Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses on ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and one of the leading voices on the next-generation of search, social media, and the Web. He is a frequent speaker and blogger, and writes guest-articles for publications such as TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM, and SiliconAngle.
Nova is presently full-time CEO of Bottlenose and also advises and/or invests in several startups including Klout, Bottlenose, The Daily Dot, StreamGlider, Live Matrix, Chronos Trading, PublishThis, Sensentia, and Energy Magnification Corporation (in stealth).
In 1994, Nova co-founded one of the first Web startups, EarthWeb, which led to a record-breaking IPO in 1998, and a second IPO of spinout, DICE.com, in 2007.
Nova worked with Stanford Research International (SRI), to conceive and co-found their global business incubator, nVention (which launched SIRI), and participated in the DARPA CALO program, one of the largest national artificial intelligence projects in US history.
He was the founder of Radar Networks, which produced Twine, one of the first Semantic Web sites.
Nova has authored more than 30 granted and pending patents in areas from search, to advertising, social media, mobile apps, the semantic web, augmented reality, and more.
He earned his BA in Philosophy from Oberlin College in 1991, with a focus on the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. In 1992, he attended the International Space University, a NASA-funded graduate-level professional school for the space industry.
He is chairman of The Earth Dashboard initiative, a non-profit initiative to build a shared online dashboard to visualize the real-time state of the planet; he also serves on the board of directors of the Common Crawl Foundation, a nonprofit, 5+ billion page, free and open search index of the Web.
You can find him on Twitter at @novaspivack and his blog, novaspivack.com.
Additional details and history related to Nova Spivack can be found on his site, and his Wikipedia page.
In 1999, he flew to the edge of space with the Russian Air Force and did zero-gravity flight training with the Russian Space Agency, as one of the early pioneers of space tourism, which led to his later angel investment in Zero Gravity Corporation, which was acquired by Space Adventures.
Nova is the eldest grandson of the late management guru, Peter Drucker.
Nova speaks internationally and advises governments and corporations on product strategy and the future of the Web. He has co-authored books on Internet strategy and collective intelligence, and has authored hundreds of articles about the Web.
During the late 1980′s and early 1990′s, while in high-school and college, Nova worked as a software engineer and product marketer with artificial intelligence and supercomputing ventures including Xerox Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and Individual Inc. He also participated in summer computer science research at MIT, focused on cellular automata.
Nova has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for over 20 years and has pursued this interest extensively in monasteries, refugee camps and communities in Nepal, India, Europe and the USA. He focuses his philanthropic activities on helping to fund the preservation of Tibet’s unique wisdom culture.
While a student at Oberlin College, as well as studying philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and computer science, Nova did a winter term internship as a production assistant at Paramount Studios, working on Star Trek, The Next Generation.
In the mid 1990′s Nova co-authored a series of patents for early Web-TV convergence for a product called HyperTV, owned by ACTV. The patents covered simulcasting URLs and metadata on the television vertical blanking interval (VBI) in order to display relevant Web pages next to live television content on suitably instrumented TV’s and PCs. The patents were later sold to Disney.
Nova has been featured, cited, and has contributed guest articles in numerous media outlets such as: AdWeek, Atlantic Monthly, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, The BBC, CBS Evening News, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, CNBC, CNET, CNN, Der Spiegel, the Discovery Channel, Download Squad, the Economist, Entrepreneur, the Financial Times, Gartner, GigaOm, the Guardian, Guidewire, Industry Standard, Infoworld, Information Week, Interactive Age, International Herald Tribune, the L.A. Times, Mashable, the MIT Technology Review, the New Scientist, Newsweek, the New York Times, NPR, the Observer UK, PC Magazine, PC World, ReadWriteWeb, Red Herring, Reuters, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, SiliconAngle, TechCrunch, the Times Online, Venturebeat, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, WIRED and ZDNet
Nova has authored hundreds of articles and co-authored several books on Internet strategy and technology, and led the EarthWeb Press publishing imprint with Macmillan Computer Publishing.
Nova gave over 30 talks in 2009 – 2010, both to technical and business audiences. For videos of some of these talks please click here.
He has spoken, moderated, and served as a judge at numerous conferences and industry events, including: BlogTalk, Defrag, DEMO, DigitalNow, the Financial Times Digital Media Conference, the Future in Review, GigaOm’s Bunker sessions, the Highlands Forum, Internet World, Internet Expo, the International Semantic Web Conference, the Island Forum, the Kleiner Perkins CIO Strategy Exchange, MIT’s Emtech, NextWeb, NewTeeVee, SDForum, the Semantic Technology Conference, SIBOS, the Singularity Summit, Search Engine Strategies, Stanford/MIT’s VLAB, Supernova, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, and The Web 2.0 Summit.
Nova has also given guest lectures and keynotes for the MBA programs at Harvard University, Stanford University and Berkeley, as well as to several business schools in Europe. In addition, Nova has advised governments in the United States as well as Asia on the near-term and long-term future of the Web.
SharelOmer says: Great new site as you just quoted: “Your money, possessions, and fame will all be lost eventually, but the benefit you give to others will keep on going”.
Please keep on inspiring us to do great things…
[...] past week, Nova Spivack, founder of Twine, a web service that dealt with information overload, stopped by in our offices to discuss the future of the web. I [...]