The Funding of the Emerging Semantic Web

The dam is finally beginning to break on the funding for the emerging Semantic Web. The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that a more powerful, integrated Web is about to emerge, where data about information is much more structured than it is today. The $42.4M invested in Metaweb Technologies in January, 2008 was led in by Silicon Valley’s Benchmark Capital and the venerable, Wall Street investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs.

Metaweb Technologies characterizes its ‘Knowledge web’ as a massive, collaboratively-edited database (like Wikipedia) of cross-linked data. In the future, its founder, Danny Hillis, hopes to generate business revenue by providing means for the ownership of information on the Internet. However, Metaweb holds a thin intellectual property portfolio. Metaweb’s founder began globally filing patents in 2001. Before $15M was raised in March, 2006, he did not keep up the patent application fees. Only one of those patent applications (US Patent Application 20050086188) for “Knowledge web” remains. The patent fees have been paid and it will issue this spring so congratulations to Mr. Hillis are certainly in order. It’s always a happy day when a patent issues. But the Knowledge Web patent will only be enforceable within U.S. borders. And, even then, do the claims cover the authoring of structured data without the necessity of Wikepedia-like collaboration? I ask this question because a critical characteristic of ownership must certainly revolve the choice of non-collaboration.

The investment is considerable even though Metaweb is pre-revenue. But the bottom line is that it is now possible to assign a very real return on investment to Semantic Web technologies.

Update on Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 9:05AM by Steve Holcombe

Twine, another pre-revenue San Francisco start-up, may be the next, next big thing after Metaweb when it comes to the funding of the Semantic Web. Series A funding of $5M was landed in 2006. Series B funding of $15M-$20M was apparently finalized in February, 2008. Twine’s bankable founder, Nova Spivack, says Twine is more like a semantic Facebook while Metaweb is more like a semantic Wikipedia.

Twine’s business model is to provide a Facebook-like interface for the purpose of deepening data connections between networked users. Will connections be ontologically deepened between networked users without their permission? We’ll just have to see how that plays out. One would think that Twine would philosophically lean much more than Metaweb toward providing data owners with non-collaborative control over the data and information.

Twine holds four pending U.S. patent applications (US Patent Application 20040158455, US Patent Application 20040220893, US Patent Application 20040230676, and US Patent Application 20060004703).

Update on Friday, April 18, 2008 at 8:53AM by Steve Holcombe

Here's a video clip interview of Novack Spivack, CEO of both Radar Networks and Twine, made on April 4, 2008.

Learning from the Future with Nova Spivack from Maarten on Vimeo.

 
Notice in the interview that Spivack opines that the Web is moving toward becoming 'one big database' though he makes no mention of the importance of data ownership to facilitating this move.

See, by comparison, Ownership Principles for Database Design which specifically addresses the question, "Why not one big database?".

Update on Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 8:15PM by Steve Holcombe

See also Nova Spivack: Making Sense of the Semantic Web ...