And Metaweb is its name. Danny isn’t telling me much (but at least he did email me to tell me about it!), but here’s what the site says:
Based in San Francisco, Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was spun out of Applied Minds, Inc. in July, 2005 to build a better infrastructure for the Web. Metaweb was founded by Danny Hillis and funded by Benchmark Capital, Millennium Technology Ventures, Omidyar Network and other prominent investors. It is led by battle-hardened alumni of Netscape, The Internet Archive, Alexa, Tellme, Intel and Broderbund.
The funding was announced today. Here’s the release. From it:
Metaweb Technologies, Inc., announced today that it has received $15 million of funding. Led by Benchmark Capital, other investors in the round included Millennium Technology Ventures, Omidyar Network and prominent individuals. As part of the financing, Kevin Harvey from Benchmark Capital joined Metaweb’s board of directors.
Danny Hillis, chairman of Metaweb, remarked, “We are delighted to receive financing from investors who share our long-term vision to fundamentally change how information is stored, organized and shared online.” Mr. Harvey
noted, “My partners and I are very excited to be working with the Metaweb team. This is a disruptive technology that puts a lot of power into the hands of individuals.” Doug Solomon, vice president at Omidyar Network, Pierre
Omidyar’s mission-based investment group, said, “Metaweb enables individuals to pursue what matters most to them and dramatically expands their role in enhancing the value of online information.”
When your *first round* is $15 million, you ain’t messing around. One to watch, for sure. For more on what Danny has been up to, read my post on Applied Minds here.
Their job postings have questions in them! That’s a new way of doing pre-screening.
At least somebody had the balls to correct something which isn’t broke. $15 Million is huge and I sincerely hope they are into something which is worth the money, pain, time in no specific order. The Infrastructure for the Web could do with a lot of changes and not on top of the various stacks, but rebuilding the stacks altogether.
All the Best for the Metaweb Team
-Animesh
I think these guys are doing something with semantic web technologies. That is, they are creating software to construtc Ontologies from harvesting text corpora using machine learning concepts.
Hope someone has more details
This might provide some answers on what Metaweb is up to. This was a paper written by Danny Hillis in 2004
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis04/hillis04_index.html
I would guess that Metaweb is doing something along these lines.