Marty Tenenbaum is the founder and chairman at CommerceNet. He is also the chief scientist and director at Webify Solutions and EVP and director at Medstory Inc. To read more about a man before his time, see their blog and wiki.

Where do you see the current Web 2.0 market being in the next 3 to 5 years?

I don’t have a crystal ball. Like Alan Kay, I believe that the best way of predicting the future is to invent it. At CommerceNet we’re now working on Web 3.0, the Intelligent Web – think Web 2.0 plus AI. You can find out more by downloading my paper AI Meets Web 2.0: Building The Web of Tomorrow Today from the CommerceNet Website or watching the streaming video of my PARC Forum talk. The Web 2.0 apps of today, remind me of the Internet collaboration tools computer scientists worked on between 1985-95, except of course for the scale and ease of use of today’s Web. I am more intrigued with the unprecedented democratizing power of every man owning his own TV network or newspaper, with feeds from a couple of billion online video cameras.

Being the visionary that you are, what would you recommend for new startup entrepreneurs to focus their time and attention on considering the current market?

The time has come to put the web and AI together. Google is amazing but key words and web links alone can only go so far. The future of search will involve using deep domain models and inference to retrieve the most relevant documents (as opposed to the most popular), as exemplified by Medstory for medical searches, as well as natural language question answering as exemplified by Powerset.

I also recommend developing horizontal platforms, by focusing initially on vertical markets experiencing significant pain. Healthcare remains highly fragmented with information locked up in silos – from medical records, to medical journals to research notebooks. This industry is overdue for its Internet revolution. CommerceNet and its portfolio companies are aiming to foment such a revolution by using Web 3.0 to tap the collective intelligence of doctors, patients and researchers.

Commercenet is an entrepreneurial research institute that helps talented people turn bold ideas into companies. For the benefit of new entrepreneurs who are seeking external sources of funding, could you comment on your startup selections?

We’re looking generally for talented individuals with bold ideas that bridge the Web and AI communities. I’m personally interested in working with individuals who want to apply the power of Web 3.0 to Healthcare.