Category Archives: Web 2.0

Accel Partners, Business, Funding, Greylock Partners, Hutchison Whampoa Limited, Meritech Capital, Money, Peter Thiel, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing Invests $60m in Facebook. Funding totals $338.20M to date

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Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing Invests $60m in Facebook. Facebook now has $338.20M in cash to play with. Plans are the company to go public in 2008 or 2009 according to some rumors within the sector.

Facebook is hugely popular social networking site, second only to MySpace in terms of users. Other popular social networking sites are Bebo and Friendster, the second one tried to acquire Facebook in 2004 for just $10M.

The latest comScore metrics, we have seen, revealed that Facebook is actually site #16 (others claim it is #6 today) in US with nearly 70M unique visitors per month and more than 50M registered and active users.
 
Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and managing partner of the Founders Fund was the first angel investor in the company. He invested $500,000 into Facebook in early 2004. Later Accel Partners poured $12.7 million more in funding, at a valuation in the $100 million range.

The next year [2006], Facebook received $25 million in funding from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital, as well as returning investors Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. The pre-money valuation for this deal was in the $525 million range.

Facebook is reported to have turned deals down from Friendster, Yahoo, Viacom  and the mighty Google a couple of months ago when Zuckerberg has chosen Microsoft to partner with. Microsoft de-facto has invested $240 million into Facebook for just 1.6 percent of the company in October 2007. This put the company’s valuation at over $15 billion on just $150 million in annual revenues.

Mr. Li Ka-shing is the Chairman of Cheung Kong (Holdings) Limited and Hutchison Whampoa Limited. Cheung Kong (Holdings) Limited is the flagship of the Cheung Kong Group which has business operations in 55 countries around the world and employs about 250,000 staff. In Hong Kong alone, the Group includes eight listed companies with a combined market capitalization of approximately HKD981 billion (31 October 2007). Hutchison Whampoa Limited is a Fortune Global 500 company.

It would be interesting to find out what’s the equity position Mr. Li Ka-shing has secured for his $60M considering what Microsoft has bought for their $240M. 

Via

[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/30/another-60-million-for-facebook/ ]
[ http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071130/facebook-nabs-60-million-investment-from-li-ka-shing/ ]
[ http://www.hutchison-whampoa.com/eng/about/chairman/chairman.htm ]

Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Technology, Web 2.0

Freebase: open, shared database of the world’s knowledge

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Freebase, created by Metaweb Technologies, is an open database of the world’s information. It’s built by the community and for the community – free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.

Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food ingredients.

By structuring the world’s data in this manner, the Freebase community is creating a global resource that will one day allow people and machines everywhere to access information far more easily and quickly than they can today.

Freebase  aims to “open up the silos of data and the connections between them”, according to founder Danny Hillis at the Web 2.0 Summit. Freebase is a database that has all kinds of data in it and an API. Because it’s an open database, anyone can enter new data in Freebase. An example page in the Freebase db looks pretty similar to a Wikipedia page. When you enter new data, the app can make suggestions about content. The topics in Freebase are organized by type, and you can connect pages with links, semantic tagging. So in summary, Freebase is all about shared data and what you can do with it.

The Company behind

Metaweb Technologies, Inc. is a company based in San Francisco that is developing Metaweb, a semantic data storage infrastructure for the web, and its first application built on that platform named Freebase, described as an “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge”. The company was founded by Danny Hillis and others as a spinoff of Applied Minds in July, 2005, and operated in stealth mode until 2007.

Reach

According to Quantcast, which we believe is very accurate, Freebase is basically not popular site, despite the press attention it gets, and is reaching less than 5000 unique visitors per month. Compete is reporting for slightly more than 8000 uniques per month.

The People

William Daniel “Danny” Hillis (born September 25, 1956, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT. He is also co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Applied Minds, Metaweb Technologies, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.

Investors

In March 2006, Freebase received $15 million in funding from investors including Benchmark Capital, Millennium Technology Ventures and Omidyar Network.

Freebase is in alpha.

Freebase.com is the first Semantic App being featured by Web2Innovations in its series of planned publications where we will try to discover, highlight and feature the next generation of web-based semantic applications, engines, platforms, mash-ups, machines, products, services, mixtures, parsers, and approaches and far beyond.

The purpose of these publications is to discover and showcase today’s Semantic Web Apps and projects. We’re not going to rank them, because there is no way to rank these apps at this time – many are still in alpha and private beta.

[ http://freebase.com ]
[ http://roblog.freebase.com ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/freebase ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_semantic_apps_to_watch.php ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Hillis ]
[ http://www.metaweb.com ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaweb_Technologies ]

Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Technology, Web 2.0

The Semantic Web and its Applications Today

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Since Web 2.0 Innovations is all about discovering and showcasing the innovation on web, we think the Semantic Web is playing a significant role of the next web transformation. Therefore in a series of publications we will try to discover, highlight and feature the next generation of web-based semantic applications, engines, platforms, mash-ups, machines, products, services, mixtures, parsers, and approaches and far beyond.

We are not going to try to explain in details what Semantic Web is after all. There has been plenty of information on web as to what does really that term mean. First off it is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Basically it promises to change how the web works in first place, to meaningfully connect the different datasets around web in a readable and usable format for both humans and robots.

The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and it’s not part of the web. One can see his/her bank statements or travel arrangements on the web, and the photographs and one can see his/her appointments in a calendar. But can one see his/her photos in a calendar to see what one was doing when she or him took them? Can one see the bank statement lines in a calendar?

Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

Some of the very basics Semantic components include:

— XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within.

— XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and content of elements contained within XML documents.

— RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects (“resources”) and their relationships. An RDF-based model can be represented in XML syntax.

— RDF Schema is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes.

— OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjoint ness), cardinality (e.g. “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties and characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.

— SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources.

Here are some more links to plenty of resources that can get you to the basics and fundaments of the Semantic Web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

http://www.w3schools.com/semweb/default.asp

http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/

http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer (Getting Into RDF & Semantic Web Using N3)

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic (Semantic Web Roadmap)

http://purl.org/swag/whatIsSW (What Is The Semantic Web?)

http://uwimp.com/eo.htm (Semantic Web Primer)

http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long (Semantic Web Introduction – Long)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html (SciAm: The Semantic Web)

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/03/07/buildingsw.html (Building The Semantic Web)

http://infomesh.net/2001/06/swform/ (The Semantic Web, Taking Form)

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity (SW Activity Statement)

http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/ (SWAD)

If by any chance you are working for or being a part of, or just know about, a company or a team deploying Semantic Web in one way or another drop us a short note at info [at] web2innovations.com and we would love to feature your work here.