Management Team
Nova Spivack, Founder and CEO
Nova Spivack is a technology visionary and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience in pioneering ventures. In 1994, Mr. Spivack co-founded EarthWeb, 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. The company’s 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, Developer.com, and 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, 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), 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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.
Sonja Erickson, COO
Sonja Erickson joined Radar Networks in June 2007 and has 20 years experience in Technical Operations and Information Technology. She has an established track record of building scalable, sustainable infrastructure and teams across a variety of business platforms.
Prior to joining Radar Networks, Ms. Erickson was Vice President of Technical Operations at Kodak Gallery (formerly Ofoto Inc.), overseeing all IT infrastructure. During her six year tenure, she helped lead The Gallery's rapid growth and success as an award winning, leading online digital printing service. Under Ms. Erickson’s leadership, The Gallery’s technical infrastructure scaled to accommodate more than 40 million members and over 2 billion online images.
Ms. Erickson also served as Vice President of Engineering at Kodak Gallery in 2005-2006. She oversaw all software development and quality assurance for The Gallery web site and back-end fulfillment operations. Ms. Erickson was Director of Hosting Services at Burst.com (1999-2001), where she built a US and European video hosting service. She has also held management and technical positions at Andromedia, Forté Software, Illustra and Ingres.
Chris Jones, Vice-President of Product Development
Chris Jones has over twelve years of experience solving business challenges through user-experience design, Web development, information architectures and interactive strategies. Prior to joining Radar Networks in 2005, he was a leading industry consultant working with leading organizations on user-experience, interface design, and strategy.
Mr. Jones was also Director of User Experience and General Manager for the Liquid Agency, and was Co-Founder and Principle of Small Pond Studios, a boutique user-experience and design firm. During the peak of the Internet boom years he was Director of Technology for Sapient, Director of Web Development for Studio Archetype, and an interactive architect at Landor Associates.
His work has included projects for Apple, Microsoft, Xerox, E*Trade, Gymboree, Vinfolio, Leap Frog, Yahoo!, TiVo, Vinfolio, Autodesk, Blue Shield of California, and many other clients.
Mr. Jones has authored numerous publications on Web design, user-experience, and branding. He has a B.A. in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jim Wissner, Chief Software Architect
Jim Wissner has over 15 years of experience as a software engineer and architect in areas including data-mining, knowledge discovery, knowledge management, collaborative application platforms, advanced query and storage architectures, speech applications, and user-interfaces. He has also worked extensively with the Semantic Web with technologies including RDF, RDFS, OWL, semantic data storage, and semantic search applications.
Beginning with ObjectiveC he later spent 10 years working primarily with Java. In his work he seeks to integrate state-of-the-art development techniques and platforms with proven logical and mathematical models, including finite state machines, probabilistic linkage, and query optimization algorithms.
Mr. Wissner has lead architecture and development of the company’s core-technology platform since he began working with Nova Spivack in 2001. While at Radar Networks he was also the chief architect for the company’s work with SRI International and DARPA.
Prior to joining Radar Networks, Mr. Wissner worked as a consultant developing advanced software architectures for a variety of workflow, collaborative application, and CRM/ERM applications. He also worked as a consultant to develop new data-mining and probabilistic linking technologies for the Ontario Cancer Foundation.
Mr. Wissner also developed several widely-used open-source software projects related to XML user-interface development. Mr. Wissner has a B.S. in Computer Science from Grand Valley State University.