OSCON 2012

We’re just one month away from one of the biggest and most exciting events of the year, O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON). This year’s conference will be held July 16th-20th in Portland, Oregon. The date can’t come soon enough. OSCON is one of the most prominent confluences of “the world’s open source pioneers, builders, and innovators” and promises to stimulate, challenge, and amuse over the course of five action-packed days. It will feature an audience of 3,000 open-source enthusiasts, incredible speakers, more than a dozen tracks, and hundreds of workshops. It’s the place to be! So naturally, Common Crawl will be there to partake in the action.

Gil EbazGil Elbaz, Common Crawl’s fearless founder and CEO of Factual, Inc., will lead a session called Hiding Data Kills Innovation on Wednesday, July 18th at 2:30pm, where he’ll discuss the relationship between data accessibility and innovation. Other members of the Common Crawl team will be there as well, and we’re looking forward to meeting, connecting, and sharing ideas with you! Keep an eye out for Gil’s session and be sure to come say hi.

If you haven’t registered, it’s not too late to secure a spot today. If you’ve already registered, we hope to see you there! We’re curious: what are some other sessions you’re looking forward to at this year’s OSCON?

Gil Elbaz and Nova Spivack on This Week in Startups

As a sign of many more good things to come in 2012, Founder Gil Elbaz and Board Member Nova Spivack appeared on this week’s episode of This Week in Startups. Nova and Gil, in discussion with host Jason Calacanis, explore in depth what Common Crawl is all about and how it fits into the larger picture of online search and indexing. Underlying their conversation is an exploration of how Common Crawl’s open crawl of the web is a powerful asset for educators, researchers, and entrepreneurs.

Some of my favorite moments from the show include:

  • In a great soundbyte from Jason at the beginning of the show, he observes that Common Crawl is in many ways the “Wikipedia of the search engine.” (8:50)
  • When the question is posed whether or not Common Crawl may eventually charge some fee for our data and tools, Nova’s response that Common Crawl is “better if it’s free… [We] want this to be like the public library system” captures the spirit of Common Crawl’s mission and our commitment to the open web. (32:00)
  • When asked about projects and applications that would benefit from Common Crawl, Gil makes a compelling case for organizations that can use Common Crawl as a teaching tool. If someone wants to teach Hadoop at scale, for example, it’s essential for them to have a realistic corpus to work with — and Common Crawl can provide that. (46:18 )

Those are just a few of the highlights, but I highly recommend watching the episode in its entirety for even more insights from Gil and Nova as we gear up for big things ahead for Common Crawl!

Video: This Week in Startups – Gil Elbaz and Nova Spivack

Founder Gil Elbaz and Board Member Nova Spivack appeared on This Week in Startups on January 10, 2012. Nova and Gil, in discussion with host Jason Calacanis, explore in depth what Common Crawl is all about and how it fits into the larger picture of online search and indexing. Underlying their conversation is an exploration of how Common Crawl’s open crawl of the web is a powerful asset for educators, researchers, and entrepreneurs.