Radar Gets More Funding for Twine

By SemanticWeb.com on February 25, 2008 11:43 AM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Radar Networks, the creator of the semantic web application Twine, used for sharing, organizing, and finding information, has secured $13 million in funding from Velocity Interactive Group.

According to CEO Nova Spivack, that’s enough to run the business for about a year and a half, including hiring more employees and scaling up its data center a bit as it moves toward a mass consumer audience. Just 1,000 people were in the first beta test, but 30,000 people are on the waiting list.

Of the deal, Spivack says, “This amount was exactly the amount I had targeted to raise. This was the deal we were looking for. Possibly we’ll raise more in the future from strategic partners and others. But we couldn’t spend more right now, so why raise more? You pay a very high price to do that.”

The next beta version of Twine launches March 5, and new users will gradually be invited in. Among the first group of self-selected and very motivated users are a group at a graduate school, systems integrators, companies, librarians, market researchers, analysts, and the like, many of whom are using Twine “many, many times a day.” Spivack wonders how the nature and quality of information in the service will change as the next beta, and beyond, opens Twine up to a wider audience. “Now you have extremely good information, since these are very knowledgeable people in the beta [phase], who don’t do things like spam,” he says. But it will be no different for Twine to have to deal with those challenges than it has been for other web-based services, he says.

So far, Radar has been interested to see the ways in which users are adapting the service to their needs — and they’re not necessarily what the company would have expected.

“We’re just learning from user behavior a bit to understand what our users want us to focus on,” says Spivack. “There are certain advanced things we thought were important, but that users thought were less important than some of the basic things.”

While there are a lot of authoring tools in Twine, for example, Spivack says Radar is finding that a lot of users are using it for more simple things, such as tracking, collecting, and keeping up with their interests. “We expected more authoring, and got more bookmarking,” he says, indicating that there are some basic management needs that remain unmet even in the age of services like del.icio.us.

In terms of applying some of the new funds to data center scale-up, Radar has ideas about the number of users that will migrate to Twine, Spivack but wants more data to base an accurate statistical projection on before making any public statements.

“Without specific numbers, we see a conversion and adoption rates that are many times the industry average, and we will see how that continues as Twine grows,” he say. He notes that the high-quality nature of the first round of users means it shouldn’t be surprising that rates have been very high. But, he notes, Twine is designed to be “an extremely viral application,” and he says users should expect to see new ways they can invite people to join, through email. “We will see some interesting things about that beyond the ways social networks might spread, related to e-mail,” though he declines to provide more details at this point. He also notes that users can expect at some point to see integration with Facebook.

Radar is currently in discussion with lots of potential partners, including organizations that might want to use it internally or to communicate with customers. There won’t be any announcements on that front for about six months, but, he notes, some of them have multi-million user audiences, “and to support that we do need to scale and test.”

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