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21 Mar
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Meeting With Naval Ravikant
Yesterday I had the honor to sit in on a meeting arranged by CRV, with Naval Ravikant, founder of Epinions, and a number of other start-ups, as well as a former VC -guy with a dozen investment, and currently back in the start-up business again as founder and CEO for Vast. Naval was invited by CRV do give a Web 2.0 overview – and I must say that it was the best presentation and overview I have ever heard about the topic. Straight to the point, what works, why it works, when to invest, and what’s next (which of course nobody has any clue of…).
Naval’s current company Vast, also had its launch yesterday and looks very promising indeed. Vast is a search service that extracts classified ads from across the web, structures them, and then makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses.
In more detail Naval says that Vast:
- Is crawling the web and large parts of the blogosphere with a general crawler, similar to the ones operated by Yahoo!, Google, Ask, MSN, and Gigablast.
- The crawler activates forms, and digs deep to find even dynamic data
- It automatically recognize classifieds listings – currently cars for sale, job postings, and personals profiles, and extract and normalize the surrounding metadata (make, model, price, mileage, salary, location, title, age, gender, etc.).
Currently, Vast have, according to Naval, some of the largest databases anywhere, of over 15 Million classified listings across these three categories, automatically extracted and structured with no human oversight, from nearly 50,000 web sites and blogs.
That is pretty amazing…Ebay watch out? BTW, anyone can steal the site…
Tags: Vast Tags: Naval Ravikant Tags: Epinions Tags: VC Tags: CRV Tags: Web2.0 Tags: Crawling Tags: Classifieds Tags: Yahoo Tags: Google Tags: Ask Tags: MSN Tags: Gigablast Tags: Search Tags: Ebay Tags: Google
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