The Semantic Web Blog had a chance to speak with Evri CEO Will Hunsinger and Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack, in separate interviews, right after the news of Evri’s acquisition of Twine broke. They provide some insight into the deal, and what it portends for T2, the next version of Twine that Radar Networks has been working on over the last few months.

Hunsinger says the two companies are a good fit because, though each was looking at different types of content, each also was trying to solve the same problem: “Enabling the end consumer to filter through the noise and get the precise, relevant results set,” as he explains it. “Twine was going after verticals and content areas that were more semi-structured or even structured data, like recipes, where we are going after temporal trending data, like news and tweets. But you put the two together and you have the ability to address the problem for consumers of getting the most interesting, relevant information. …We were never focused on evergreen content like recipes, and so on, but with T2 we can bring these together and can apply these technologies for a much richer, deeper and broader consumer experience.”

How will that manifest itself in terms of the consumer experience when the technologies merge? “We’re still a little ways away from,” Hunsinger says. “But conceptually the idea of consolidating these products is pretty cool, pretty compelling. Will it look like what T2 looks like in the demo? I don’t think so, that would be too disconnected from what EVRI is. But do we like the ingredients and do we think that together we will have a great, industry-leading semantic search and discovery product? Absolutely.” He doesn’t expect that there will be a big bang, all-in-one-fell-swoop change, noting that Evri is very happy right now with the update it launched last night at Evri.com, billed as featuring a redesigned global navigation model, and more intuitive ways to search, explore and filter the trending news and multi-media content of the web.

Spivack says the acquisition was a good fit, both for shareholders and in terms of strategy and vision. He says Radar had offers from major vendors in the search space, but given that Twine and Evri share a common investor in Paul Allen and are both exclusively focused on semantics and solving the discovery problem for people, “it felt like a cultural fit. Will and I had been speaking for year, our development teams had been speaking….We even planned to use the Evri API in some of T2. It made sense for us to do this and in the long run it’s the best thing for the team, the technology and for shareholders.” He notes that the deal protects users’ and their data, and the time and investment they’ve put into their content.

It’s a bittersweet moment for Spivack in some respects. “It’s a victory but it’s always an emotional experience to sell a venture. It’s the end of an era in a way but also the beginning of a new era,” he says. The economic downturn played its part in the era’s end, he says. Some early-stage deals are getting funding but “it’s unbelievably small amounts of funding. They used to get a couple of million before even launching, now they’re raising $25,000. It’s a very different environment. Any company that had raised Series B funding before the recession began was left hanging.” In a nutshell, he says, “because of the economy it was very hard to raise additional money, so we had to make drastic reductions that slowed us down and put us in situation where we had to sell the company to someone with deeper pockets than us.” (You can read more of his post-deal analysis at novaspivack.com.)

The Twine team is already ensconced with Evri, and Hunsinger says that’s a tremendous value point of the deal as well. “What really stood out in bringing these two together, beyond us both solving the same problem with highly compatible technologies, is being able to put these two teams together,” he says. Evri developers’ expertise around NLP and machine learning, and Twine engineers’ and technologists’ massive amount of experience in working with RDF and other semantic technologies for structured data is “pretty amazing. To put those teams together and really have-- outside of the big boys-- an unparalleled team to solve the semantic web challenges, that’s pretty darn interesting. And pile on the intellectual property portfolio we have put together between us, and that really is unprecedented.”

Spivack will act as an advisor to Evri but his focus is going to be on new ventures, including LiveMatrix, still in stealth mode. “LiveMatrix is doing something new, adding a time dimention to the web, working on the real-time web in a new way,” he says. “It’s a big project and there’s already a lot of deal-making and excitement.”