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...
John Markoff published an interesting article today in the New York Times about the shift in software and operating systems from the desktop to the Web, in which I am quoted. The article focuses on the rivalry and different styles between Microsoft and Apple’s next-generation projects that attempt to tie desktop operating systems and the [...]
I met today with Jim Wissner, Chief Architect and co-founder of my company, Radar Networks. Jim started the company along with me and Kris Thorisson several years ago when we were just a few guys doing futuristic R&D. Jim has been working for a few months on a "secret project" in his spare time, and [...]
DICE, a company that I helped to acquire and build while I worked as a co-founder of EarthWeb, has announced they are doing a $100M IPO. Great news! That’s two IPO’s for EarthWeb — one as EarthWeb Inc., and now as Dice Inc. After the Internet bubble burst EarthWeb’s content assets were sold and we [...]
Hey everyone, it’s that time of the month again — yes, you guessed it, the monthly SFWIN meetup (San Francisco Web Innovators Network). Come join our high-quality network of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, techies, and vendors for an evening of conversation, food and drinks in San Francisco (the Orrick Building). It’s close to transit and there’s [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I’ve been saying for quite some time that the first thing the Semantic Web will accomplish is “doing for data what HTML did for documents.” HTML made it possible for everyone to publish, access and connect documents on the Internet. RDF and OWL — the languages of the Semantic Web — make it possible to [...]
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 [...]
Nice article in Scientific American about Gordon Bell’s work at Microsoft Research on the MyLifeBits project. MyLifeBits provides one perspective on the not-too-far-off future in which all our information, and even some of our memories and experiences, are recorded and made available to us (and possibly to others) for posterity. This is a good application [...]
Google’s Larry Page recently gave a talk to the AAAS about how Google is looking towards a future in which they hope to implement AI on a massive scale. Larry’s idea is that intelligence is a function of massive computation, not of “fancy whiteboard algorithms.” In other words, in his conception the brain doesn’t do [...]
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 [...]
If you are interested on what computer user-interfaces are going to feel like in the future — you must see this video of a demo of a new multi-touch computer monitor. This is amazing technology — and the various demos themselves are interactive artworks in their own right. For more information about the researchers and [...]
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 [...]