Evri Acquires Radar Networks In Semantic Search Consolidation
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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.
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Wildcat2030 wildcat on 18 Feb 10"On Karma: Top-line Lessons on User Reputation Design In Building Web Reputation Systems, we appropriate the term karma to mean a user reputation in an online service. As you might expect, karma is discussed heavily throughout the more than 300 pages. During the final editing process, it became clear that a simple summary of the main points would be helpful to those looking for guidance. It seemed that our first post in over a month (congratulations on the new delivery, Bryce!) should be something big and useful... This post covers the following top-line points about designing karma systems, drawn from our book and other blog posts: * Karma is user reputation within a context * Karma is useful for building trust between users, and between a user and the site * Karma can be an incentive for participation and contributions * Karma is contextual and has limited utility globally. [A chessmaster is not a good eBay Seller] * Karma comes in several flavors - Participation, Quality and Robust (combined) * Karma should be complex and the result of indirect evaluations, and the formulation is often opaque * Personal karma is displayed only to the owner, and is good for measuring progress * Corporate karma is used by the site operator to find the very best and very worst users * Public karma is displayed to other users, which is what makes it the hardest to get right * Public karma should be used sparingly - it is hard to understand, isn't expected, and is easily confused with content ratings * Negative public karma should be avoided all together. In karma-math -1 is not the same magnitude as +1, and information loss is too expensive. * Public karma often encourages competitive behavior in users, which may not be compatible with their motivations. This is most easily seen with leaderboards, but can happen any time karma scores are prominently displayed. [i.e.: Twitter follower count] "
