Nova Spivack

Current

• CEO and Founder at Radar Networks, Inc.
• CEO at Lucid Ventures, Inc.

Past

• Co-founder, nVention Incubator, Entrepreneur in Residence at SRI International and Sarnoff Corporation
• Co-Founder, VP Strategy and Products at EarthWeb
• Analyst -- Online Services, Emerging Technology, and Multimedia at Individual Inc.

• Consultant, Software Development and Technology Marketing at Thinking Machines
• Software developer at Xerox Kurzweil

see less...

2 more...

Recommended

4 people have recommended Nova

Connections

265 connections

Industry

Internet

Nova Spivack’s Summary

Presently, I'm working on new business models and technologies for the emerging Semantic Web. My current venture, Radar Networks, is in stealth mode. I'm interested in knowledge management, collaboration, social networking tools, community created content, and artificial intelligence. You can learn more about me and what I do at Lucid Ventures (www.lucidventures.com).

Nova Spivack’s Specialties:

Semantic Web entrepreneur; Co-founder of EarthWeb, also worked at Thinking Machines, Kurzweil, Individual, SRI/Sarnoff

Nova Spivack’s Experience

• CEO and Founder

  Radar Networks, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  January 2000 — Present (8 years 9 months)

  Radar Networks, Inc. is currently in Stealth-Mode.

• CEO

  Lucid Ventures, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  January 2000 — Present (8 years 9 months)

  Lucid is my incubator for intellectual property and ventures I start or get involved with. You can learn all about Lucid at www.lucidventures.com

• Co-founder, nVention Incubator, Entrepreneur in Residence

  SRI International and Sarnoff Corporation

  (Non-Profit; 1001-5000 employees; Internet industry)

  December 1999 — December 2000 (1 year 1 month)

  I was brought into Sarnoff Laboratories, the Microsoft of the Television era, by a board member. Sarnoff is presently a for-profit national R&D lab, that is owned by a leading non-profit think tank: SRI International. Sarnoff and SRI have hundreds of amazing patents from all their work for the government and leading corporations. I was brought in to help decide which ones to spin out as new ventures, and to advise and work with the startups we created. Our work focused around proprietary intellectual property such as cutting-edge broadband, mpeg video, satellite imaging, wireless networks, security, routing. I conceived of the idea to start an incubator and worked to co-found it, launch it, and worked with several of our startup ventures.

• Co-Founder, VP Strategy and Products

  EarthWeb

  (Public Company; 201-500 employees; EWBX; Internet industry)

  January 1994 — December 1999 (6 years)

  I co-founded EarthWeb with Jack Hidary and Murray Hidary in 1994. We were among the first few Internet companies in the world at that time. We grew the company for many years and went public in 1998. I left the board of directors in 1999. EarthWeb was a wild ride -- we were one of the first companies to make commercial Web sites (for the Met Museum of Art, The New York Stock Exchange, BMG Music Club, AT&T and many others), then we evolved to provide online services for other Web integrators -- for example Gamelan.com, Developer.com, Dice.com, etc. The IPO was an unexpected hit -- rising around 247% in the first day of trading and kicking off the second IPO bubble. In my time there I spearheaded our product strategy, marketing strategy and technology strategy, as well as working on business development and deal structures with my partners.

• Analyst -- Online Services, Emerging Technology, and Multimedia

  Individual Inc.

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Services industry)

  December 1993 — December 1994 (1 year 1 month)

  This was a really cool gig -- one of my favorites of all time. Individual was one of the first companies to use artificial intelligence to provide filtered strategic news feeds to corporate customers. My job there was essentially to function as an intelligence analyst for the private sector. I was part of the filtering process -- I took as input a firehose of incoming data found by the AI system, and then tuned it down to manageable trickles for the particular interests of our various customers -- mainly the top managers of leading global corporations. So essentialy I was the "aware" part of the Machine...and I LIKED it. I've always felt that the best pardigm for "ai" is a symbiotic partnership between humans and machines that is collectively 'more intelligent than the sum of its smarts,' so to speak.

• Consultant, Software Development and Technology Marketing

  Thinking Machines

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Computer Hardware industry)

  December 1987 — December 1989 (2 years 1 month)

  Thinking Machines was a legend in it's own time. Unfortunately it's also a legend in our time. But anyway, I was there in the heyday -- when Danny Hillis, Lew Tucker, Brewster Kahle, and many other great minds were all in one place building the fastest massively parallel supercomputer in the world at that time. It was like the best sci-fi movie, the coolest technology... except we were in it and the technology was real. Wish you could have been there; I don't think there's been a place like it since.

• Software developer

  Xerox Kurzweil

  (Public Company; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

  December 1986 — December 1987 (1 year 1 month)

  I worked for Ray Kurzweil's character recognition venture which was acquired by Xerox. We developed neural-net software to do things like automatically read to the blind, to analyze scanned information and turn it into ascii text files, etc. I built a Hypercard utility that could take the output of the neural net and create a database, from scanned tabular data documents. I loved Hypercard -- I still do -- that was an amazingly *complete* product. It was as beautifully executed as it was imagined. Wow. If only there were tools like that for the Web! Why hasn't anyone made Hypercard for the Web yet?

Additional Information

Nova Spivack’s Groups:

•    Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Boards

Nova Spivack’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch