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Behind The Money: AdaptiveBlue's Alex Iskold on new product, new investor

Published October 28, 2008 at 1:08 PM




Semantic Web startup AdaptiveBlue on Tuesday is launching a new service, called Glue, that connects people around everyday things, including books, movies and music through a wide range of Web sites, including Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com and Citysearch. 

"We forget that the Web has no concept of a book or a movie," says Brad Burnham, co-founder of Union Square Ventures, which led AdaptiveBlue's $1.5 million Series A in 2007.

"When we get together with our friends, we don't talk about URLs, we talk about things--about books, movies, wine, etc.," adds Burnham. "With this release, AdaptiveBlue is making it possible for people to come together around the things that mean something to them, not just the pages they visit."

Along with the new product, AdaptiveBlue is announcing details of its recent $4.5 million Series B, which closed at the end of August and had been reported by some blogs earlier this month. AdaptiveBlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold (pictured) tells Tech Confidential that the round was led by RRE Ventures, with participation from Union Square.

"Our investment in AdaptiveBlue is a reflection of our confidence in Alex, his outstanding team and in their collective ability to deliver what we think will be one of the first truly useful semantic tools for the Web," says Jim Robinson, who co-founded RRE in 1994 with Stuart Ellman. Robinson has joined AdaptiveBlue's board of directors. AdaptiveBlue conforms with other investments RRE has made under the theme of "filtering technologies," including SkyGrid Inc. and Storm Exchange Inc.

"Investing in AdaptiveBlue is in keeping with our belief that ever-spiralling data sources require better tools,"  Robinson says. "Semantic technology is a big part of that."

Iskold, 36,  is an experienced entrepreneur, having sold his first company, Information Laboratory, to IBM Corp. [IBM] for an undisclosed amount in 2003. He is also a prolific writer, with a blog and frequent contributions to ReadWriteWeb on topics ranging from advice for startups to the challenges of protecting patents in the "era of open-source ideas."

In Tech Confidential's Behind the Money video interview, Iskold talks about Glue, his new investors and the challenges of running a startup in the current economic climate.  -- Mary Kathleen Flynn

See Alex Iskold's blog
See Alex Iskold's articles on ReadWriteWeb
If you are interested in embedding this video the code is: <embed src="http://blip.tv/play/AdaeMQA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="330" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>
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