| Web 3.0: New Opportunities on the Semantic Web
Robert Cook from Metaweb, Nova Spivack from Radar Networks, Alex Iskold from Adaptive Blue and Paul Kedrosky from Ventures West, moderated by Paul Saffo.
Moderator:
Panelists:
Event Description:
We are well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0.
What lies on the horizon? Will Web 3.0 usher in the long awaited vision of the semantic web, as proposed by “Father of the Web” Tim Berners-Lee more than ten years ago?
Join us for a lively panel session where some of the best emerging companies in the semantic web space present their different approaches to realizing the vision. The panel will address questions such as: How can we best implement the vision of the semantic web? What will we do with the web once it is structured with semantic information? What new applications will appear? Where is the consumer value and how should it be marketed? What new businesses can be built on top of the semantic web that are not possible today? Will the semantic web ultimately bring about a new intelligence that surpasses that of humanity, sparking a new era of non-biological evolution?
Join us and bring questions of your own – help us uncover the future of the web!
Bios:
Moderator:
Paul Saffo
Technology Forecaster and Consulting Professor
Stanford University
Paul is a forecaster and essayist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. He currently teaches at Stanford University and is a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was the founding chairman of the Samsung Science Board and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation and the Singapore National Research Foundation Science Advisory Board. He is also an advisor to 3i Venture Capital and has served as an advisor and Forum Fellow to the World Economic Forum. He is on a research sabbatical from Institute for the Future where he has worked since 1985. Paul’s essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times,and the Washington Post. Paul is also a columnist for ABCNews.com, writing on technology and innovation issues. Paul holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University. His web site is http://www.saffo.com
Panelists:
Robert Cook
Co-Founder and Executive VP of Product Development
Metaweb
Robert Cook co-founded Metaweb Technologies in July 2005. At parent company Applied Minds, Robert led the San Francisco office as Director of Knowledge Product Development. Since the start of his career, Robert has played the role of author, designer and programmer for myriad software applications. Robert’s first computer was an Elf II, which used the same microprocessor as the Voyager, Viking and Galileo spacecraft. At the young age of 15, Robert created database software for a small publishing company. He followed this first piece of work by publishing a number of computer games through Broderbund. This early work included the classic game Gumball as well as the Atari 400/800 and Commodore 64 versions of Karateka. Robert later designed the game D/Generation and acted as the technical director for The Last Express.
Robert holds a BS in Computer Science from Yale University.
Nova Spivack
Founder and CEO
Radar Networks
Nova Spivack is a technology visionary and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience in pioneering ventures. In 1994, Mr. Spivack co-founded EarthWeb, one of the first Internet companies, where he was Executive Vice-President for Products, Strategy and Marketing. EarthWeb went public in 1999 and resulted in the Nasdaq’s largest IPO single-day percentage point gain up to that point, spawning a wave of Tech IPOs. Mr. Spivack left EarthWeb’s board of directors in 1999 and began advising startups and angel investing. During the down-years of the post-Internet-bubble, EarthWeb’s content properties were acquired in 2000 by Internet.com. The company’s Dice.com property remained a strong stand-alone business until it was acquired for approximately $200 million in 2005.
While at EarthWeb he helped key cultural institutions and businesses develop their first large-scale Web presences, including the New York Stock Exchange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BMG Music Club, Sony, AT&T, US West, and others. He also helped to catalyze the adoption of Java technology by leading the production of large on communities for the IT professionals, including Gamelan.com, Developer.com, and Datamation.com.
Prior to EarthWeb, Mr. Spivack worked in a variety of roles from technology marketing to software engineering at artificial intelligence and next-generation computing ventures including Individual, Inc., Ray Kurzweil’s pioneering OCR company, Kurzweil Computer Products which was sold to Xerox, and at Danny Hillis’ legendary supercomputing venture, Thinking Machines. Mr. Spivack is also the founder of Lucid Ventures, an early-stage incubator that originated the technologies that are now Radar Networks. Mr. Spivack is a co-founder of the San Francisco Web Innovators Network (SFWIN), a network of several hundred technology innovators and business leaders who meet monthly in the Bay Area.
Mr. Spivack has extensive experience working on knowledge representation and the Semantic Web, and has authored and helped to design several large (500 to 3000 class) ontologies in the OWL language, the W3C open standard for ontology specifications. Mr. Spivack has also been a lead advisor to SRI International on the DARPA CALO program, a distributed research program encompassing several hundred top researchers across over 20 major research institutions focused on next-generation semantically-aware machine learning applications, and in particular on the IRIS Semantic Desktop project. Also with SRI and Sarnoff Laboratories, Mr. Spivack helped to co-found nVention, SRI’s in-house technology incubator.
Mr. Spivack has co-authored several books on Internet strategy and technology and led the EarthWeb Press publishing imprint with Macmillan Computer Publishing, one of the largest computer book publishers, which resulted in a series of publications by leading authors on technology. He has been featured and cited in Business Week, CNN, CNBC, CBS Evening News, CNN-FN, Discovery Channel, The New York Times, Washington Post, WIRED Magazine, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Communications Week, Interactive Week, Internet World, Reuters, Newsweek, Red Herring, Silicon Alley Reporter, Interactive Age, Web Week, Java Developer’s Journal, and has spoken at numerous conferences and industry events. Mr. Spivack also helped to invent key technologies for interactive television and Web convergence in the early days of the Web, as well as several pending patents for Radar Networks.
Mr. Spivack has a long-time interest in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, emergent computation, knowledge management and the emerging Semantic Web. As a grandson of management guru Peter F. Drucker, Mr. Spivack shares his family’s heritage of interests in management theory, nonprofits, and knowledge work. In addition, he has been a student of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, art and culture for nearly 20 years and has pursued this interest extensively in monasteries, refugee camps and communities in Nepal, India, Europe and the USA. Mr. Spivack focuses his philanthropic activities on helping to fund the preservation of Tibet’s unique wisdom culture as a world-heritage treasure for the benefit of future generations.
Mr. Spivack has a BA in Philosophy, with a focus on cognitive science and artificial intelligence, from Oberlin College and a CSS degree from the International Space University a NASA-funded graduate professional business school for the space industry. In 1999 Mr. Spivack’s interest in space gave him the opportunity to help pioneer the early days of space tourism when he flew to the edge of space with Space Adventures and did micro-gravity parabolic flight training with the Russian air force.
Mr. Spivack’s weblog, Minding the Planet, focuses on Radar Networks and emerging technologies and can be read at http://www.mindingtheplanet.net
Alex Iskold
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Adaptive Blue
Alex launched AdaptiveBlue because he was inspired by the vision of a personalized web. He is passionate about building elegant software that helps people save time and makes their online experience effective and enjoyable.
His previous startup, Information Laboratory, was focused on applying the ideas of Complexity Science to software engineering. Alex and his team developed a tool, called Small Worlds, which automatically identified structural problems in large-scale software systems. After Information Laboratory was acquired by IBM, Alex worked in the IBM Automated Software Quality group as an architect.
Alex regularly contributes to influencial Read/WriteWeb blog and Web 2.0 journal. You can see some of his articles in here, and read more in his blog at http://alexiskold.wordpress.com.
Paul Kedrosky
Venture Partner
Ventures West
Dr. Kedrosky is a venture capitalist, media personality, and entrepreneur. He is a sought-after speaker; an analyst for CNBC television; a columnist for TheStreet/RealMoney; the editor of Infectious Greed, one of the best known business blogs on the Internet; and he is frequently quoted in major publications around the world.
Most recently he has been the Executive Director of the William J. von Liebig Center in San Diego, California. Using an innovative seed capital program, the Center catalyzes the commercialization of technologies from the internationally-ranked University of California, San Diego.
He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, where he is focused on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the future of risk capital. He is also a venture partner with Ventures West, Canada’s largest institutional venture capital firm. In the latter capacity his interests include consumer technologies, media, semiconductors, and life sciences. He is currently on the board of Marqui Corporation, a marketing automation software firm, as well as Dabbledb, a hosted data management company.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Kedrosky founded the technology equity research practice at HSBC James Capel. As a highly-ranked technology equity analyst, transactions with which he was involved created in excess of a billion dollars in public market value. Dr. Kedrosky was one of the first analysts to cover Internet companies, as well as making early and timely calls in networking and communications.
Dr. Kedrosky has also been a successful entrepreneur. In 1999 he financed and launched one of the first hosted blogging services, GrokSoup. The service grew to more than a thousand subscribers. Relatedly, he wrote for Harvard Business Review what is widely regarded as the seminal article on dark matter and syndication technologies.
Dr. Kedrosky is a sought after media personality. He has hosted a television program, “Profiles on Innovation”, that is available on cable in the U.S., as well as on the web (at www.ucsd.tv). He has written influential columns for Business 2.0 magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Harvard Business Review, and others. He has also appeared on many media outlets, including CNN, PBS Newshour, ABC Nightline, and the New York Times, and he can be seen frequently on CNBC’s “On the Money”. He maintains one of the best known technology, venture capital, & finance blogs at http://paul.kedrosky.com.
Dr. Kedrosky currently divides his time between La Jolla, California, and Vancouver, British Columbia.
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