Nova Spivack recently wrote an article describing a lawsuit waged against him by a shareholder in his former company, Radar Networks, the company behind Twine. Such lawsuits are commonplace amongst entrepreneurs, and Spivack offers advice to others in the same predicament. Spivack writes, “In a nutshell, this one shareholder, out of many that we had, has filed a lawsuit against many of the other shareholders, directors and our acquirer, to try to forcefully regain part of their investment. This kind of lawsuit is unfortunately not that uncommon when companies are sold, or shut down; It’s just not talked about that much.” Read more

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Evri Announces Acquisition of Twine, Relaunches Consumer Site PR-USA.net (press release) “Twine was developed to provide consumers with a smarter way to keep up with their interests, powered by the Semantic Web,” said Radar Networks CEO Nova … TechCrunch: Evri Acquires Radar Networks In Semantic Search Consolidation NewsFactor Network Real-time firm Evri acquires Radar Networks StrategyEye all 3 news articles »

Real-time firm Evri acquires Radar Networks StrategyEye Real-time search company Evri is acquiring Radar Networks because it uses similar semantic technology to deliver its results. …

Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, which developed Twine, an ambitious "interest network" Web application based on semantic Web technologies, , said that Wolfram Alpha may be as "important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different …

Twine, explosively growing, is an early success VentureBeat, CA - 23 hours ago Twine, if you’ll recall, was an early poster-child for the semantic web, through its parent company Radar Networks. Before people saw the service, …

Part I : Advice from Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks at SemTech 2008. Radar Networks is the creator of Twine, a promising semantic-social-networking collaboration app.

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What is commonly understood about the Semantic Web is not what I care to write about. I have a long professional history of looking to the future of business and how things come together in unique and challenging ways. In other words how stuff turns out that most people did not anticipate and thus did not factor into their decision making – sometimes with terrible consequences. This is no doubt true also with the Semantic Web.

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Back when I was an industry analyst (VP, E-Business Strategies at the META Group, since acquired by Gartner), I often had to critique emerging markets.  Unlike venture capitalists, industry analysts are privy to product roadmaps from publicly-traded companies, including the industry giants (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM).  And unlike i-bankers, they are privy to product roadmaps from start-ups.  And as a kicker, some analysts (actually, only those with the largest firms; back then, primarily limited to those analysts with Gartner, Forrester, META and Giga) get a lot of great feedback from CIOs and other end users.

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Yesterday I was able to spend a few minutes on the phone with Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks. If you’re reading this newsletter, you already know that Radar Networks announced its closed beta for Twine, its semantically enabled collaboration and information system.

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Web developers use microformats to get out of the Semantic Web starting gate. True technological paradigm shifts don’t happen easily. There’s always the challenge of getting from here to there. The IT industry has typically referred to this as the "installed base" problem, and it represents as thorny an issue for new development concepts as it does for actual products. This has been one of the issues standing in the way of more rapid enterprise adoption of the Semantic Web. Until relatively recently, early users of Semantic Web technologies and techniques did not have a "bridge" from current to new Web practices that would make the transition easier. Microformats provide such a bridge.

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