Is Freebase worth much?

There has been some speculation that Freebase is a vehicle for Metaweb to prosper from its semantic web infrastructure when used for commercial purposes.  As I recall, Metaweb raised over $40 million in Series B around the time they started building Freebase. The investment was led by Goldman Sachs.  Metaweb’s seasoned investors were unlikely to invest so much in a business that cannot project a return on that investment.  Almost certainly, Metaweb has firm plans for realizing over $100 million in revenues.  Most likely, for these investors and the amount of capital, target revenues by 2014, five years after the second round, would be in the vicinity of $1 billion.  Obviously, there is a lot of work to get there from around zero today.

Some of the bubble in raising those funds has burst.  The economy would crimp the valuation and investment if made today.  And the semantic web has yet to produce a winner, so with less enthusiasm, the investment would again be less favorable today.  All this is modulo the business plan.  If the business plan withstands scrutiny and the rate of return from credibly achievable projections justifies investment, they could get the money again, even now.  But no one that I have heard or read over the past few years can explain the business plan adequately – that is, concretely.  I would appreciate any insights or opinions on the topic.  I believe these are smart people, in the company and among its investors, so I am sure it is there.  I just don’t believe in the “we’ll figure out how to make money eventually” business plan in this case.

Some Freebase terms that are worth knowing but are commercially reasonable for any site that provides a free service include:

  1. The terms of service are subject to change (upon posting).
  2. The service may be changed or discontinued at any time and without notice.
  3. Limits concerning access to or use of the services may be established.
  4. Any disputes shall be heard in San Francisco and governed by California law.

Continue reading “Is Freebase worth much?”

The Semantic Arms Race: Facebook vs. Google

As I discussed in Over $100m in 12 months backs natural language for the semantic web, Radar Networks’ Twine is one of the more interesting semantic web startups.  Their founder, Nova Spivak, is funded by Vulcan and others to provide “interest-driven [social] networking”.  I’ve been participating in the beta program at modest bandwidth for a while.  Generally, Nova’s statements about where they are and where they are going are fully supported by what I have experienced.  There are obvious weaknesses that they are improving.  Overall, the strategy of gradually bootstrapping functionality and content by controlling the ramp up in users from a clearly alpha stage implementation to what is still not quite beta (in my view) seems perfect. 

Recently, Nova recorded a few minute video in which he makes three short-term predictions: Continue reading “The Semantic Arms Race: Facebook vs. Google”

Over $100m in 12 months backs natural language for the semantic web

Radar Networks is accelerating down the path towards the world’s largest body of knowledge about what people care about using Twine to organize their bookmarks.  Unlike social bookmarking sites, Twine uses natural language processing technology to read and categorize people’s bookmarks in a substantial ontology.  Using this ontology, Twine not only organizes their bookmarks intelligently but also facilitates social networking and collaborative filtering that result in more relevant suggestions of others’ bookmarks than other social bookmarking sites can provide.

Twine should rapidly eclipse social bookmarking sites, like Digg and Redditt.  This is no small feat!

The underlying capabilities of Twine present Radar Networks with many other opportunities, too.  Twine could spider out from bookmarks and become a general competitor to Google, as Powerset hopes to become.  Twine could become the semantic web’s Wikipedia, to which Metaweb’s Freebase aspires. Continue reading “Over $100m in 12 months backs natural language for the semantic web”