Radar Networks

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Radar Networks
Type Private
Founded 2003
Founder Nova Spivack, Kristinn R. Thórisson
Headquarters San Francisco, California, USA
Key people Nova Spivack, CEO; Lew Tucker, CTO & VP of Engineering; Sonja Erickson, VP, Systems Engineering; Christopher Jones, VP of Product Development; Jim Wissner, Chief Architect
Industry Data management
Employees 20
Website www.radarnetworks.com
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Radar Networks is a San Francisco based company developing semantic web applications for the general public[1]. The company was founded in 2003 by Nova Spivack and Kristinn R. Thórisson (co-founder).

Contents

[edit] History

The company was founded in 2003 by web entrepreneur Nova Spivack, grandson of the late Peter Drucker, and AI researcher Kristinn R. Thórisson. They were soon joined by Jim Wissner, who is now the company's Chief Architect. Thórisson was CTO of Radar Networks until 2004 when he joined Reykjavik University. He remains on the company's Board of Advisors.

In April 2006 it was announced that Radar Networks would be funded by Vulcan Capital and Leapfrog Ventures, and that their first product would be released in 2007[2]. Shortly thereafter, in August 2006, the company announced Lew Tucker would become CTO and Vice-President of Radar Networks[3].

It has been stated that, as of summer 2007, the company has received around USD $10 million in venture funding from Vulcan Capital and Leapfrog Ventures[4]. Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital along with Peter Rip from Leapfrog Ventures reside in Radar Network's board of directors along with Nova Spivack.

The company remains in stealth mode but their research and development has been covered to some extent in interviews and on the founder's personal blog. General information on the usage and purpose of their first product has been revealed (see below), and the company's founder has described their work as enabling next generation social software and search [5]. Little has been revealed regarding the technical aspects and implementation of their systems.

[edit] Technology

Radar Networks works on semantic web, online applications intended for the general public. Semantic web technologies are often referred to as quintessential to Web 3.0, and are intended to extend the World Wide Web by adding a new, machine processable layer of data. Several large organizations, such as Citigroup and Eastman Kodak Co., are using semantic technologies to handle their data to increase efficiency[6], but applications for the general public have remained harder to implement.

The modern web (or Web 2.0) introduced some services to tag data in order to make it easier to browse and find relevant information. Flickr and Technorati tags are an example of such services, where users can add additional information (metadata tags) to a photo or blogpost that describes or relates to the content. Semantic web services are similar as they involve adding machine-processable tags to data with a markup language (like RDF). The essential difference between the current usage of tags and semantic tags is the addition of an ontology that describes what things in the world are and how they are related. Such a contextual framework is intended to enable computers to understand and reason with data, thus making way for more intelligent data handling methods[7].

Other companies working on similar technologies are, for example, AskMeNow, Garlik, Metaweb and Powerset.

[edit] Products

Twine 'semantic service' is Radar Networks' first consumer application, which released on 19.10.2007. It is a semantic 'personal data organizer' through which people will be able to upload data from their own resources ' like emails'. They will also be able to access data from multiple other online services such as YouTube and Flickr. As of October 2007, the application is still in Invite Beta and has been described as enabling both manual and automatic 'tagging' of these pieces of data with semantic markup (see above), so that computers can process it more intelligently[8]. The service is announced to be a knowledge network. Group and interaction capabilities have been announced and the application can thus also be considered a social network that allows people to share and collaboratively edit data. The application brand is designed by Igor International — a branding company based in San Francisco, California[9].

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ John Markoff (2006-11-12). Entrepreneurs See Web Guided By Common Sense. New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-08-14.
  2. ^ Radar Networks (2007-04-06). Radar Networks Announces Closing of Series A Financing. Radarnetworks.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-13.
  3. ^ Radar Networks (2006-08-28). Java Pioneer & Creator of Salesforce.com AppExchange to be CTO of New Web Venture. radarnetworks.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-13.
  4. ^ Michael Copeland (2007-03-07). Web 3.0: No Humans Required. Business2.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-11.
  5. ^ David Needle (2007-02-26). Developer Tool Targets Semantic Web. Internetnews.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-13.
  6. ^ A Web That Thinks Like You. BusinessWeek.com (2007-07-09). Retrieved on 2007-08-11.
  7. ^ W3C Semantic Web FAQ
  8. ^ Michael Copeland (2007-03-07). Web 3.0: No Humans Required. Business2.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-11.
  9. ^ Nova Spivack (2007-07-18). Radar Networks Progress Update. novaspivack.typepad.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-11.

[edit] External links