Nova Spivack (March 11th, 2010):

Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine (http://www.twine.com/), have been acquired by Evri (http://corporate.evri.com/about-us/). TechCrunch broke the story here (http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/11/evri-acquires-radar-networks/).

This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.

As the CEO and founder of Radar Networks and Twine.com, I am both happy and relieved to have reached this milestone during what has been a difficult time of global recession. I am very proud of my 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, from multiple industry leaders in media, search and social software, we eventually selected Evri because not only did they make us the best offer, but we also felt Evri was the closest strategic and cultural fit to our mission and vision for Twine (note: Evri’s lead investor is Vulcan Capital, which is also the lead investor in Twine). Will Hunsinger, the CEO of Evri, and I have been speaking about the potential for teaming up since last year, and this deal made good sense for both companies.

The Twine team is joining Evri to continue our work there. Twine.com’s data and users are safe and sound and will be transitioned into the Evri.com service over time. This process will be done in a manner that protects privacy and data, and is minimally disruptive. I have great faith in the team at Evri and believe they will handle this with great 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 highpoints 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 incredible 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 is Nova Spivack going to do next?

I will be continuing to advise Evri going forward, 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 (http://livematrix.com/), a new venture that I co-founded with Sanjay Reddy (CEO of Live Matrix; formerly SVP of Corp Dev for Gemstar TV Guide). We will be announcing Live Matrix and providing first public details at SXSW, this weekend. We’re going to give the Web a new dimension: time. More news about this soon.

Klout (http://klout.com/), 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 starting a new early-stage fund with an innovative business model. It’s part incubator, part fund, part production company. Through this fund, 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 working on a book about major cultural shifts that are taking place, thanks in part to the real-time Web. And I’m looking forward to traveling and speaking about this topic widely in the coming year.

I’m looking forward to working more on my non-profit interests, particularly those related to supporting democracy and human rights around the world (http://www.challengepost.com/challenge/unblockable-anonymous-encrypted-mobile-interenet-a), 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 (http://twitter.com/novaspivack), and also keep up with my blog here at novaspivack.com (http://novaspivack.com/) and my mailing list (accessible in the upper right hand corner of this page).

http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/evri-ties-the-knot-with-twine

Evri, Nova Spivack, Radar Networks, Twine

An article by Allan Cho examines the confusion surrounding Web 3.0. It gives attention to the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web.

The article covers the topics Intelligent Web, Openness, Interoperability, A Global Database, 3D Web & Beyond, Control of Information, and Semantic Web versus Web 3.0.

Cho concludes:

Nova Spivack’s Twine is one of the first online services to use Web 3.0 technologies. Its goal is to organize, share and discover information about a user’s interests in networks of like-minded people. Using semantic technologies, and powered by semantic understanding, Twine automatically organizes information, learns about users’ specific interests and makes recommendations. The more users use Twine, the better the service gets to know its users and the more useful it becomes. Twine is an example of Web 3.0 at work, combining the social elements of Web 2.0 with user-specific Semantic Web tools.

http://internet.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_web_30

3D web, Allan Cho, article, control of information, global database, intelligent web, interoperability, Nova Spivack, openness, semantic web, Tim O’Reilly, Twine, web 2.0, web 3.0