What has Nova Spivack been up to? Get a sneak peek here...
Mr. Spivack is CEO and Founder of Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com), a stealth-mode technology venture located in San Francisco. It's a Semantic Web initiative. Definitively Web 3.0. Here's an excerpt from a recently posted article in Business2.0 that gives what i t hink is the first sneak peak under the covers:
The first consumer app Radar plans to launch is a sort of personal data organizer. It will allow you to bring in e-mail, contacts, photos, video, music --anything digital, really -- from anywhere on the Web, turn it into RDF, and access it in one place. Semantic tags are added manually, or automatically if the item is a photo from Flickr or a video from YouTube. "We add a new level of order to connect and interact with these things at a higher level than is possible today," Spivack says. "We are letting you build a little semantic Web for your project, your group, or your interest." When it's done, it should be like the best wiki you've ever used. To illustrate, Spivack flips open his computer and pulls up his own Radar-enabled page. On it are groups of people he knows and interests he's pursuing, including the space industry, alternative energy, physics, Internet-related technology, and skiing. In each of these categories are objects that Spivack has collected and tagged or, if it is a topic that has multiple people included, that they have collected and tagged. In the skiing topic, for example, Spivack has posed a question: Where should we go skiing? One of the responses is Alta, Utah. When Spivack clicks on that item, the Radar engine goes out and finds all the things in the Radar Networks database related to Alta. It "knows" that Alta, in this case, refers to a place (as opposed to the Spanish word for "high"), so there are hotel suggestions. There are also photos, videos, trail maps, and comments from people in his group who have skied there before. In a sense, what Radar allows Spivack to do is build a database around any question, project, or interest he may have and then start looking at it from different perspectives: cost, distance from San Francisco, snow conditions in March, nearby restaurants, what his friends liked about a particular resort. And if they liked Alta, what other places did they like? "You start to see new ways to look at the information," Spivack says. "What gets me excited is what we can do when we have billions of objects and 10 million people using them." For that to happen, of course, people need to start adding their own digital stuff to the mix. The digital life organizer is the bait Spivack and his team are using to try to draw them in. The team will also open Radar Networks to outside developers to write their own applications. Those might involve travel, food, or a better way to manage large projects. Radar hopes to be the engine powering all that, providing a massive, meaning-filled Web of data that can be infinitely poked and prodded and leveraged. The company will make its money from advertising and premium subscriptions; the basic service will be free.