Nova Spivack

Nova Spivack is a technology visionary and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience in pioneering ventures.

Mr. Spivack is CEO and Founder of Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com), a stealth-mode technology venture located in San Francisco. Radar Networks is developing a fundamental new technology for enriching content that will open up a new dimension of the Web. The company anticipates releasing its first products in 2007.

In 1994, Mr. Spivack co-founded EarthWeb (http://www.earthweb.com), one of the first Internet companies, where he was Executive Vice-President for Products, Strategy and Marketing. 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. Mr. Spivack left EarthWeb’s board of directors in 1999 and began advising startups and angel investing. During the down-years of the post-Internet-bubble, EarthWeb’s content properties were acquired in 2000 by Internet.com (http://www.internet.com). The company’s Dice.com (http://www.dice.com) property remained a strong stand-alone business until it was acquired for approximately $200 million in 2005.

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 (http://www.gamelan.com), Developer.com (http://www.developer.com), and Datamation.com (http://www.datamation.com).

Prior to EarthWeb, Mr. Spivack 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 is also the founder of Lucid Ventures (http://www.lucidventures.com), an early-stage incubator that originated the technologies that are now Radar Networks. Mr. Spivack is a co-founder of the San Francisco Web Innovators Network (SFWIN) (http://www.sfwin.org), a network of several hundred technology innovators and business leaders who meet monthly in the Bay Area.

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 (http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/), the W3C open standard for ontology specifications. Mr. Spivack has also been a lead advisor to SRI International (http://www.sri.com) on the DARPA CALO program (http://www.ai.sri.com/project/CALO), 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 (http://www.openiris.org). Also with SRI and Sarnoff Laboratories, Mr. Spivack helped to co-found nVention (http://www.sri.com/about/nvention.html), 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, one of the largest computer book publishers, which resulted in a series of publications by leading authors on technology. 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 long-time interest in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, emergent computation, knowledge management and the emerging Semantic Web. As a grandson of management guru Peter F. Drucker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker), Mr. Spivack shares his family’s heritage of interests in management theory, nonprofits, and knowledge work. In addition, he has been a student of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, art and culture for nearly 20 years and has pursued this interest extensively in monasteries, refugee camps and communities in Nepal, India, Europe and the USA. Mr. Spivack focuses his philanthropic activities on helping to fund the preservation of Tibet’s unique wisdom culture as a world-heritage treasure for the benefit of future generations.

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 (http://www.isunet.edu) a NASA-funded graduate professional business school for the space industry. In 1999 Mr. Spivack’s interest in space gave him the opportunity to help pioneer the early days of space tourism when he flew to the edge of space with Space Adventures (http://www.spaceadventures.com) 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 http://www.mindingtheplanet.net

 

Source:http://novaspivack.typepad.com/about.html 

Craig Johnson - Bio

Craig Johnson currently serves as the Chairman of the Venture Law Group Board of Advisors. He joined Heller Ehrman in 2003 and was a co-founder of Heller Ehrman's Venture Law Group, acting as its Chairman from its founding in 1993 until its merger with Heller Ehrman ten years later.

Experience

Mr. Johnson retired from the practice of law in 2005 and is now serving as an advisor to, and angel investor in, various early stage companies.

During Mr. Johnson's law career, he represented high technology emerging growth companies from incorporation through initial public offering or acquisition. Among the companies he has represented are Adaptec, Wyse, Collagen, StrataCom, Aspect, SnapTrack, Gupta, MediaQ, Reflectivity, Voxify, Centrality and IP Wireless.

Mr. Johnson is also the co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures, Financial Engines, Grassroots Enterprise and Concept2Company. These companies have raised more than $200 million in venture capital.

Mr. Johnson has been recognized by Business Week as one of Silicon Valley’s top 25 “movers and shakers” (1997), by Red Herring Magazine as one of nine Silicon Valley “top power brokers”, (1999), as one of the 100 most influential attorneys in America by The National Law Journal (2000), and by Forbes as one of the country’s top private company investors (“Midas List”) in 2001 and 2002. He has also been selected for inclusion in Chambers Global: The World's Leading Lawyers for Business and Chambers USA: America's Leading Lawyers for Business for a number of years.

 Extract from: http://www.hellerehrman.com/en/attorneys/bios/Johnson_Cra...

Rencontre avec Eric Benhamou

Nous rencontrerons tout d'abord Mr Eric Benhamou Lundi 14 Janvier 2008 dans un amphithéâtre de Stanford University. Mr Benhamou a été le fondateur et le CEO de la société 3com de 1990 à 2000. Il a aussi été CEO de la société Palm de 2001 à 2003. Il est actuellement à la tête d'un fonds d'investissement pour entreprises innovantes BGV.

 

En 1997, le Président Bill Clinton a chargé Mr Benhamou de faire en sorte que les USA restent toujours à la pointe de la haute technologie par rapport à la concurrence mondiale. En 1998, il a reçu le Prix du meilleur investisseur étranger par le Premier Ministre Israélien Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

Agé de 49 ans, Mr Benhamou possède toute une batterie de diplômes israéliens, américains, et français.