Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses on ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
This is just a brief post because I am actually slammed with VC meetings right now. But I wanted to congratulate our friends at Metaweb for their pre-launch announcement. My company, Radar Networks, is the only other major venture-funded play working on the Semantic Web for consumers so we are thrilled to see more action [...]
Is it only Wednesday? It feels like a whole week already! I’ve been in back-to-back VC meetings, board discussions and strategy meetings since last week. I think this must be related to the heating-up of the "Web 3.0" meme and the semantic sector in general. Perhaps it is also due to the coverage we got [...]
I’ve been thinking since 1994 about how to get past a fundamental barrier to human social progress, which I call “The Collective IQ Barrier.” Most recently I have been approaching this challenge in the products we are developing at my stealth venture, Radar Networks. In a nutshell, here is how I define this barrier: The [...]
Here at Radar Networks we are working on practical ways to bring the Semantic Web to end-users. One of the interesting themes that has come up a lot, both internally, as well as in discussions with VC’s, is the coming plateau in the productivity of keyword search. As the Web gets increasingly large and complex, keyword [...]
Editor’s NOTE, February 27, 2007: I guess this post must have helped. The Wikipedia has reinstated a page about Web 3.0 and hopefully it will improve over time. Thanks if you helped argue the case. Someone at Wikipedia has repeatedly deleted the Web 3.0 page and locked it — they’ve done this despite the fact [...]
VC interest in my startup, Radar Networks has suddenly ignited in the last two weeks. We were planning to wait before shopping our deal, but I guess the app speaks for itself. VC’s have been coming over pretty much non-stop this week. I don’t know who is telling them about us. But anyway, if you [...]
Hey just a reminder — please join us at the monthly SFWIN meetup in San Francisco tomorrow (Thursday) evening. So far, there are around 40 people RSVP’d including several VC’s, demo companies, and early stage startups, and as always, good food and drinks too. Should be a good event, hope to see you there — [...]
Another article of note on the subject of our evolving digital lives and what user-experience designers should be thinking about: Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more [...]
The folks at Read/Write Web have a great analysis of AOL’s recent move to support the OpenID initiative. AOL has integrated with OpenID, adding 63 million users in a bid to make AIM handles sticky. Digg also just announced they are joining OpenID. OpenID is one of the technologies that I am tracking as a [...]
Tom Hayes has an interesting post in which he coins the word ‘beme" to mean a meme that spreads in the blogosphere. Michael Malone’s ABC News column on Thursday mentioning "bemes" has certainly produced a lot of interest. Originally, I coined the word beme to describe a meme propagated by blogs and bloggers. Now I [...]
It’s been a while since I posted about what my stealth venture, Radar Networks, is working on. Lately I’ve been seeing growing buzz in the industry around the "semantics" meme — for example at the recent DEMO conference, several companies used the word "semantics" in their pitches. And of course there have been some fundings [...]
My friend and colleague, Adam Cheyer, from SRI, recently helped to advise and launch Change.org — a social network for nonprofit activism. It’s a great site for a great cause. It’s also a great example of a special-purpose social network — a useful social network. Congratulations to Adam and the team over there! Read the [...]
My startup company, Radar Networks, has been busy working in stealth on the next-generation of the Web (sometimes called "Web 3.0"). We’ve been quietly growing and putting the pieces in place all year. Today we are celebrating the opening of our new, much larger office at 410 Townsend in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco. [...]
The SFWIN (San Francisco Web Innovators) holiday meetup is this Thursday, Dec. 7 — Please join us! We’re celebrating one year of SFWIN events. We’re teaming up with the folks from SFBETA for this event and we’ve got a max limit of 175 attendees, so you must RSVP — it’s filling up fast. Hope to [...]
I just found out from Pete, that the Venice Project is making really heavy use of RDF. Very interesting. Another major proof point. It’s looking like 2007 is going to be the year of mainstream RDF applications. It sounds like there are some similarities between what the Venice Project is making, on a platform level, [...]
I’ve been reading some of the further posts on various blogs in reaction to the Markoff article in the New York Times last Sunday. There is a tremendous amount of misconception about the Semantic Web– as evidenced for example by Ross Mayfield’s post recently. Ross implied that the Semantic Web is about automating the Web, [...]
ZDnet’s Dan Farber, just blogged about the Semantic Web meme — Dan says: Back to Web 3.0. There will be one, and it has been associated at this point with concepts of the semantic Web, derived from the primordial soup of Web technologies. It’s been a focus of attention for Tim Berners-Lee, who cooked up [...]
John Markoff’s New York Times article discusses the term "Web 3.0" and equates it with the next evolution of the Web, in which he predicts a move towards more intelligent applications. First of all I want to say that I hope the use of the term "Web 3.0" in the article doesn’t distract from the [...]
I’ve read several blog posts reacting to John Markoff’s article today. There seem to be some misconceptions in those posts about what the Semantic Web is and is not. Here I will try to succinctly correct a few of the larger misconceptions I’ve run into: The Semantic Web is not just a single Web. There [...]
A New York Times article came out today about the Semantic Web — in which I was quoted, speaking about my company Radar Networks. Here’s an excerpt: Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But [...]