Nova Spivack

Nova Spivack is a technology visionary and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience in pioneering ventures. In 1994, he co-founded EarthWeb, one of the first Internet companies. EarthWeb went public in 1999 and resulted in the Nasdaq's largest IPO single-day percentage point gain up to that point, spawning a wave of Tech IPOs.

While at EarthWeb he helped key cultural institutions and businesses develop their first large-scale Web presences, including the New York Stock Exchange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BMG Music Club, Sony, AT&T, US West, and others. He also helped to catalyze the adoption of Java technology by leading the production of large on communities for the IT professionals, including Gamelan.com, Developer.com, and Datamation.com.

Prior to EarthWeb, he worked in a variety of roles from technology marketing to software engineering at artificial intelligence and next-generation computing ventures including Individual, Inc., Ray Kurzweil’s pioneering OCR company, Kurzweil Computer Products which was sold to Xerox, and at Danny Hillis’ legendary supercomputing venture, Thinking Machines.

Mr. Spivack has extensive experience working on knowledge representation and the Semantic Web, and has authored and helped to design several large (500 to 3000 class) ontologies in the OWL language, the W3C open standard for ontology specifications. Mr. Spivack has also been a lead advisor to SRI International on the DARPA CALO program, a distributed research program encompassing several hundred top researchers across over 20 major research institutions focused on next-generation semantically-aware machine learning applications, and in particular on the IRIS Semantic Desktop project. Also with SRI and Sarnoff Laboratories, Mr. Spivack helped to co-found nVention, SRI’s in-house technology incubator.

Mr. Spivack has co-authored several books on Internet strategy and technology and led the EarthWeb Press publishing imprint with Macmillan Computer Publishing. He has been featured and cited in Business Week, CNN, CNBC, CBS Evening News, CNN-FN, Discovery Channel, The New York Times, Washington Post, WIRED Magazine, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Communications Week, Interactive Week, Internet World, Reuters, Newsweek, Red Herring, Silicon Alley Reporter, Interactive Age, Web Week, Java Developer’s Journal, and has spoken at numerous conferences and industry events. Mr. Spivack also helped to invent key technologies for interactive television and Web convergence in the early days of the Web, as well as several pending patents for Radar Networks.

Mr. Spivack has a BA in Philosophy, with a focus on cognitive science and artificial intelligence, from Oberlin College and a CSS degree from the International Space University, a NASA-funded graduate professional business school for the space industry. In 1999, he flew to the edge of space with Space Adventures and did micro-gravity parabolic flight training with the Russian Air Force.

Mr. Spivack’s weblog, Minding the Planet, focuses on Radar Networks and emerging technologies and can be read at mindingtheplanet.net.