Life in the matrix

Web pioneer and serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack believes smart Internet searching has only just begun. His start-ups demonstrate how consumers and businesses alike will be able to glean information from the Web.

A week before his wedding in Napa Valley’s vineyards, Nova Spivack is not worrying about place cards and flower arrangements. Instead, he’s in Austin, Texas, thinking out loud about the future of the Internet. It’s his favorite pastime. The entrepreneur from San Francisco is one of the thousands of developers, founders, venture capitalists, artists, musicians and designers attending the annual South by Southwest conference – a must for innovative thinkers in today’s information society. Micro-blogging service Twitter made its big breakthrough here two years ago.

This year, Spivack is inviting a select group of techies to take a look at his latest project: his search engine, Live Matrix. “It’s not about finding events that happened in the past,” explains Spivack in the almost impatient staccato tone of someone who is always one step ahead of the interviewer. “With services like Live Matrix, you can organize the Web into events that are happening now or even in the future. Forget about asking where an old file or link is. The temporal search is at least as important.”

It is no coincidence that the co-founder of Spivack’s new venture is a former key executive at the interactive programming outfit Gemstar-TV Guide. Live Matrix looks a bit like a TV guide because it displays the Web as a dynamic grid of times and dates that are of interest to the individual user: programs, events, online seminars and Webcasts – even auctions and virtual conferences. “Our system observes and learns what’s important. It opens up a totally new way of exploring the Web – in line with people’s personal preferences,” explains the 41-year old as he clicks away furiously on his laptop.

Spivack is no stranger to navigating his way through an ever-swelling sea of data. The grandson of management guru Peter Drucker, the guy who coined the term “knowledge worker”, has been contemplating the conundrum of how artificial intelligence (AI) can help improve access to relevant information since the 1990s. And he contributed to a great many projects, including working with technology visionary Ray Kurzweil and on an adaptive search engine for the legendary United States Department of Defense agency DARPA, before he turned his attention to semantic searching.

“It’s all about creating search engines that understand the significance of information,” stresses Spivack. “Keyword searches only work if you know what you’re looking for and if precisely those terms come up in a document. Semantic searches understand questions like people do – even if you don’t explicitly ask for the information.” For example, technology of this kind recognizes what a person, a place or a publicly traded company is – and how these things relate to each other.

Spivack predicts this type of smart searching will be particularly valuable for companies that find data mining challenging and whose employees require access to information from multiple sources. “A server here, database there, email programs, legacy apps running on huge mainframes, external Web services – semantic searches can trawl through all these sources and create an entire new dossier. This makes knowledge more accessible to individual workers and it can be extremely useful when it comes to providing customer service.”

Part two of article