Venture funded UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge is unveiling a demo of its private beta today and looks like an interesting site to watch. One cannot help but think of the still-unlaunched Powerset, but it's also reminiscent of the very real Ask.com "smart answers".
Though the video the company published this morning speaks quite well for itself, the gist of what's happening is this. TrueKnowledge combines natural language analysis, an internal knowledge base and external databases to offer immediate answers to various questions. Instead of just pointing you to web pages where the search engine believes it can find your answer, it will offer you an explicit answer and explain the reasoning patch by which that answer was arrived at. There's also an interesting looking API at the center of the product. "Direct answers to humans and machine questions" is the company's tagline.
It sounds very interesting and I'd love to get my hands on it. Unfortunately, the company isn't allowing general access to the site and hasn't given me a login yet either. I hope it's real and really performs as advertised. It takes a very special technology to get coverage of a screencast and coverage again of an actual product release later. This might be one of those technologies. With the sense of self-importance that's implied by the act of unveiling your private beta to the world, one hopes there will be some meat here.
Founder William Tunstall-Pedoe says he's been working on the software for the past 10 years, really putting time into it since coming into initial funding in early 2005. Hopefully there won't be a Powerset style wait for the actual product. Keep an eye on our network blog AltSearchEngines for coverage of TrueKnowledge and the rest of the search engine world as soon as information emerges. See also Alex Iskold's excellent write up on a top-down approach to the semantic web and our coverage of semantic app Twine.
Google Maps are already winging their way across the skies courtesy of a partnership with jetBlue. Now Google and gas pump maker Gilbarco Veeder-Root have announced a partnership that will bring Google Maps down to earth and provide driving directions, local search, and coupons to 3,500 Internet-enabled gas pumps across the US.
Veer is not your average stock photo site. With a mixture of licensed and original content under its control, Veer offers not just photos, but also illustrations, and fonts, as well as a collection of merchandise (clothing, decor, art supplies, etc.) geared toward creative professionals. The world's second largest stock photography company, Corbis, announced yesterday that it would acquire Veer for an undisclosed sum. Corbis intends to keep the companies operating separately.
Veer, which has offices in Calgary, Alberta; New York; Berlin and Düsseldorf, Germany; is the fourth largest stock photo company on the planet, according to Corbis. Veer actually sells some collections from the largest stock photography distributor, Getty Images, the main rival of Corbis (JupiterImages sits in third place). That seems unlikely to change, however.
Corbis' purchase makes sense for the company, which needs to bolster its online strategy to compete with Getty, which is about three times the size (in terms of revenue) and operates gettyimages.com, punchstock.com, and the very popular istockphoto.com. Veer operates in a different space than Corbis, targeting graphic designers as opposed to editorial customers like magazines and newspapers. According to Photo District News, Corbis is concentrating on four business divisions: Corbis, Corbis Rights Services, SnapVillage (micropayment stock photos similar to Getty's iStockPhoto), and Veer.
Big computing company HP was promoting a strange concept at the Web 2.0 Summit in October: Print 2.0. At first I couldn't figure out what this meant. Web-based printers? Some new form of inkless paper? Curious to know more, while I was at the Summit I met up with HP's Antonio Rodriguez - formerly of startup Tabblo, now Director of Research and Development for HP’s embedded web-to-print group.
Some background: Tabblo is a custom printing site that HP acquired in March 2007. In our meeting, Antonio described Tabblo to me as "Flickr meets blogger on steroids". Using Tabblo, you can mashup photos and add text, to create a kind of collage - which you then have the option to print out as a poster, book, card, etc. The collage is also available online, where other Tabblo users can comment on it. There are a lot of other features too, such as advertising options and widget-like tools. At the heart of Tabblo is its template engine, which allows users to output their creative photo collages both online and as printed materials. Here's a good example of a Tabblo collage, from someone's birthday party. Here's another example, via Flickr:
At long last, Facebook today finally unveiled its much hyped advertising strategy at an invite-only event in New York. Their three pronged attack has already been reported on ad nauseum, so beyond a quick overview, I won't get into the reporting side much.
The company's approach to advertising boils down to an attempt at conversational marketing, where users become product promoters and are encouraged to spread the word about things they buy and use among their group of friends and contacts. "Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a small crowd of a few hundred ad execs and press, with his usual Jobsian hyperbole in full effect. "For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do."
Today at the Defrag Conference, Kevin Marks from Google gave a presentation on OpenSocial. Before working at Google, Kevin was Principal Engineer at Technorati. He's also well known as one of the founders of microformats.
Kevin's speech wasn't on the Defrag agenda, but it was squeezed in due to the timeliness of the topic. Plus, tongue in cheek, it was suggested that Brad Feld and our own Alex Iskold's launch of ClosedPrivate the day before may have compelled Kevin to get OpenSocial on the agenda!
While a lot of the material was repurposed from Campfire, Kevin also sat down with Jerry Michalski and the conversation turned very interesting. There were a few nuggets I wanted to share with the Read/WriteWeb audience.
Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman is a 22 year old law student in Egypt who blogged under the name Kareem Amer until being arrested one year ago today. Charged with 'contempt of religion' and ‘defaming the President of Egypt,' the young man was sentenced in February of this year to four years in prison. Supporters will hold rallies on Friday calling for his release in 14 major cities around the world, from London to Mexico City.
The demonstrations are being organized, in part, by the Free Kareem Coalition. The group says it is an interfaith organization founded and primarily made up of Muslims who disagree with what Kareem wrote on his blog but will "defend with all our might his right to express such opinions."
Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines is blogging up a storm at Defrag. Here are his latest posts from the conference:
There are more posts over on AltSearchEngines.
SpringNote is a hosted Korean wiki service that's been in the works for some time but will make a public launch at the Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo next week. It's a strong product. The site offers a number of features that are worth a look, evidence too that there's still a lot of room for innovation in the world of wikis. There is also clear room for improvement in this particular offering.
There's a lot of nice touches in SpringNote. Edits are autosaved and each page has an accompanying memo or notes page. RSS feeds are widely available throughout the site and each wiki can have feed publishing turned on or off. I'm not sure why you would want to turn feed publishing off, though, and it ought to be on by default. There's an API and plug-in development community. There's a bookmarklet for copying parts of any webpage into your SpringNote wiki, there's MSN chat integration and there's an offline version of the product. It's an impressive application.
According to a New York Times story this morning, circulation across the US newspaper industry fell about 3 percent over the spring and summer compared with figures from the same period last year. The drop in paper sales is indicative of a change in the way people consume news content, shifting especially toward the Internet, where traffic to newspaper web sites has risen. Even paid online content is doing well, with the Wall Street Journal reporting over 1 million paid online subscribers, now accounting for about half of its paid circulation.
Newspapers are not taking this shift in news consumption behavior lying down. The Chicago Tribune reports that five major US newspaper publishers are considering forming a joint online ad network. Gannett Co., Tribune Co., Hearst Corp., Media News Group and Cox Newspapers are in talks to form an ad sales consortium that would, according to a Tribune source, capture seven of the top ten US newspaper markets.
