Comments on: Freebase Takes $42 Million

By: Design Shrine | Semantic Web Mashups and Freebase | Interior, Architecture and Web Design Blog

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 03:56:52 +0000

[...] was founded by Danny Hillis and Robert Cook from Applied Minds, and with $42 million dollars is well funded. Tim O’Reilly earlier wrote that Freebase Will Prove Addictive: What Metaweb [...]

By: The Semantic Hacker One-Million Dollar Challenge : Online media news summary of todays online advertising news

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 03:26:28 +0000

[...] startups and projects are hot right now. (See Radar Networks, Freebase, Blue Organizer, Hakia, even Yahoo). But what do you do if you are a little-known technology [...]

By: mike soron . com — LINKS 00004

mike soron . com — LINKS 00004 — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 08:44:49 +0000

[...] Future overlord Freebase takes in $42 million. [...]

By: RR

RR — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:05:59 +0000

To dan (14)
Believe it or not, solving climate change problems can be done quicker with flexible and smart data exchange protocols.
As for American Idol, well … can’t argue with that! That’s much more entertaining

Cheers

Love and Peace

By: carmen

carmen — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:55:28 +0000

i brought up “centralized” when Freebase was announced and Danny and Robert both said they considered a data web a ‘hard problem’ and the answer for now is ‘to centralize things’. hardcore parallel silicon and operating systems used to be a walk in the park for these guys and now they consider a solved problem a hard problem:

just click an icon, all sorts of distributed data-web machinations kick into gear, aggregating Atom feeds of new torrents, finding peers for these over DHT, sharding the necessary parts, even generating rating concensus from multiple 3rd party providers like Digg, rottentomatoes and IMDB. on a more directly-related topic last i checked it was some college students in their spare time that did the work that lets me SPARQL wikipedia, not Metaweb. and i can install the free/open-source Virtuoso or Sesame and run a Freebase on my machine.. or EC2 cloud

im not sure what their monetization/exit-plan of attack is. they could play catch-up in the neo-DB a la carte space if they want to protect their source code – simpleDB, force.com, dabbleDB etc. or they could try to become the next mySQL and give their database for free. Oracle already has RDF/graph features in their latest versions so an acquisition doenst look too likely there other than customer attrition reasons

By: Ashy

Ashy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:25:27 +0000

Dyde, as I said VCs are thirsty for fame now! They are looking for a vehicle like crazy

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:14:07 +0000

hurray for schemas, and not just a bunch of text with links.

By: Mr. Crash

Mr. Crash — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:22:02 +0000

$57 million?…

I wonder if they’ll spend it all freebasing…
Thats a damn lot of the white stuff…

By: dan

dan — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:31:27 +0000

@rr It will be interesting to see which of these two approaches will eventually prevail

Dude, you should be happy the new season of American Idol has started because the SPARQL/Freebase throw-down won’t be interesting at all. I can tell you right now neither will win. Both are flawed approaches to solving an non-existent problem. They merely show how really smart people sometimes act like idiots.

Now if all these geniuses were working on solving global climate change problems, maybe polar bears wouldn’t be drowning.

By: RR

RR — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:10:32 +0000

NOTE: Two things happened this week in the Web Sematics world, each reflecting the opposite approach to the other. SPARQL (with RDF) became a W3C standard on one hand and FreeBase raised 57M$. The alarming reality is that these two approaches to Web Semantics are in plain conflict with each other. The SPARQL protocol promotes data linking between DISTRIBUTED datasets, while FreeBase promotes loading all the data in the world onto their CENTRALIZED database, with centralized data schemas etc..
It will be interesting to see which of these two approaches will eventually prevail. One thing is for sure, yet again the IT world introduces conflicting technologies, on the same time, to solve the same general issues; too bad.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:04:13 +0000

Wow, that’s a lot of cash! How did they get Goldman so crazy to pour it in the crazy idea?

By: gyula csocsan

gyula csocsan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:53:51 +0000

57 million must be enough to test this site on the moon (:

By: Dyde

Dyde — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:19:14 +0000

Damn they’re website looks like a domain spam placeholder. And Goldman paid $50mln for that? On top of that, looks like they reinvented SQL and HTML, why not use existing techs??

By: Mark Madsen

Mark Madsen — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:00:21 +0000

They do have the possibility of doing something similar to Swivel, and maybe better. The problem I’ve seen with sites like Swivel or ManyEyes is in the data arena. People on those sites are polluting the data, constantly excerpting and reexcerpting data, making it kind of a mess. Freebase may offer better data controls, and could extend themselves into things on top of the data platform.

By: Trace

Trace — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:38:05 +0000

Richard Pryor called and he wants his domain name back!

By: Ashy

Ashy — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:19:36 +0000

Wikipedia clone, said that, the only thing its got better than wikipedia is its web design. The $42M funding also shows what some VCs want: they want to be famous like Jimmy Wales….. they want fame… but unfortunately thats not gonna come their way. Freebase will be in deadpool once the funding capital is burned up.

By: bbbase

bbbase — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:03:53 +0000

name and model are much like googlebase, obviously… is googlebase successful?..

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:26:52 +0000

This is extremely interesting. Their ambitions are enormous and their project is of great potential value to the web (semantic, 3.0, 2.7 or otherwise). However, as the first commenters point out, there is very little demonstrable progress to date.

The revenue model will be there if they can control the data in the future. But again, I believe this model if far from being a sure thing.

By: magnusdopus

magnusdopus — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:16:40 +0000

That site is only as interesting as the data it contains, which is not very interesting. However with $57 million, they should be able to clean it up. I can’t really see there being a viable business model though.

By: Macaroni Mike

Macaroni Mike — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:08:43 +0000

Yea really.

Whats in a name anyway.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:06:23 +0000

Freebase?

Who came up with that name?

By: Technicle

Technicle — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:55:41 +0000

Not much done for the level of money they’ve secured to date…