Radar Networks

Radar Networks was a San Francisco-based data management company established in 2003 with the objective of creating Semantic Web applications for the general consumer market. The company was co-founded by Nova Spivack, a web entrepreneur and grandson of the renowned management consultant Peter Drucker, and Kristinn R. Thórisson, an AI researcher. Spivack's background in entrepreneurship and his focus on the future of the web, combined with Thórisson's expertise in artificial intelligence, formed the foundation of the company's technological pursuits.

The firm's core focus was on developing a proprietary platform to structure and manage information, moving beyond simple social connections to what founder Nova Spivack termed "knowledge networking." This technology was designed to enrich content and was seen as a new frontier in search, advertising, and e-commerce. Radar Networks' only publicly released product was Twine, a web service launched in October 2008. Twine functioned as an online tool for users to collect, organize, share, and discover content—such as articles, videos, and web pages—based on their interests.

The service utilized a semantic platform that combined natural language processing, statistical analysis, and graph analysis to automatically understand and tag the content users added. This auto-tagging engine would identify entities like people, places, and companies within the content, making it discoverable and linkable in a more structured way than traditional bookmarking services. The business aimed to address information overload by helping users intelligently track their interests. The company secured a Series A funding round in 2006 and a significant Series B round in February 2008, with investors including Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Velocity Interactive Group. After several years of operation and development, Radar Networks was acquired by Evri Inc. in March 2010. Shortly after the acquisition, its flagship product, Twine, was shut down in May 2010.

Keywords: Radar Networks, Twine, Nova Spivack, Kristinn R. Thórisson, semantic web, data management, knowledge networking, information organization, content aggregation, semantic application platform, natural language processing, auto-tagging, entity extraction, collective intelligence, Evri acquisition, Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, social bookmarking, interest tracking, web 3.0