HitForge, a new twist on incubators

Naval Ravikant, who in his past life co-founded Epinions and Vast, has started HitForge, a San Francisco-based outfit that is a unique twist on the incubator model. Via GigaOM.

HitForge closely follows the record company model, which I discussed with various people at a great party at a co-working type space in Cambridge last Friday. The idea is to develop several concurrent $50k projects, with the most promising get additional resources and support. IdeaLab was successful with this model back in the day, when startup costs were still far higher than they are today.

As for space and proximity to resources, the Cambridge Innovation Center looks like a nice space, as well as various co-working initiatives. Me, I  want to get out of my home offfice. After five years I’m ready for a change and would welcome the opportunity to get involved with entrepreneurs in an incubator-style workspace.

Weekly Wrap-up

Web 2.0 Expo happened, here’s a handy link to the coverage. Now all it takes is a good idea and a small bag of money to sell your one-off Web 2.0 company to Google. Psst, make sure it has to do with MS Office.

Digg API is out. Now you can build apps based on the fickle 30 people that rule Digg.

Yahoo Pipes is cool, so is Dapper, and now we have Coghead.

Talk about a job offer, now that’s Personal.

YouTube Retrospective

The Best of YouTube in 2:37. I love these dense clips, saves me hours of viewing each month.

Hitwise Acquired for $240 Million

Experian has bought Internem marketing intelligence company Hitwise for $240 million. Companies like Quantcast and Compete are starting to offer some of the intelligence that corporations currently pay Hitwise for. What will happen when companies realize they can get most of the data from a free service instead of that hefty $20,000 a year contract?

Via Ben Barren, Mashable

Go Marathoners!

Congratulations to the intrepid souls running the Boston Marathon in today’s windy, rainy 47 degree weather. I may walk over to the finish line later when the rain lets up (lazy!).

What Happened To Virtual Reality?

One of my new favorite blogs is 10 Zen Monkeys. A recent post titled “What Happened to Virtual Reality” brought me back to a time in 1992 at a spiritual retreat where Jaron Lanier sat barefoot and cross-legged in front of us, speaking about a new technology and concept he called Virtual Reality. I went on to co-found the Boston Computer Society Virtual Reality Group, which at it’s most popular, had 250 people at our monthly meetings.

10 Zen is like Mondo 2000 in blog form, great stuff.

Free Phone Calls With Jajah

I used Jajah for the last month to keep in touch with my girlfriend who while she was traveling in Australia. The service has worked as advertised, and I see no charges on my mobile bill besides local access costs. Great service, works as advertised.

Addendum to Danny Hillis’s Knowledge Web

While researching Metaweb and Freebase, I came across Danny Hillis’s article in Edge. A continuation of an earlier piece he wrote in 2004 about advanced Internet-based learning tools.

Addendum to “Aristotle: The Knowledge Web” continues the discussion, with various smart minds weighing in on the topic of machine-based learning.

This is an incredible article, a clear roadmap to the future of learning. Definitely worth a read if you like to pay attention to what’s next.

ZoomInfo Launches Semantic Search Engine

Brian Balfour recently emailed me via a mutual acquaintance I met at the last Boston WebInnovator event. Turns out Brian works for Zoominfo, a site I have used frequently to search for people and business information, especially for linking to from blog entries.

Brian wrote about the new version of Zoominfo on his blog, Social Degree.

Blink 3D

Blink 3D is a complete system for creating interactive, animated and chat enabled multi-user 3D Web environments easily and without the need for programming skills. Blink makes it easy for anyone to embed 3D environments into blogs and social networking pages.