TripIt

Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning. With TripIt, you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest.

Over the past year TripIt has continued to iterate on its feature set - introducing LinkedIn integration, better mobile functionality, more social networking features, and other goodies.

RWW verdict one year later: TripIt is one of those apps that amazes people when they first use it. Its challenge now is to grab a foothold among mainstream users.

AdaptiveBlue

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue is a current RWW sponsor and its founder Alex Iskold is a feature writer at RWW.

AdaptiveBlue are makers of the Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer. As we wrote in January this year, the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer is that it gives you added information about webpages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter.

Over the past year the company has been working on a new product, called Glue. Launched last month, Glue is a more social networking oriented version of BlueOrganizer - it connects you to your friends based around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more.

RWW verdict one year later: the company has diversified smartly, but its challenge is to go beyond the 'cool factor' and get more people using the products repeatedly.

TrueKnowledge

When we covered UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge last year, it was just after it had unveiled a demo of its private beta. Back then it reminded us of the also unlaunched (at that time) Powerset, but it was also reminiscent of Ask.com "smart answers". TrueKnowledge combines natural language analysis, an internal knowledge base and external databases to offer immediate answers to various questions.

One year later, TrueKnowledge is still in private beta - and this author got an error message when I submitted my email to apply to get into the beta. However there are signs of public life in the company blog, which is fairly active. Also the company launched a beta app this month, called Quiz Bot - a natural language search service that likely "won't be able to answer your question, but by asking us you are helping improve the service."

RWW verdict one year later: The jury is still out. It looks like a public beta is still some way off, which puts pressure on it to be extremely good when it eventually does launch.

Talis

Talis is a 40-year old UK software company which has created a semantic web application platform. Over the past year, Talis has continued to make a name for itself as an evangelist for the Semantic Web, most notably through the blogging and podcasting activities of Paul Miller. Talis also produces a great magazine for Semantic Web, called Nodalities, and has an active company blog under the same name. As for the company's products, the platform seems to be iterating nicely and is being used in niche library and government applications.

RWW verdict one year later: Talis has successfully positioned itself as an authority on Semantic Web in the blogosphere, which we love because it's a great way to keep track of Semantic Web trends!

Spock

Spock is a people search engine that got a lot of buzz when it launched. Alex Iskold went so far as to call it "one of the best vertical semantic search engines built so far."

So how has it fared over the past year? Apparently its traffic has been very good. However, as Sarah Perez recently wrote on this blog, the "excitement has worn off." Instead of searching for people on Spock or other similar people search engines, wrote Sarah, most users simply turn to old standbys like Facebook or LinkedIn. To get their mojo back again (and no doubt some money in the bank), Spock has plans to launch a new subscriber-only service in January. It will be full-on public record search tool, which people can subscribe to for $1.99 per month.

RWW verdict one year later: despite claims of great traffic growth, it's clear that Spock as a consumer search engine hasn't quite panned out. Can it re-invent itself as a subscription-based specialist service? Check back in another year.

Conclusion

We're pleased to see that all 10 of the products we profiled one year ago are still very much alive and kicking. One had a great acquisition result (Powerset), at least one has grown into a thriving developer ecosystem (Calais), some are experimenting with new services (AdaptiveBlue, Spock, Hakia), some are continuing to pump out new features and/or apps (TripIt, Talis). However, it's also clear that some are still trying to find their feet (Freebase, Twine, TrueKnowledge).

In our next post in this series, we'll profile 10 more Semantic Apps to watch! Please tell us in the comments which ones have caught your eye recently.