PeoplePad

Semantic Search

Austin-based PeoplePad is currently in stealth mode and will launch in 2009. The company is working on a consumer-oriented portal for the Semantic Web. From Venturebeat: 'In 1998, a New England lawyer frustrated with the difficulty of library research decided to scan and index every book in the world. Troy Williams moved to Texas, raised $150 million, and started a company called Questia, and convinced hundreds of publishers to give Questia digital copyrights. To date, the company has somewhere north of 67,000 books and 1.5 million articles online. But Williams, who became an expert on many of the Internet's nascent technologies, moved late last year to start his next project, a semantic web application called PeoplePad.'