Group items tagged

Evri Acquires Radar Networks In Semantic Search Consolidation 10 Comments Share6 Buzz it by Erick Schonfeld on Mar 11, 2010 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. I spoke with both CEOs this morning. They would not disclose the terms of the deal, but it is safe to assume that it was largely an equity-based transaction. Both Evri and Radar Networks share Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital as their largest shareholder. Radar has raised $24 million in total capital, while Evri has raised $8 million. (At least that is what has been publicly disclosed. Paul Allen has poured much more money into Evri almost single-handedly, perhaps even more than Radar raised). Radar was unable to raise more during the recession and kept pushing out the release of its next product, T2, an ambitious project to create a semantic index of the Web. Using this semantic index, T2 can do a better job understanding what each Web page it indexes is about.

This acquisition falls in tandem with a re-launch of www.evri.com, incorporating a number of visual and technological updates designed to enhance the experience of discovery. With the introduction of a redesigned global navigation model and more intuitive ways to search, explore and filter the trending news and multi-media content of the web, Evri enables consumers to cut through the clutter and receive only content of interest to them. “At Evri, we’re striving to deliver a search engine that proactively discovers the most interesting, popular and trending stories on the web, filtering out the clutter and delivering information to consumers in timely, relevant and intelligent streams,” said Mr. Hunsinger. “With the acquisition of Twine and the launch of our new consumer site, we’re making good on the intuitive discovery experience we envision for the Web.”

ABOUT EVRI Evri (www.evri.com) automates how content is understood, filtered and shared, inviting consumers to participate in the conversations that matter most to them. With over 2.5 million real-time topical streams across thousands of categories, Evri is rapidly improving consumers’ access to information on the topics they value most. Publishers large and small have installed Evri applications on their Websites, including some of the world’s most prestigious news organizations like Hearst Entertainment (www.lmk.com) and the Times of London. Evri is based in Seattle, WA, and is funded by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. Evri is a tradema

Evri Ties the Knot with Twine — Twine CEO Comments and Analysis March 11th, 2010  Share Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here. This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.

At the time of beta launch and for almost six months after, Twine was still very much a work in progress. Fortunately our users and the press were fairly forgiving as we worked through evolving the GUI and feature set from what was initially just slightly better than an alpha site to the highly refined and graphical UI we have today. During these early days of Twine.com we were fortunate to have a devoted user-base and this became a thriving community of power-users who really helped us to refine the product and develop great content within it.

These losses meant we could no longer create compelling content or to manage the Twine community. So we put Twine.com on auto-pilot and let the traffic fall off. While painful to watch, this at least had the benefit of reducing the pressure to scale the system and support it under load, giving us time to focus all our energy on getting T2 finished and raising more funds.

The Drupal admin feels like it was developed by a developer while the Wordpress admin feels like it was developed by an end-user.

Even after improvements by Drupal, Wordpress probably still wins the ease of admin game

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages."