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January 15, 2008
More Money for Metaweb: What's Up?
You have to give Danny Hillis's Metaweb credit. It announced today a giant $42.5m financing from Benchmark, Goldman Sachs, and others, all in service of its Freebase service. What is Freebase? Well, here's the PR from the latest release:
Freebase.com [is] an open, shared database of the world's information in which data is freely available. This global resource will one day allow people and machines everywhere to access information far more easily and quickly than is currently possible.
No, I'm not entirely sure what that means either, but it sounds great, like something infoporn fans like me would use. Maybe. Someday. If I knew what it was. Mind you, they'll need to get past their current 8,000 unique visitors a month if they really want to have an impact.
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Partnerships that are not public probably had a lot to do with the funding (for example this was not verified but interesting with Powerset:
http://venturebeat.com/2007/06/22/an-update-on-powerset-the-natural-language-search-engine/
But either way i am cheering on the Freebase folks. I was impressed by Robert Cook's presentation at the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab Web 3.0 panel that you also spoke at a couple months back and i am glad to see the news.
Here's my post on What is Freebase? from a while back.
Re-reading it, I was pretty skeptical back then, and still am...
I haven't had the time to really leverage Freebase, but I do love the concept of providing structure to data and they do have a killer API. At Scifoo, I was somewhat disappointed with Danny's presentation and vision for Freebase. The impression was that they could free it up more and really make it more powerful.
Freebase is certainly developer centric and the best way of looking at it is as a semantic data store for developing applications. The challenge is going to be trying to get people who might go straight to using RDF and SPARQL instead of using the Metaweb API and MQL.
The # of unique visitors may not be telling the whole story here; What's more important is how much structured data is added via its API.
Also keep in mind that right now Freebase is mainly a developer tool.