Want to be notified to turn on the AC when a room reaches a certain temperature? Or when your laundry’s done? Well MIT Media Lab alumni Supermechanical have built Twine, a sleek 2.5″ rubber square which connects to Wifi and allows objects to “communicate” under certain conditions.
The Twine, which reminds me of a Square from a design simplicity perspective, comes with a web app, ‘Spool’ which allows you to program its sensors with natural language rules like “When: accelerometer is at rest, Then: Tweet” in the case of the laundry done thing, for example. → Read More
There’s a nasty, and very personal, lawsuit in progress between Radar Networks and a jilted investor, Kate Paley (daughter of CBS icon William Paley). The defendants include founder Nova Spivack, the company that eventually acquired Radar Networks (Evri) as well as investors Steve Hall, Ross Levinsohn and Baris Kardogan.
The company, known by most through it’s product Twine, was once doing quite well from an outsider’s perspective, but the reality, according to the lawsuit, is that the company was scrambling for ways to stay in business by 2008. The way that the company raised new money, and the details around its eventual sale to Evri, are a warning to any startup – sometimes it’s better to just shut down a failed company and move on. → Read More
After shopping itself around to all the major search engines, Radar Networks finally found a buyer in another semantic search startup. Today, Evri is announcing that it will be acquiring Radar Networks, along with its core technical team and its main product, Twine. Rumors surfaced yesterday on ReadWriteWeb that Evri was being acquired, but that is not the case. Evri is the acquirer. → Read More
Yesterday, Bing released a surprisingly useful new feature around recipe search. If you search for “Chicken,” you can narrow the results down by “chicken recipes” and then a whole bunch of new filtering options appear down the left-hand column. You can further narrow results by recipe rating, cuisine (vegetarian, Spanish, Southwestern), convenience (quick/easy, family, entertaining), occasion (wedding, Valentine’s Day), main ingredient, course, or cooking method. Bing is big on guided search (showing relevant search categories to help narrow results), but this goes one step further towards semantic search (the ability to index and search the Web by different facets). Recipes are just the beginning, and it’s not just Bing. Google and a handful of startups, including Evri, Hakia, and Radar Networks, are hard at work on making semantic search a reality. The race is on to bring this type of semantic filtering for nearly every category of search across the Web.
In fact, Bing’s recipe search looks a hell of a lot like T2, the semantic search engine being developed in private by Radar Networks. The startup currently offers a semantic bookmarking application called Twine which is on autopilot, but T2 is much more ambitious. Not many people have seen T2, but CEO Nova Spivack once gave me a demo and I took a bunch of screenshots like the one above (there are also slides on the Web). When you search for “chicken” on T2, you can also narrow by difficulty level, meal, main ingredient, dietary option, cuisine, course, and so on. Recipes happens to be one of T2′s strong suits. It has perhaps the largest semantic indexes of recipes in the world with 300,000 recipes. But it is also building out its semantic search index for video games, movies, music, travel, health, sports, and other category verticals. → Read More
Extracting meaning from the Web is huge project that is very difficult to do at large scale. Keyword search only skims the surface of meaning locked in Web pages. Various semantic search technologies try to go deeper by adding structured data to web pages so that the Web can be treated more like a database. But adding semantic metadata to the Web is laborious and time-consuming. Just look at Twine. It’s approach so far has been to add semantic data only to the Web pages members save to the service.
While it appeared like Twine was finally getting some traction earlier this year, it’s fallen by the wayside. Traffic is way down (see chart below), partly because it is no longer buying traffic with ads and partly because of changes to the way Google indexes the site. Bottom line is that is that beyond a hardcore following of about 250,000, Twine does not have broad appeal.
But CEO Nova Spivack and his team at Twine have been busy working on something else entirely, to the point that the current Twine service is pretty much on autopilot. In the video after the jump, Spivack gives a sneak peak at what his team has been working on. Codenamed T2, it is complete departure from the navel-gazing approach of Twine 1.0. It is a big step towards creating a semantic search engine that might eventually scale across the Web—exactly the kind of swing for the fences type of idea we like to see at TechCrunch. → Read More
What is the best way to sift through a stream of information? The list view seems to be the most popular because it is information-dense and easy to scan, but it can be overwhelming. More visually appealing ways to manage data are needed. Twine, a site which lets you collect and subscribe to different interest feeds, just introduced a new way to wade through its streams.
The new Flash visualization presents your stream of shared links as a deck of headlines which you can shuffle through (see video below). A slider along the bottom, lets you cycle through the deck by time, and arrows underneath let you move sequentially, or you can just click on a deck in the background to move it forward. If you want to learn more, you can flip each deck to read a snippet and link to the full detail page. The semantic tags associated with each item also show up on the side and can be clicked on to navigate through the deck. → Read More
What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger. Adam Lindemann learned that the hard way with iMindi, a startup trying to create a “thought engine” that was skewered by our judges at last year’s TechCrunch50. “It almost destroyed us,” says Lindemann. But he and his team have completely redesigned the product, which creates a mind map of your thoughts based on semantic indexing technology, and lets you “merge” those thought maps with related ones created by other people.
It is still rough around the edges, but is a vast improvement over the original concept. Today, iMindi is launching in private beta, and we have 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers (sign up here).
The drubbing iMindi received at TechCrunch50 last year was brutal. After Lindemann’s presentation (see video below), Mark Cuban, who was a judge, laid into him: → Read More
It turns out that people are following more than just their friends online. Look at the comScore chart above comparing unique visitors in the U.S. to FriendFeed versus Twine. Yeah, I was shocked to see that Twine has more than three times as many unique monthly visitors as FreindFeed (714,000 vs. 188,000). On a worldwide basis, comScore shows FriendFeed still slightly ahead of Twine. ComScore doesn’t always do a great job with small sites, so I checked Compete, which shows Twine with 2.25 million monthly visitors in April versus 998,000 for FriendFeed (see embed below). Different numbers, same story. While FriendFeed is organized around following feeds of your friends’ activities across the Web, Twine is organized around interest feeds. → Read More
A year after launching its beta, Twine opened up today to the general public with a completely redesigned site. The relaunch got lots of coverage. Maybe you read some of it. Even if you did, you probably still don’t know what Twine does. Some semantic shit, right?
Exactly. Twine’s marketing department made the video above as a joke for their staff meeting today. (Warning: Turn the volume down, NSFW). I think that is the best explanation I’ve heard yet of what Twine does. → Read More
Semantic Web startup Radar Networks raised $13 million in a B round, led by Velocity Interactive Group. Velocity’s Ross Levinsohn will join the board. Other investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. The company previously raised $5 million from Vulcan, Leapfrog Ventures, Ron Conway, and Peter Rip. Radar Networks is the company behind Twine, a site in private beta that helps you organize the Web and your personal information by automatically tagging and cataloging everything you save to it. (For more, see our write-up). CrunchBase Information Radar Networks Twine Velocity Interactive Group Ross Levinsohn Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Radar Networks, the not-so-secret stealth startup, is finally unveiling its site, dubbed Twine. Twine is targeted straight at groupware and knowledge-management apps that have mostly been confined to enterprise installations, and opening that up to a broader base of consumers. The startup has raised $5 million from Paul Allen, Peter Rip, Ron Conway in April, 2006, and has done work for DARPA. CEO Nova Spivack took me through a demo. On the surface, Twine is a place to organize information you find or create on the Web—bookmarks, notes, videos, photos,contacts, tasks. (A Web browser plug-in makes it easy to save stuff to your Twine wherever you may find it on the Web). You can also share that information with a private group or publicly. Once you ingest in all the information you want to organize, Twine applies a semantic analysis to it that creates tags for each document or video or photo. The tags match up to concepts that Twine’s algorithms associate with each piece of content, regardless of whether that concept is specifically mentioned in the Web page or other content being tagged. For example, you might bookmark this post and Twine would create tags for all the people mentioned in it (Nova Spivack, Paul Allen, Peter Rip, and Ron Conway). It would also create tags for the organizations related to the post, such as Radar Networks and DARPA, but also Paul Allen’s venture firm Vulcan Capital—even if Vulcan was never mentioned in the post. What Twine does is automatically generate smart tags and connect them together. There is also a social element. If you share a Twine with others, each piece of content that someone brings into that online space is associated with that person. So when you do a search, the results that come back are influenced not just by the tags, but also by who put the information into the Twine in the first place. “It’s the wisdom of crowds plus the wisdom of computers working together,” says Spivack. The more closely related that person is to you, the higher the relevance. At the same time, Twine is creating a very detailed profile of your interests which it hopes to run highly targeted ads against. Twine is putting structure onto all of this unstructured data that is out there by analyzing it and adding tags to it that are connected together. The network of links between → Read More
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