Nova Spivack | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | Oberlin College |
Occupation(s) | Entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author |
Partner | Kimberly Rubin |
Parent(s) | Mayer Spivack, Kathleen Spivack (Drucker) |
Nova Spivack is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. [1] He is the founder and CEO of the early stage science and technology incubator Magical [2] and co-founder of The Arch Mission Foundation. [3]
Spivack previously co-founded Bottlenose; [4] [5] EarthWeb; Radar Networks; The Daily Dot; and Live Matrix. [6] He has invested in companies such as Klout, [7] Sensentia, PublishThis, Next IT, [6] and is a venture partner in Rewired. [8] He is also an advisor for EES Ventures, [9] and is on the board of directors of the Common Crawl Foundation. [10]
Nova Spivack was born in Boston and grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts. [11] He was admitted early to the University of Massachusetts Boston and attended while still in high school.[ citation needed ] In 1989, he participated in summer research at MIT and took part in a study of parallel computing techniques for research on chaos- and complexity theory focused on Cellular Automata.[ citation needed ] He studied philosophy at Oberlin College with focus on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1991. [10] [12] Spivack attended International Space University in 1992. [12] He majored in Space Life Sciences, and also worked on ISU’s space humanities program. His studies at ISU were funded by NASA and the ESA. [13] [14] While at ISU, he also worked in Japan on a project to build an international solar power satellite system. [14] Spivack later trained with the Russian Air Force in reduced-gravity parabolic flight and flew to edge of space with Space Adventures in 1999. [15]
In the late 1980s, while a college student, Spivack developed software for Kurzweil Computer Products and later at Thinking Machines. [13] [14] In 1993, Spivack worked at Individual, Inc., a venture that developed intelligent software to filter news sources. [13] [14] Nova Spivack co-founded EarthWeb, a website that provided career development resources and technical information to IT professionals, in 1994. [16] While at EarthWeb, Spivack helped establishments including AT&T, Sony, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BMG Music Club, and the New York Stock Exchange launch their first large-scale Web operations. [15] EarthWeb's successfully executed an initial public offering in November 1998. [17] At the time, EarthWeb's first-day return was among the largest in NASDAQ history and helped recapture dwindling [18] investor interest in new equity offerings from Internet-based companies. [17] [19] [20]
From 1999–2000, Spivack helped co-found and build nVention Convergence Ventures, an in-house intellectual property incubator of SRI International and Sarnoff Laboratories. [12] While consulting to nVention, Spivack founded two companies of his own: business incubator Lucid Ventures in 2001 and technology venture Radar Networks in 2003. Radar Networks invented technologies based on Semantic Web standards that the company also licensed to CALO, an SRI project funded by DARPA. [21] [22] Spivack raised initial outside venture funding for Radar Networks in April 2006. [23]
Radar Networks introduced its first commercial product Twine, a Semantic Web-based tool for information storage, authoring and discovery, in 2008. [24]
In 2009, Spivack became the first investor in Klout.com, a website and mobile app that measures social influence. [25]
Spivack and Sanjay Reddy launched[ clarification needed ] Live Matrix. [26]
Spivack co-founded Bottlenose in 2010 with Dominiek ter Heide. [27] [4] [5]
Spivack co-founded The Daily Dot in August 2011. [28] Spivack serves as a patron[ clarification needed ] for the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. [2] He is also a member of the Education and Awareness Council of For All Moonkind, Inc.
In 2015, Spivack co-founded The Arch Mission Foundation. Through the Arch Mission Foundation, Spivack curated the first permanent space library, which contained Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy contained on a quartz disk aboard the Tesla Roadster that was sent to space aboard the SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket in 2018. [29] [30] [31] In 2019, the Arch Mission sent the Lunar Library, a 30 million page library of books, data, images and a copy of English Wikipedia to the Moon. Spivack says the Arch Mission and Lunar Library were inspired by an early childhood dream of his of the future. [32] [33] In 2021, Spivack announced partnerships with Astrobotic Technology and Galactic Legacy Labs for several return missions to the Moon such as a second attempt to deliver the Lunar Library and for consumers to land their personal memories and photos on the Moon. [34] [35]
Spivack is also the founder and CEO of Magical Corporation, a science and technology venture studio. [36] [37]
Spivack is considered a leading pioneer in semantic web technology. [38] [39] [40] Spivack has authored approximately 100 granted and pending patents. [41] [42] He writes about the future of the Internet and topics concerning search, social media, personalization, information filtering, entrepreneurship, and Web technology and applications. [43] [44] Spivack has been interviewed by TechCrunch, Live Science , Space.com and other publications regarding the development of data storage for use in space missions and the preservation of earth's civilization. [45]
Spivack is the grandson of management theorist Peter F. Drucker. [39] He is married to Kimberly Rubin-Spivack. His parents are poet Kathleen Spivack and inventor Mayer Spivack. [11]
Radar Networks was a San Francisco–based company that aimed to develop Semantic Web applications for the general public. Its only public product was the website Twine. The company was founded in 2003 by Nova Spivack and Kristinn R. Thórisson. On March 11, 2010, Radar Networks was acquired by Evri Inc. On May 14, 2010, Twine was shut down, becoming a redirect to evri.com. On October 5, 2012, Evri laid off much of its staff and shut down its commercial offerings, including evri.com.
Astrobotic Technology is an American private company that is developing space robotics technology for lunar and planetary missions. It was founded in 2007 by Carnegie Mellon professor Red Whittaker and his associates with the goal of winning the Google Lunar X Prize. The company is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The first launch of one of its spacecraft, the Peregrine lunar lander, is expected to take place in 2024.
WolframAlpha is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data.
John Breslin is an Irish engineer and full professor at the University of Galway. He is co-founder of the Irish websites boards.ie and adverts.ie. He co-authored the Irish bestselling book Old Ireland in Colour in 2020, Old Ireland in Colour 2 in 2021, and Old Ireland in Colour 3 in 2023.
A lunar rover or Moon rover is a space exploration vehicle designed to move across the surface of the Moon. The Apollo Program's Lunar Roving Vehicle was driven on the Moon by members of three American crews, Apollo 15, 16, and 17. Other rovers have been partially or fully autonomous robots, such as the Soviet Union's Lunokhods, Chinese Yutus, and the Indian Pragyan. Four countries have had operating rovers on the Moon: the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India.
Klout was a website and mobile app that used social media analytics to rate its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which was a numerical value between 1 and 100. In determining the user score, Klout measured the size of a user's social media network and correlated the content created to measure how other users interact with that content. Klout launched in 2008.
Babak "Bobby" Yazdani is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and investor specializing in early-stage, private U.S.-based modern enterprise technology companies.
Brandwatch is a social media suite company owned by Cision. Brandwatch sells two different products: Consumer Intelligence and Social Media Management.
Bottlenose.com, also known as Bottlenose, is an enterprise trend intelligence company that analyzes big data and business data to detect trends for brands. It helps Fortune 500 enterprises discover and track emerging trends that affect their brands. The company uses natural language processing, sentiment analysis, statistical algorithms, data mining, and machine learning heuristics to determine trends, and has a search engine that gathers information from social networks. KPMG Capital has invested a "substantial amount" in the company.
The Lunar CATALYST initiative is an attempt by NASA to encourage the development of robotic lunar landers that can be integrated with United States commercial launch capabilities to deliver payloads to the lunar surface.
Emil G. Michael is an Egyptian-born American businessman. Michael was the Senior Vice President of Business and Chief Business Officer at Uber, and the Chief Operating Officer of Klout.
littleBits is a New York City-based startup that makes an open source library of modular electronics, which snap together with small magnets for prototyping and learning. The company's goal is to democratize hardware the way software and printing have been democratized. The littleBits mission is to "put the power of electronics in the hands of everyone, and to break down complex technologies so that anyone can build, prototype, and invent." littleBits units are available in more than 70 countries and used in more than 2,000 schools. The company was named to CNN's 10 Startups to Watch for 2013.
Elysium Space is a space burial company. Burial options the company offers are Earth-orbit and then reentry burnup, and delivery to the lunar surface. The company was the first to offer burial on the Moon.
Arch Mission Foundation is a non-profit organization whose goal is to create multiple redundant repositories of human knowledge around the Solar System, including on Earth. The organization was founded by Nova Spivack and Nick Slavin in 2015 and incorporated in 2016.
Nura was a consumer electronics company based in Melbourne, Australia, that designed and manufactured headphones with personalized sound technology. Nura's proprietary technology automatically measures the user's hearing sensitivities to different frequencies by monitoring sounds generated from the inner ear. This hearing measurement process takes 1–2 minutes. The headphones then adapt their frequency response to the user's hearing, allowing them to hear more detail when listening to music.
Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) is a NASA program to contract transportation services able to send small robotic landers and rovers to the Moon's south polar region mostly with the goals of scouting for lunar resources, testing in situ resource utilization (ISRU) concepts, and performing lunar science to support the Artemis lunar program. CLPS is intended to buy end-to-end payload services between Earth and the lunar surface using fixed priced contracts. The program was extended to add support for large payloads starting after 2025.
Team AngelicvM is a private company based in Chile that plans to deploy a small rover on the Moon. Their rover, called Unity, is one of various rovers that will be carried by the commercial Peregrine lander manufactured by Astrobotic Technology.
Foursquare Labs Inc., commonly known as Foursquare, is a geolocation technology company and data cloud platform based in the United States. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app. The app, Foursquare City Guide, popularized the concept of real-time location sharing and checking-in.