Minding the Planet

New Video: Leading Minds from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft talk about their Visions for Future of The Web

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

I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:

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

Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.

Jon Udell, Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

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

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

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

Enjoy!!!

Radar Networks Announces Twine.com

My company, Radar Networks, has just come out of stealth. We've announced what we've been working on all these years: It's called Twine.com. We're going to be showing Twine publicly for the first time at the Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow. There's lot's of press coming out where you can read about what we're doing in more detail. The team is extremely psyched and we're all working really hard right now so I'll be brief for now. I'll write a lot more about this later.

Radar Networks Coming Out of Stealth - Friday, October 19

News Flash!

My company, Radar Networks, is coming out of stealth this Friday, October 19, 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit, in San Francisco. I'll be speaking on "The Semantic Edge Panel" at 4:10 PM, and publicly showing our Semantic Web online service for the first time. If you are planning to come to Web 2.0, I hope to see you at my panel.

Here's the official Media Alert below:

               

(PRWEB) October 15, 2007 -- At the Web2.0 Summit on October 19th, Radar Networks will announce a revolutionary new service that uses the power of the emerging Semantic Web to enable a smarter way of sharing, organizing and finding information. Founder and CEO Nova Spivack will also give the first public preview of Radar’s application, which is one of the first examples of “Web 3.0” – the next-generation of the Web, in which the Web begins to function more like a database, and software grows more intelligent and helpful.

Join Nova as he participates in “The Semantic Edge” panel discussion with esteemed colleagues including Powerset’s Barney Pell and Metaweb’s Daniel Hillis, moderated by Tim O’Reilly.

Who:   
Radar Networks Founder and CEO Nova Spivack

When:   
Friday, October 19, 2007
4:10 – 4:55 p.m.
   
Where: 
Web2.0 Summit
Palace Hotel
Grand Ballroom
2 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco,  California  94105
   

Update from the Web 2.0 Conference: THE WEB BIZ IS BACK!

I've been at the Web 2.0 Conference here in San Francisco this week. And it's been incredible. Not only is it completely mobbed, but the energy is just intense. There are so many new companies, so much VC interest, and it really feels like the Web industry has suddenly woken up from a 10-year slumber. In fact, it feels like 1995 all over again. There's a tangible sense that something Big and New is happening here -- that Web 2.0 is really changing the game -- and gaining momentum. And there are so many new funded startups here. But there is also a tangible difference between the Web business today and the biz in 1995: Today it's much more rational. People have learned from what worked and didn't work in the 90's. The startups are all run by experienced teams, and they've got a clear understanding of what they're doing. There's also a decade of case studies to draw on for how this business really works: the revenue models that actually work and how to implement them, the best-practices for funding, building and executing Web business models, and the relevant metrics for measuring progress and success. The entrepreneurs and the VCs are more seasoned now and there is a clear sense that everyone is really thinking carefully about every move. That said, there is also a growing excitement around AJAX, social apps, and the potential of Web 2.0 to enable a whole new generation of software and services. And my startup, Radar Networks, is sitting right in the sweet-spot of all this new activity and energy. It's a great time to be starting an Internet venture!

Time Traveler Convention and Further Thoughts

There's a very interesting event taking place at MIT tonight -- the first (and only?) Time Traveler Convention. The organizers are inviting anyone in the future who is capable of time travel to travel back to the geo coordinates of this event (to be held at MIT) and attend it, along with proof that they are from the future. In order to increase the chances that this event will be discovered by the relevant people in the future, the organizers have asked as many people as possible to link to the event and have also asked people to insert acid-free paper containing the coordinates of the event into library books that are likely to be read in the future.

This event is an experiment that attempts to test whether in fact time travel will be invented in our future. The hypothesis is that if time travel is possible, and if it is discovered, and if future time-travel-capable beings also find out about this MIT Convention, then they will travel back in time to the event. Of course this begs the question of whether they actually would attend this event even if they could -- for example, perhaps they prefer to remain secret at this time? Or perhaps if they prove to us that time travel is possible at this moment in our evolution it might influence their timeline such that it could risk interfering with their past discovery of time travel or risk the technology ending up in the wrong hands in the future. Or maybe, just maybe, they are simply too "cool" to travel all that distance backwards in time (and spend who knows how much money to do so) just to have cheap chips and dip for an hour or two with a room full of MIT nerds? I mean hey, if I could travel backwards in time would I go to a geek gathering at MIT or would I go somewhere more fun (and with better food and drinks too) like an imperial party in ancient Rome?

In any case, the various potential risks of time travel might outweigh the potential benefit of any actual time travelers attending the MIT event. But let's hope that some real live time travelers do show up at the event. I know one thing for certain, if anyone does show up from the future they will probably be geeks too, since anyone who isn't a geek probably has other parties higher on their list.

Incidentally, this event reminds me of a similar proposal I came up with last year for building a receiver that might be able to receive a message from the future. While time travel by macroscopic things like people might be difficult or impossible due to the amount of energy required and the potential negative impact on the physical structure of the traveler, sending messages backwards in time could be more practical. Such messages could be comprised of subatomic particles or tiny black holes or local disturbances in fundamental fields or physical constants. The question is, how to design a receiver that could receive messages sent by beings in the future? If anyone can think of how to do this, blog about it and link to this article (since comments are off); I'll see your post via the trackbacks hopefully and if it's a really good idea I'll link to it from this article. If someone can design and actually build a suitable receiver then just like the MIT event, it could be publicized widely in the hopes that in the future if and when there is suitable technology, someone will send a message to it.

Links:

My friend, Tom Meyer, suggests that we might be able to utilize existing particle accelerators as "receivers" -- his idea is that we publicize that we will be analyzing the data from a particular device for anomalies placed there as messages to us. It's an intriquing proposal. Would it work?

Video Explains Semantic Web + A Comment

Ben Hammersly has come out with a video of his talk explaining the Semantic Web for beginners. It's a great resource to explain what the Semantic Web is all about for people who are new to the subject or simply interested in the underlying technology of RDF, the concept of triples, etc. It is also unique because Ben's video appears in the upper left corner of his presentation, synched to his slides -- now that is really cool! What a great idea!

Now my reaction to this presentation is that Ben makes many good points, but he says the only remaining big problems of the Semantic Web are "getting people to make data" and the "user-interface" for search and what he calls "compound queries" -- what I call "semantic queries" (and what have been called "multifaceted navigation" by library scientists for a long-time). However, I think there is another unsolved problem -- one that is equally important to adoption of the Semantic Web, what I call "The Ontology Problem." See my next post for more on this...