, but I have been following its progress with interest since I first spoke to the project manager, Venkatesh Rao, over two years ago.

Trailmeme, which is currently in a private beta, is a conceptual necessity to the organization and creation of Web content in the endless flux of the Stream. While its UI features are still in development, after a recent exploration of their stage, I feel it is evolving a new and valuable breed of content curation and creation.

I’m not allowed to say too much about them as they are still very much under wraps, but I do want to give a few high-level observations that get at why the project is so interesting.

Trailmeme is, on the surface, an organizational tool, yet that is only a small aspect of its actual value or purpose. And more importantly, it has certain characteristics that many startups will reckon with as WIDD becomes more and more acute.

Like any number of other content organization or bookmarking sites, Trailmeme allows users to save and tag articles.

But in their case, users do not simply consume and store articles, but “blaze” their own trails by creating a meaningful, intent-driven, interlinked network between pieces of Web content. The result are annotations and contextualizations that are at once personally relevant and, when shared and made public, a new way of reengaging the material for readers and followers of the trail itself.

The distinction between Trailmeme and regular bookmarking platforms is a deference to creative engagement rather than passive consumption.

Rather than tracking and cataloguing articles and sites, Trailmeme insists users place that content in a relevant pattern, however defined by the user, with other content. Users link digital objects (articles, websites, datasets, etc) in multiple relational paths, and provide their own commentary to the interlinked associations.

For example, the Trail on the “Scamville” expose launched last year by TechCrunch begins with a single node, or trail marker, and branches out in any number of creator or collaboratively defined paths to follow the story across various websites and articles.

For readers, these artifacts can be followed as an in-frame series of articles, or from a visual map view that displays all of the possible paths.

The visualization element is one that will become increasingly indispensable to the Web as streams are organized (InfoHarmoni is an especially interesting visualization play, fresh out of Y-Combinator).

The ability to link to multiple markers from a single node is also an intrinsic property that hearkens back to the earliest, but still unrealized, vision for what the World Wide Web should be.

The passive consumption of articles and Web content must become an active process of contextualizing and contributing to that content in new ways.

Here’s a video on the Trailmeme concept:

Conclusion

We have a long way to go before the Web of Intent takes hold, but the conceptual interests that underlie Trailmeme and others are fundamental to addressing some of our most pressing problems.

Hopefully many more systems like this will force an intentional engagement, one where mere passivity and reception proves not only unrewarding, but antithetical to the system, much in the same way that video games have elevated the interactivity of film and television.

The first step to ensuring intention is to promote systems that are inherently based on engagement and action, not mere consumption (e.g. more clients upon clients).

If we are to evolve a more manageable and effective Web, we must remember that capturing attention is not the only ambition we must pursue; we must focus and foster intention as well.

See Also: Good post by Venkatesh Rao, leader of the Trailmeme project, on Web Attention Deficit Disorder

Please vote for these SXSW Panels: (voting closed August 27)

What We Really Want In Web TV

Banking on Big Brands/Celebs for the Web

Humans Versus Robots: Who Curates the Real-Time Web?

The Future of Conferences: Designing Experiences

Social Viewing for Fan Engagement at MTV

Anatomy of an Online Video Show

500 People in Your Living Room: Emerging SocialTV

Making live events pay off – online and offline

Are Attention and Intention Casualties of the Web?

I am not advocating charging for content online, however, it may be a necessary evil for some content providers to survive. Without subscription revenues the newspaper industry is dying. The same is true for magazine publishers. Online content providers face similar challenges – the cost of doing high-quality editorial is high and the revenues from advertising are not always enough to cover them. Furthermore, smaller content providers – that don’t have the benefit of massive traffic-generating audiences – definitely cannot cover their editorial costs from advertising alone. Without some solution to this problem it is likely that many large and small content providers (both old/traditional and new/online content providers) will find it hard to survive in the age of the Web.

Various companies have experimented with charging for content. But these experiments have not worked. I think one of the problems with their approaches was that they were based on an old-fashioned view of why consumers pay for content. They didn’t really fit the way content is being used and distributed on the Web. But there may be a way to charge for online content that works. By “works” — I mean that it will make sense to consumers, will not completely shut out non-paying consumers, and will actually increase demand and distribution for their content. Sounds awesome? It could be.

The basic proposal is “time-based pricing” that is similar to how financial data feeds are provided. For example with stock ticker data, some providers offer access to their live feed for a subscription, but anyone can get the delayed feed for free. Let’s imagine we apply a similar model to online content and see what might happen.

For example, an online newspaper might charge a low annual subscription (a few dollars a year) for access to their live, current articles and discussion, but they let anyone see a 6 hour delayed view of their site for free. They also have an affiliate program that rewards their paying subscribers for helping to distribute their content to the non-paying majority. The paying subscribers get social and financial reward for seeing content earlier than the majority — it positions them as mavens, makes them more valuable to their followers, and may earn them real money. They become key distributors and promoters of the content. The non-paying majority is monetized through ads and upselling subscriptions.

Here are the basics of the model:

1. Charge for non-delayed access to content. Paying subscribers get the current live content. Non-paying subscribers see a delayed view of the content (several minutes to hours). Do not charge for access to old archived content by the way — making that content visible helps your search rankings and gets long-tail ad revenues as well.
2. Only expect that avid readers will pay. People who really care, or really need to know, or simply are avid readers will pay for content, and only if the price is LOW. In the online world, people read across a lot more content sources than in the print world, and thus they simply cannot afford to pay a few dollars subscription to each of those sources — there are far too many.
3. Reward Paying Subscribers for being Distributors. The people who pay get the content first. In turn, they are allowed to  blog and tweet about the content, and share the content, before the non-paying audience majority. This sets up paying subscribers to be distributors and mavens for content they like — because the non-paying audience can’t see what’s happening in real-time, so they look to the tweets and blog posts by the paying subscribers to keep up. But that’s not all — paying subscribers should be rewarded for driving traffic to content by giving them affiliate  revshares of ad and subscription revenues they drive from their referrals.
4. Sell subscriptions in bundles. People don’t want to be bothered signing up to subscribe to dozens of sites. Instead sell them bundles of popular sites they might like, or let them choose what sites to bundle, and charge them in a single transaction. This is not unlike basic vs. premium cable subscriptions with various bundles that people can buy.

It’s really a simple model. What do you think of the idea?

ps. Afterthoughts:

(1) Some online news publications publish breaking stories at midnight when news embargoes lift. For this model to work with such sites, they would need to have a long enough time delay so that in the morning non-paying consumers would still have to wait for access to the content. Another issue is time-zones — the delay would have to be sensitive to time zones. I’m not sure whether these are deal-killers for this model? Maybe some reader will solve them!

(2) One problem with a model like this is that if news site A uses time-based pricing, but their competitor, news site B, gives the same thing away for free. The readers will just go to news site B and site A will lose their audience. One solution this issue might be a proposal to the FTC for a new kind of copyright law that covers “hot news.” (thanks @jen_mctadden for sharing this link).

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.

We exist in a epoch of great technological change. Within the space of just a few generations we have gone from horse drawn carriages to exploring the outer reaches of our solar system, from building with wood, stone and metals to nanoscale construction with individual atoms, and from manual printing presses and physical libraries, to desktop publishing and the World Wide Web. The increasing pace of technological evolution brings with it many gifts, but also poses challenges never-before-faced by humanity. One of these challenges is the digital generation gap.

The digital generation gap is the result of the extremely rapid rise of personal computing, the Internet, mobile applications, and coming next, biotechnology. Never before in the history of our species have we been faced with a situation where each living generation is focused around a different technology platform.

The tools and practices that the elders of our civilization use are still based on the pre-digital analog era. Their children — the Baby Boomers — use entirely different tools and practices based around the PC. And the youth of today — the Boomers’ children, exist in yet another domain: the world of mobile devices.

The digital generation gap presents a major challenge to our civilization. In particular because of the effect this has on education — both informal education that takes place at home and in communities, and formal education that takes place in school settings. The tools that teachers grew up with and now teach with (PC’s) are not the same tools that the students of today are using today to learn and communicate with (mobile devices).

Baby Boomers grew up before the advent of any of these technologies — they lived in an analog world in which daily life took place primarily on the physical, face-to-face human scale, with physical materials and physical information media like printed books and newspapers. This world was similar to the world of their parents and grandparents — even though it was increasingly automated and industrialized during their lives. As children and during their young adult years the Boomers grew up amidst the fruition of the industrial revolution: mass-produced physical and synthetic goods of all kinds. Among the defining shifts of this period was the transition from a world of manual labor to one of increasing automation. The pinnacle of this transition was the adoption of the first generations of computers.

The Boomer’s children — people in their 30′s and 40′s today — arrived to usher in the transition from an automated analog world, to the new digital world. They were born into a civilization where monolithic computers had already taking hold in government and industry, and they witnessed the birth of waves of increasingly powerful, inexpensive and portable personal computers, the Internet, and the Web. This generation built the bridges from the industrial world of the Boomers to the digital world we live in today. They integrated systems, connected devices, and brought the whole world together as one global social and economic network.

Now their children – the children and youth of today — are growing up in a world that is primarily focused around mobile devices and mobile applications. They have always lived with ubiquitous mobile access and social media. No longer concerned with building bridges to the legacy industrial world of their parents and grandparents, they are plunging headlong into an increasingly digital culture. One in which dating, shopping, business, education — almost everything we do as humans — is taking place online, and via mobile devices.

Each generation is out of touch with the means of production and consumption of the other generations. The result is an increasing communications gap between the generations: They use different platforms. And not surprisingly the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, traditions, cultural norms and standards is not operating like it used to. In fact it may be breaking down entirely.

Many of the cultural and social stresses making headline news are related to the digital generation gap. For example, the increasing growth of cyberbullying is the result of parents and teachers being totally out of touch with the mobile world that kids live in today.

Parents and teachers are so out of the loop technologically, compared to kids today, that they are literally unable to see what is going on between them, let alone do anything about it.

It’s no wonder that kids are running wild online, “sexting,” cyberbullying, and cheating in school. There are few adults, and little to no adult-supervision, where they spend their time online keeping order.

There is no period in recent history when this has ever been the case. It used to be that schoolkids took recess breaks in the schoolyard under the watchful eyes their teachers. There was a certain level of adult supervision in school, and also at home. Not today. Teachers and parents can’t see what their kids are up to online and have no control over what they do with their mobile devices. We have a generation of kids who are growing up with less adult oversight and supervision than ever before.

And the newest generation — the babies of today — what will their experience be? Will the pace of technological progress finally start to plateau for them? Will their world be more like the world of their parents?

Instead of a sudden shift to yet a smaller level of scale or a more powerful technology platform, will they and many generations to come, live on a more stable and shared technology platform? If the pace does slow down for a while, we may see inter-generational gaps decrease. Perhaps this will serve to standardize and solidify our emerging global digital culture. A new set of digital norms and traditions will have time to form and be handed down across generations.

Alternatively, what if in fact the pace of change continues to quicken instead? What if the babies of today grow up in a world of augmented reality and industrial-scale genetic engineering? And what if their children (the grandchildren of people in their 40′s today) grow up in a world of direct brain-machine interfaces and personal genetic engineering? Those of us today who think of ourselves as being on the cutting edge will be the elders of tomorrow, and we will be hopelessly out of touch.

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.

Barney Pell invited me to a dinner tonight for the founders, funders, and friends of Singularity University tonight at the NASA Ames campus. I’ve been following the progress of the initiative for some time, via Peter Diamandis, who I’ve known since I attended the International Space University program in 1992. Singularity University brings together luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, with a number of leading minds across the hottest fields in science and technology. Paraphrasing what one alum said, “it’s about applying the best of humanity’s innovation and ideas to the worst of humanities challenges and problems.” I very pleased to see the amazing and rapid progress being made there. They really are doing something exciting, and it’s a truly legendary line-up of visionaries, tech heavy-hitters and genius-level scientists. One of the more interesting things they’re doing is designing a new model for advanced education — literally reinventing education — or at least graduate-level education. It was eye-opening, and the food wasn’t bad either. Best of all, it was surprisingly focused on the applied-side — creating several spin-out ventures to solve big global problems, and make money in the process. Great!

“All reality is virtual” — Terrence McKenna

This is Part II of my article “The Global Brain is About to Wake Up” — about the  realtime Web and how it relates to the emerging Global Brain.

Here I focus mainly on thorny philosophical and scientific speculations about the nature of consciousness, the role it plays in the universe, and whether or not the Web can ever be said to be conscious in its own right. Beware — this content may not be of interest to most of my readers. It’s certainly in the “wild speculation” category.

Will the Web Become Conscious?

As the realtime Web gets faster and richer, it will begin to appear to be more cohesive and collectively intelligent. It will begin to appear like an actual, unified Global Brain, rather than just a crowd. Instead of being just a collection of interacting parts we will be able to see it as a functioning whole — a kind of entity in its own right. We will also be able to see this collective “entitiness” emerge for subsets of the whole Web? For example will nations, organizations, markets, industries, enterprises, workgroups and teams start to seem more intelligent? The Web will get smarter and faster, at every level of collective cognition but will it ever actually become conscious?

Yes and no.

It will become collectively more intelligent, and the consciousnesses of individuals around the Web will be more connected and potentially synchronized. But the Web itself won’t actually have it’s own new consciousness, unique from the consciousnesses of the people who participate in it. Still it will seem more conscious than it was before, simply by virtue of the human consciousnesses within it being more connected and focused.

I don’t think the Web will actually develop or have its own meta-level consciousness however. It won’t evolve some new form of Web-scale consciousness that is totally separate from the individual consciousness of the people on the Web.  A Web-scale sentient entity that is unique and separate from the humans minds on the Web will never exist. That will never happen. Instead, the Web as a whole will evolve to better utilize the human consciousness that is already present within it — the consciousness that we human beings already have.

The Irreplaceable Role of Humans in the Web

As conscious entities, we humans play a unique and irreplaceable role in the realtime Web and the Global Brain.  We provide the only consciousness the Web will ever have. Machines may be able to sense and measure what is going on, and even make sense of it for us in ways that transcend the abilities of the individual human brain, but they won’t be able to be conscious of what is going on the way that we humans can be.

We human beings are the consciousness of the Web — that is our special role. No machine or set of machines can replicate consciousness, not even the entire Web as a single machine. However there is a distinction to be made between consciousness and intelligence.

Machines can certainly be made to be intelligent, and that applies even to the entire Web as a machine as well. The Web is getting more intelligent, and as this happens it is becoming our Global Brain. But it’s not becoming more conscious.  Rather, we humans are becoming more conscious of the Web and what is going on within it. Humans are becoming able to be more conscious of the Web, but the Web itself is not becoming conscious at all, let alone more conscious. This is a key point to keep in mind.

Until recently humans have been watching the Web in slow motion. We can only see small glimpses at a time. The individual human brain cannot comprehend the vast patterns that are taking place on the Web, and there are few software tools that can make sense of them for us either. It’s just too big and complex a system, and the patterns which comprise its collective thoughts — the thoughts of the Global Brain — are too spread out in time and space.

We humans are barely able to be lucidly conscious in our little nows — which are really just spans of a few square meters, and a few minutes, at a time — but the collectively intelligent processes and patterns out on the Web cover thousands of miles and can span days, weeks, months or even years. They just don’t fit in our little human nows. The solution is to find a way to visualize them so we can digest them in our little nows. That’s the only practical approach — unless someone figures out how to expand the individual human now.

Fortunately, there are several trends that are going help with this process. As the Web gets faster, processes that used to take too long for us to follow them will become short enough for individuals to watch them play out in reasonable timespans, without getting lost or overwhelmed. The collective thoughts of the Web are starting to happen fast enough for our human minds to see them emerge, change, and interact on our human timescale of minutes and hours. Instead of watching memes develop and spread on the Web as if in slow-motion, we are starting to see and measure them in our timescale, at our speed.

In addition as the Web gets more computationally powerful — computers and software will be able to help us see what is going on beyond the limits of our human nows — larger volumes of data changing over larger spans of time than we can grasp on our own. This too will help to compress and visualize patterns and processes that were previously beyond our comprehension in ways that we can make sense of as individual human observers with our small brains and short nows.

Both of these trends will enable individual human minds to comprehend larger and more complex processes and patterns within the Web. And as individuals become able to be conscious of larger and more complex patterns taking place within the Web, they will be able to react and adapt to those patterns in their own individual behavior. This feedback loop will give rise to increasingly intelligent collective adaptation and behavior. And thus the Web as a whole — the Global Brain that includes humans, machines, software, and all our infrastructure — will appear to become increasingly smart.

Humans drive this process by simply being conscious observers of the Web, and by making intelligent decisions, adding content and taking actions online. But we’re not the only ones. Software will also play a role in this — adding intelligence and content, but not consciousness, to the process.

How Important is Consciousness Anyway?

But how important is human consciousness to the Web, and the Global Brain? One might wonder whether human consciousness really matters in all this, or whether it’s enough just to have non-conscious but intelligent machines?

Would the Global Brain be different without humans there to witness it? If there were no humans in it, but just non-conscious artificially intelligent software that simply follows rules or uses statistics and algorithms — would the Global Brain be more or less conscious or intelligent?

This is actually an absurd question. Without humans there would not be a Web, let alone a Global Brain. But let’s just suspend that for a moment and ask the question in a different way. Suppose that at some time in the distant future, all humans die, but the Web remains. Would the Web still contain any consciousness on it’s own?

I think the answer is no. This ultimately goes back to John Searle’s concept of Qualia. In a nutshell, there is nothing on the Web, apart from humans, that is capable of experiencing qualia — the actual knowing of any experience. So there is nothing on the Web that is capable of being conscious, apart from the humans who participate in it. Without the humans, there could be no consciousness in or on the Web.

There  is a difference between being conscious of the qualia of something, and simply measuring data about something. Qualia is special — as strange and potentially hocus-pocus at that may sound. I just don’t believe qualia is something that can be synthesized in a machine or by any algorithm. Being conscious of the Web is not the same as simply measuring data flows. I believe there is a distinct quality of “knowing” or “being aware” that is the hallmark of actual consciousness and which simply cannot be synthesized in a computer.

From what I can tell, qualia is something unique to being sentient, in other words, aware. And awareness is something special as far as I can tell — I think it might be fundamental like space and time, not something we can create or synthesize, and not something emergent. Again this just my opinion — but I think it’s a defensible one.

The Unexplainableness of Consciousness

I’ve spent decades thinking about the question of consciousness, and whether machines can ever be conscious, and I have never found it plausible to make conscious machines.

Quite the contrary — the more I have examined this question, the more clear it has become to me that consciousness is special — it is something that simply cannot even be described, and literally cannot be found — yet it is undeniably taking place. Ontologically consciousness is similar to space and time — we cannot find space or time, we cannot isolate them or grasp their substance, yet they are undeniably taking place. Consciousness seems to be just like that. Unexplainable, yet undeniable.

I’m something of a mystic with regard to consciousness — but not in a blind way. I’ve come to this view only after really trying to avoid it — through very thorough and painstaking investigation from just about every perspective on it — neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, physics, cosmology, and religion and spirituality.

Consciousness appears finally to be something we just cannot explain, let alone synthesize, and I’d be willing to bet that it’s always going to be beyond our reach. In fact I have made such a bet at the Long Bets project: You can read more about this in my article, “Why Machines Will Never be Conscious.”

Given that I view consciousness as something primordial and beyond physics, from my perspective at least, I don’t think we can manufacture it. I also doubt it will simply magically emerge on the Web, apart from individual human minds.

Consciousness is Neither Emergent Nor Reducible.

But wait. Certainly there is a case to be made that if consciousness can emerge within the human brain, then why not within the Web? The human brain is essentially a more complex Web after all. Why is one kind of Web any more or less qualified to be conscious?

My present answer to this is that I don’t think consciousness ever emerges through some physical process — it’s never created or destroyed, and even when said to be present it’s not “there” like other kinds of things. It doesn’t appear as something, it has no form, shape, color, etc. It cannot be found or grasped at all. It is similar to space in these respects.

Space is never created or destroyed — at least as far as we can tell from within this universe. Similarly, consciousness is never created or destroyed as far as we can tell as conscious observers. That’s just how the universe is — it’s a mystery that is bigger than us. We’ll never be able to comprehend it fully from inside it. Consciousness seems to have the same ontological status as space. The difference is that while space is inert, incapable of observing or knowing, consciousness seems to have a quality of knowing that is quite unique.

My point is actually that the human brain is NOT special. I don’t actually think consciousness comes from the brain or is inside the brain, or running like some kind of software on the hardware of the brain.

If consciousness were merely some physical phenomenon that depended on the brain, then it would be no problem to synthesize it, not just for AI but for the Web as a whole as well. But that’s not the case, in my opinion.

I don’t think consciousness is a material thing, nor is it an emergent phenomena. I think it’s fundamental to the nature of the universe — like space and time — or perhaps even more fundamental than space and time. We can’t create it. We’ll probably never fully understand it. It just is there from the start. It’s the very basis of the entire phenomena of the universe, it’s not merely something that evolves and emerges within the universe. Indeed, I would venture to state that without consciousness — at least in primordial form — no universes would even be possible or would ever arise.

In my view, material things like the physical universe and the human body and brain, emerge from consciousness, rather than consciousness emerging from material things. Consciousness, whatever it is, is primordial and fundamental. Whether or not you reify it as a fundamental first-cause or ultimate thing, or you take the Buddhist view that it is also empty of any entity or nature and therefore not a thing, it is still at least totally primordial.

This isn’t just speculation — it’s something that can both be observed and is entirely logical as well. For example, if you really look closely at what you or anyone can possibly ever observe, it appears this is the only tenable answer we can find. Why? Because we cannot observe anything prior to being conscious ourselves — consciousness is necessary to be an observer. We can’t even ask such questions if we are not conscious in the first place. Consciousness is assumed, and must already be there, as soon as we even start looking for it.

Furthermore, the example of dreams proves that incredibly real virtual worlds, entire universes, can indeed appear and take place within the sphere of an individual dreaming consciousness — and they are indistinguishable (while they occur) from waking experience. Dreaming illustrates the power and scope of consciousness — it shows that it is not absurd to think that the our own so-called waking experience could be appearing like a dream within our own fields of consciousness. Waking experience, like dreaming, happens within the sphere of consciousness. It’s impossible to have waking experience without being conscious.

We have no evidence of there being anything beyond the sphere of consciousness and we cannot possibly observe anything without resorting to consciousness in the process to make the observation. There is no way to logically establish that there exists anything beyond or before the scope of consciousness. Anything we attempt to prove or observer is mediated by our own observing consciousness.

For this reason, as far as I or anyone can ever discern, it is reasonable to posit that each of our unique perspectives — each of our minds — contains the universe from one perspective. It’s similar to a hologram — where each piece of the picture contains the whole picture from a different angle. In the case of consciousness, each individual consciousness is one unique perspective on the universe. And the universe itself cannot be found apart from all these conscious perspectives on it. It’s not “out there” as some separate physical thing that these consciousnesses are simply watching from afar — it is literally a manifestation of these consciousnesses, there is no duality between observer and what is observed at the quantum level.

All the evidence points to consciousness being prior to everything else. There is in fact no evidence that indicates otherwise. As a result I don’t believe consciousness is emergent or reducible. I don’t think it is created or destroyed. And even when present it is not actually findable, because it is basically an axiom of the system we are in. It’s primordial and so we cannot sense it or detect it, other than with consciousness itself. There’s nothing more fundamental to break it down into, or to compare or contrast it against.

Consciousness and the Quantum Substrate

From what I can discern so far, I believe that human consciousness — actual sentience, not simulated sentience — is fundamentally related to the fabric of space-time. It is woven right into the quantum substrate of reality.

At that level of reality there is not clear distinction between mind and matter, it’s some kind of whole that we barely understand. While computers may be able to simulate aspects of this, they do not actually interact directly with the quantum substrate the way that human consciousness does.

This is a big difference between machine minds and human minds: Human consciousness is directly connected to the fundamental quantum nature of the universe, and quite probably plays a role in creating or at least conditioning observed reality. Computer programs — no matter how sophisticated — are not connected to the quantum substrate in the same way — they are not capable of being true quantum observers.

There is at least some evidence for my view of consciousness: On a quantum level, observation and measurement seem to have an impact on what is actually found to occur. The observer affects the experiment. All forms of observation eventually seem to require a human — or equivalently conscious — observer at some point in the process — there’s no escaping that. Without such an observer, the universe remains in an indeterminate quantum state. So it appears that human consciousness — or at least authentic actual consciousness whether human or not — is required to cause the quantum field to actually crystallize into particular events.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that computers can ever be conscious; no evidence that synthetic sentient observers can be created, and even if we created them, there would be no way to prove that their powers of observation were equivalent to our own. Any observations they made of them would ultimately be observed by us humans, and so we would always be the final conscious observers in the chain.

On a quantum level, our observation of our machines, would cascade downwards, causing their observations of reality to have an effect. Without our observing them, machines would not be able to actually affect the quantum level of reality. And indeed it would be difficult to try to prove otherwise, because a human observer is necessary to observe any such proof or system we can devise (and in fact, quantum observer effects have been shown even to propagate backwards in time from a later act of observation to an earlier experiment). So there’s just no way to take human consciousness out of the loop.

We cannot prove that human consciousness isn’t necessary for our universe to appear. We cannot prove that machines can function as independent quantum observers, separate from human observation, and we probably cannot devise any experiment or device which could prove that therefore. There’ s really no evidence to suggest that machines could synthesize this function — all the evidence in fact says otherwise. And this applies by extension to the Web as a whole, and thus to the Global Brain.

As a result, I think human consciousnesses play an absolutely crucial role in the universe, the  Web, and in any eventual Global Brain or form of collective intelligence. Our consciousness is the only actual authentic consciousness in the system. And it plays an important and necessary role at a quantum level in shaping reality through quantum level acts of observation.

By the way, it’s worth noting that consciousness is not exclusively the domain of human beings — animals are also conscious for example. But human beings are at least the most intelligent conscious things that we know of, so I’m limiting this discussion of the Global Brain to humans. In any case, there is no substitute for actual consciousness. It can’t be synthesized. It comes only from humans. At best it can perhaps be aimed, funneled or maybe amplified.

But that doesn’t mean that machine intelligence won’t play a very important enabling and catalyzing role in making the Global Brain smarter. There’s a difference between consciousness and intelligence. In fact, machine intelligence is critical to the Global Brain waking up — because it makes the vast complexity of the Global Brain (in both space and time) comprehensible, digestible, and accessible to the individual human consciousnesses that observe it.

Although humans posses consciousness, our minds are limited in scope — we simply cannot see or make sense of patterns that are above a certain level of scale or complexity in space and time. We need help with that — and that’s where computers enter the story, with their vast abilities to calculate, sort, collate, correlate, and organize masses of data.

Computers essentially increase the scope of human consciousness, by enabling us to observe things and do computations that are beyond the abilities of the individual human brain. It is by making the vast patterns within the complex whole — the entire Web –  more visible and understandable to the observers within it — the human consciousnesses within it — that the Global Brain actually becomes smarter, more reflexively-aware, and more collectively conscious.

By connecting individual human consciousnesses to the vast intelligence and knowledge of the growing global computing network, we will get the best of both: a Global Brain that gets increasingly collectively aware and intelligent.

The emerging realtime Web is not only going to speed up the Web and our lives, it is going to bring about a kind of awakening of our collective Global Brain. It’s going to change how many things happen on online, but it’s also going to change how we see and understand what the Web is doing. By speeding up the Web, it will cause processes that used to take weeks or months to unfold online, to happen in days or even minutes. And this will bring these processes to the human-scale — to the scale of our human “now” — making it possible for us to be aware of larger collective processes than before. We have until now been watching the Web in slow motion. As it speeds up, we will begin to see and understand what’s taking place on the Web in a whole new way.

This process of of quickening is part of a larger trend which I and others call “Nowism.” You can read more of my thoughts about Nowism here. Nowism is an orientation that is gaining momentum and will help to shape this decade, and in particular, how the Web unfolds. It is the idea that the present-timeframe (“the now”) is getting more important, shorter and also more information-rich. As this happens our civilization is becoming more focused on the now, and less focused on past or the future. Simply keeping up with the present is becoming an all-consuming challenge: Both a threat and an opportunity.

The realtime Web –  what I call “The Stream”  (see “Welcome to the Stream”) — is changing the unit of now. It’s making it shorter. The now is the span of time which we have to be aware of to be effective our work and lives, and it is getting shorter. On a personal level the now is getting shorter and denser — more information and change is packed into shorter spans of time; a single minute on Twitter is overflowing with potentially relevant messages and links. In business as well, the now is getting shorter and denser — it used to be about the size of a fiscal quarter, then it became a month, then a week, then a day, and now it is probably about half a day in span. Soon it will be just a few hours.

To keep up with what is going on we have to check in with the world in at least half-day chunks. Important news breaks about once or twice a day. Trends on Twitter take about a day to develop too. So basically, you can afford to just check  the news and the real-time Web once or twice a day and still get by. But that’s going to change.  As the now gets shorter, we’ll have to check in more frequently to keep abreast of change. As the Stream picks up speed in the middle of this decade, to remain competitive will require near-constant monitoring — we will have to always be connected to, and watching, the real-time Web and our personal streams. Being offline at all will risk missing out on big important trends, threats and opportunities that emerge and develop within minutes or hours. But nobody is capable of tracking the Stream all 24/7 — we must at least take breaks to eat and sleep. And this is a problem.

Big Changes to the Web Coming Soon…

With Nowism comes a faster Web, and this will lead to big changes in how we do various activities on the Web:

• We will spend less time searching. Nowism pushes us to find better alternatives to search, or to eliminate search entirely, because people don’t have time to search anymore. We need tools that do the searching for us and that help with decision support so we don’t have to spend so much of our scarce time doing that. See my article on “Eliminating the Need for Search — Help Engines” for more about that.
• Monitoring (not searching) the real-time stream becomes more important. We need to stay constantly vigilant about what’s happening, what’s trending. We need to be alerted of the important stuff (to us), and we need a way to filter out what’s not important to us. Probably a filter based on influence of people and tweets, and/or time dynamics of memes will be necessary. Monitoring the real-time stream effectively is different from searching it. I see more value in real-time monitoring than realtime search — I haven’t seen any monitoring tools for Twitter that are smart enough to give me just the content I want yet. There’s a real business opportunity there.
• The return of agents. Intelligent agents are going to come back. To monitor the realtime Web effectively each of us will need online intelligent agents that can help us — because we don’t have time, and even if we did, there’s just too much information to sift through.
• Influence becomes more important than relevance. Advertisers and marketers will look for the most influential parties (individuals or groups) on Twitter and other social media to connect with and work through. But to do this there has to be an effective way to measure influence. One service that’s providing a solution for this (which I’ve angel invested in and advise) is Klout.com – they measure influence per person per topic. I think that’s a good start.
• Filtering content by influence. We also will need a way to find the most influential content. Influential content could be the content most RT’d or most RT’d by most influential people. It would be much less noisy to be able to see only the more influential tweets of people I follow. If a tweet gets RT’d a lot, or is RT’d by really influential people, then I want to see it. If not, then only if it’s really important (based on some rule). This will be the only way to cope with the information overload of the real-time Web and keep up with it effectively. I don’t know of anyone providing a service for this yet. It’s a business opportunity.
• Nowness as a measure of value of content. We will need a new form of ranking of results by “nowness” – how timely they are now. So for example, in real-time search engines we shouldn’t rank results merely by how recent they are, but also by how timely, influential, and “hot” they are now. See my article from years ago on “A Physics of Ideas” for more about that. Real-time search companies should think of themselves as real-time monitoring companies — that’s what they are really going to be used for in the end. Only the real-time search ventures that think of themselves this way are going to survive the conceptual paradigm shift that the realtime Web is bringing about. In a realtime context, search is actually too late — once something has happened in the past it really is not that important anymore –what matters is current awareness: discovering the trends NOW. To do that one has to analyze the present, and the very recent past, much more than searching the longer term past. The focus has to be on real-time or near-real-time analytics, statistical analysis, topic and trend detection, prediction, filtering and alerting. Not search.
• New ways to understand and navigate the now. We will need a way to visualize and navigate the now. I’m helping to incubate a stealth startup venture, Live Matrix, that is working on that. It hasn’t launched yet. It’s cool stuff. More on that in the future when they launch.
• New tools for browsing the Stream. New tools will emerge for making the realtime Web more compelling and smarter. I’m working on incubating some new stealth startups in this area as well. They’re very early-stage so can’t say more about them yet.
• The merger of semantics with the realtime Web. We need to make the realtime Web semantic — as well as the rest of the Web — in order to make it easier for software to make sense of it for us. This is the best approach to increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of content we have to look at whether searching or monitoring stuff. The Semantic Web standars of the W3C are key to this. I’ve written a long manifesto on this in “Minding The Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web” if you’re really interested in that topic.

Faster Leads to Smarter

As the realtime web unfolds and speeds up, I think it will also have a big impact on what some people call “The Global Brain.” The Global Brain has always existed, but in recent times it has been experiencing a series of major upgrades — particularly around how connected, affordable, accessible and fast it is. First we got phone and faxes, then the Internet, the PC and the Web, and now the real-time Web and the Semantic Web. All of these recent changes are making the Global Brain faster, more richly interconnected. And this makes it smarter. For more about my thoughts on the Global Brain, see these two talks:

• My detailed History and Future of the Global Brain given at the Singularity Summit.
• A talk on the emerging Global Brain and human-machine cybernetic superorganism, with specific focus on what it means for media companies, from the GRID Conference.

What’s most interesting to me is that as the rate of communication and messaging on the Web approaches near-real time, we may see a kind of phase change take place – a much smarter Global Brain will sort of begin to appear out of the chaos. In other words, the speed of collective thinking is as important to the complexity or sophistication of collective thinking, in making the Global Brain significantly more intelligent. In other words, I’m proposing that there is a sort of critical speed of collective thinking, before which the Global Brain seems like just a crowd of actors chaotically flocking around memes, and after which the Global Brain makes big leaps — instead of seeming like a chaotic crowd, it starts to look more like an organized group around certain activitities — it is able to respond to change faster, and optimize and even do things collectively more productively than a random crowd could.

This is kind of like film, or animation. When you watch a movie or animation you are really watching a rapid series of frames. This gives the illusion of there being cohesive, continuous characters, things and worlds in the movie — but really they aren’t there at all, it’s just an illusion — our brains put these scenes together and start to recognize and follow higher order patterns. A certain shape appears to maintain itself and move around relative to other shapes, and we name it with a certain label — but there isn’t really something there, let alone something moving or interacting — there are just frames flicking by rapidly . It turns out that after a critical frame rate (around 20 to 60 frames per second) the human brain stops seeing individual frames and starts seeing a continuous movie. When you start flipping pages fast enough it appears to be a coherent animation and then we start seeing things “moving within the sequence” of frames. In the same way, as the unit of time of (aka the speed) of the real-time Web increases, its behavior will start to seem more continuous and smarter — we won’t see separate chunks of time or messages, we’ll see intelligent continuous collective thinking and adaptation processes.

In other words, as the Web gets faster, we’ll start to see processes emerge within it that appear to be cohesive intelligent collective entities in their own right. There won’t really be any actual entities there that we can isolate, but when we watch the patterns on the Web it will appear as if such entities are there. This is basically what is happening at every level of scale — even in the real world. There really isn’t anything there that we can find — everything is divisible down to the quantum level and probably beyond — but over time our brains seem to recognize and label patterns as discrete “things.” This is what will happen across the Web as well. For example, a certain meme (such as a fad or a movement) may become a “thing” in it’s own right, a kind of entity that seemingly takes on a life of its own and seems to be doing something. Similarly certain groups or social networks or activities they engage in may seem to be intelligent entities in their own rights.

This is an illusion in that there really are no entities there, they are just collections of parts that themselves can be broken down into more parts, and no final entities can be found. However, nonethless, they will seem like intelligent entities when not analyzed in detail. In addition, the behavior of these chaotic systems may resist reduction — they may not even be understandable and their behavior may not be predictable through a purely reductionist approach — it may be that they react to their own internal state and their environments virtually in real-time, making it difficult to take a top-down or bottom-up view of what they are doing. In a realtime world, change happens in every direction.

As the Web gets faster, the patterns that are taking place across it will start to become more animated. Big processes that used to take months or years to happen will happen in minutes or hours. As this comes about we will begin to see larger patterns than before, and they will start to make more sense to us — they will emerge out of the mists of time so to speak, and become visible to us on our human timescale — the timescale of our human-level “now. As a result, we will become more aware of higher order dynamics taking place on the real-time Web, and we will begin to participate in and adapt to those dynamics, making those dynamics in turn even smarter. (For more on my thoughts about how the Global Brain gets smarter, see:  “How to Build the Global Mind.”)

See Part II: “Will The Web Become Conscious?” if you want to dig further into the thorny philosophical and scientific issues that this brings up…

We are so focused on how to improve present-day search engines. But that is a kind of mental myopia. In fact, a more interesting and fruitful question is why do people search at all? What are they trying to accomplish? And is there a better way to help them accomplish that than search?

Instead of finding more ways to get people to search, or ways to make existing search experiences better, I am starting to think about how to reduce or  eliminate the need to search — by replacing it with something better.

People don’t search because they like to. They search because there is something else they are trying to accomplish. So search is in fact really just an inconvenience — a means-to-an-end that we have to struggle through to do in order to get to what we actually really want to accomplish. Search is “in the way” between intention and action. It’s an intermediary stepping stone. And perhaps there’s a better way to get to where we want to go than searching.

Searching is a boring and menial activity. Think about it. We have to cleverly invent and try pseudo-natural-language queries that don’t really express what we mean. We try many different queries until we get results that approximate what we’re looking for. We click on a bunch of results and check them out. Then we search some more. And then some more clicking. Then more searching. And we never know whether we’ve been comprehensive, or have even entered the best query, or looked at all the things we should have looked at to be thorough. It’s extremely hit or miss. And takes up a lot of time and energy. There must be a better way! And there is.

Instead of making search more bloated and more of a focus, the goal should really be get search out of the way.  To minimize the need to search, and to make any search that is necessary as productive as possible. The goal should be to get consumers to what they really want with the least amount of searching and the least amount of effort, with the greatest amount of confidence that the results are accurate and comprehensive. To satisfy these constraints one must NOT simply build a slightly better search engine!

Instead, I think there’s something else we need to be building entirely. I don’t know what to call it yet. It’s not a search engine. So what is it?

Bing’s term “decision engine” is pretty good, pretty close to it. But what they’ve actually released so far still looks and feels a lot like a search engine. But at least it’s pushing the envelope beyond what Google has done with search. And this is good for competition and for consumers. Bing is heading in the right direction by leveraging natural language, semantics, and structured data. But there’s still a long way to go to really move the needle significantly beyond Google to be able to win dominant market share.

For the last decade the search wars have been fought in battles around index size, keyword search relevancy, and ad targeting — But I think the new battle is going to be fought around semantic understanding, intelligent answers, personal assistance, and commerce affiliate fees. What’s coming next after search engines are things that function more like assistants and brokers.

Wolfram Alpha is an example of one approach to this trend. The folks at Wolfram Alpha call their system a “computational knowledge engine” because they use a knowledge base to compute and synthesize answers to various questions. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, going through various data, computing and comparing, and then synthesizes a concise answer.

There are also other approaches to getting or generating answers for people — for example, by doing what Aardvark does: referring people to experts who can answer their questions or help them. Expert referral, or expertise search, helps reduce the need for networking and makes networking more efficient. It also reduces the need for searching online — instead of searching for an answer, just ask an expert.

There’s also the semantic search approach — perhaps exemplified by my own Twine “T2″ project — which basically aims to improve the precision of search by helping you get to the right results faster, with less irrelevant noise. Other consumer facing semantic search projects of interest are Goby and Powerset (now part of Bing).

Still another approach is that of Siri, which is making an intelligent “task completion assistant” that helps you search for and accomplish things like “book a romantic dinner and a movie tonight.” In some ways Siri is a “do engine” not a “search engine.” Siri uses artificial intelligence to help you do things more productively. This is quite needed and will potentially be quite useful, especially on mobile devices.

All of these approaches and projects are promising. But I think the next frontier — the thing that is beyond search and removes the need for search is still a bit different — it is going to combine elements of all of the above approaches, with something new.

For a lack of a better term, I call this a “help engine.” A help engine proactively helps you with various kinds of needs, decisions, tasks, or goals you want to accomplish. And it does this by helping with an increasingly common and vexing problem: choice overload.

The biggest problem is that we have too many choices, and the number of choices keeps increasing exponentially. The Web and globalization have increased the number of choices that are within range for all of us, but the result has been overload. To make a good, well-researched, confident choice now requires a lot of investigation, comparisons, and thinking. It’s just becoming too much work.

For example, choosing a location for an event, or planning a trip itinerary, or choosing what medicine to take, deciding what product to buy, who to hire, what company to work for, what stock to invest in, what website to read about some topic. These kinds of activities require a lot of research, evaluations of choices, comparisons, testing, and thinking. A lot of clicking. And they also happen to be some of the most monetizable activities for search engines. Existing search engines like Google that make money from getting you to click on their pages as much as possible have no financial incentive to solve this problem — if they actually worked so well that consumers clicked less they would make less money.

I think the solution to what’s after search — the “next Google” so to speak — will come from outside the traditional search engine companies. Or at least it will be an upstart project within one of them that surprises everyone and doesn’t come from the main search teams within them. It’s really such a new direction from traditional search and will require some real thinking outside of the box.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last month or two. It’s fascinating. What if there was a better way to help consumers with the activities they are trying to accomplish than search? If it existed it could actually replace search. It’s a Google-sized opportunity, and one which I don’t think Google is going to solve.

Search engines cause choice overload. That wasn’t the goal, but it is what has happened over time due to the growth of the Web and the explosion of choices that are visible, available, and accessible to us via the Web.

What we need now is not a search engine — it’s something that solves the problem created by search engines. For this reason, the next Google probably won’t be Google or a search engine at all.

I’m not advocating for artificial intelligence or anything that tries to replicate human reasoning, human understanding, or human knowledge. I’m actually thinking about something simpler. I think that it’s possible to use computers to provide consumers with extremely good, automated decision-support over the Web and the kinds of activities they engage in. Search engines are almost the most primitive form of decision support imaginable. I think we can do a lot better. And we have to.

People use search engines as a form of decision-support, because they don’t have a better alternative. And there are many places where decision support and help are needed: Shopping, travel, health, careers, personal finance, home improvement, and even across entertainment and lifestyle categories.

What if there was a way to provide this kind of personal decision-support — this kind of help — with an entirely different user experience than search engines provide today? I think there is. And I’ve got some specific thoughts about this, but it’s too early to explain them; they’re still forming.

I keep finding myself thinking about this topic, and arriving at big insights in the process. All of the different things I’ve worked on in the past seem to connect to this idea in interesting ways. Perhaps it’s going to be one of the main themes I’ll be working on and thinking about for this coming decade.