It’s been a few months since I posted that I was on the market for a new job after my sponsored research job at MIT ended with its natural and planned course.

I decided to follow some friends that preceded me (with success) and perform my job hunt in the open, wide open actually, posting my availability (and my desires/restrictions) on this very blog and to a few restricted mailing lists I’m honored to be part of.

First, I would like to thank those who sent good vibes (and high ranking link love): several of the offers I received came from those referrals.

Second, I would like to thank each and everyone of those who offered me a job (29 offers in total!), especially those 3 that spent considerable amount of energy, time and resources to try to hire me.

Last, but not least, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be working for Metaweb Technologies Inc., a San Francisco start-up known mostly for their Freebase web site and spin off of Applied Minds, co-funded by Danny Hillis (of Thinking Machines fame).

My title will be “application catalyst” and my job will be to facilitate the emergence of a development ecosystem around Freebase as a platform for web developers.

What attracted me to Metaweb is (what seems to be) the right mix between intriguing ideas, ambitious goals, talented and friendly people, established expertise, solid funding and a good understanding of what it takes to get stuff done. Not all of these can be found in academia, unfortunately, which is ultimately the reason why I decided to move on.

I’m perfectly aware of the high risks involved in such ambitious goals, but worthy challenges are what keeps me going and knowing what I know now about the ‘data web’ and the socio-economical dynamics around it, it will never emerge out of academia alone (as it happened for the ‘document web’) and without some technological adaptability and openmindness (which the semweb crowd hardly exhibits).

Metaweb looks to me like the place that not only has great technology, great ideas and a great team (and the money to pay for it!) but also the openmindness that is ultimately required to transition something from a lab to the real world without killing it in the process.

Of course, like many risky and highly ambitious ventures, it might fail miserably to produce anything worth selling as a product or worth using as a service. I’m fully aware of that and I’m prepared for that outcome. But I also feel confident that I can help, even infinitesimally, to make things happen, which is where I feel my best skills reside.

And, last but not least, I’ll continue to enjoy working and planning world domination with David… hopefully transitioning some of the ideas we had while at MIT from the whiteboards or the prototype stages to real world applications that everybody can use.