A prototype email system being developed at Stanford University is designed to bring the power of semantic technology to our inbox. Called SEAmail, short for "semantic email addressing," the system will help its users route email to the correct person or persons without needing to know their names or email addresses and without the need for preexisting distribution groups.
If two minds are better than one, then two minds with two iPhones must be even better. But how can you get those two great minds working together and thinking alike? Try Whiteboard, a new app that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a collaborative workspace for sketching and sharing ideas in real-time.
Tagging. It has fundamentally changed the way we find and manage content on the Web. Take a page, an image, or a chunk of media, surround it with keywords, and allow others to do the same. Then mix that tagged content with more tagged content and suddenly context starts to form. But tagging, for all its benefits, will only get you so far. Between tagging and the content, there's the opportunity for another level of classification - brief summaries of content. And that's where Synop.it hopes to find its niche.
Earlier this week we posted a Guide to Recommender Systems, as part of our series on recommendation technologies. In this post we look at some of the challenges in building or deploying a recommender system. And yes, Napoleon Dynamite is one of them.
This week an event called Recked was held in Amsterdam, aimed at engineers interested in these systems. The event was hosted by Wakoopa and Strands (we've embedded the presentations below). In those presentations, there were some hints at the problems that these companies have to overcome to build an effective recommender system.
A source close to AOL has informed ReadWriteWeb that it will be shutting down and relaunching the Weblogs Inc. "Lifestyle Blogs" as online magazines. These blogs make up roughly 1/4 of what remains of the Weblogs Inc. network that AOL acquired four years ago. From the heady days of carrying the flag of the blog revolution in 2003 and 2004, to a high profile buy-out by AOL in 2005, the near-term future of Weblogs Inc. raises interesting questions about the ballyhooed medium of blogging itself.
Expert System is a perhaps little known "semantic intelligence" company; but it has 15 years of experience in the tech industry, 115+ employees and is bringing in a very solid $12 Million a year in revenues from over 100 corporate and government clients (at 40% growth over the past two years). The Italian company's core technology is the Cogito platform, a sophisticated system which searches, extracts and classifies unstructured information and makes it into structured data. Cogito (which translates to "I think" in Latin) is bringing semantic technologies to the mainstream commercial world, including online advertising.
A number of ISPs have lately started to clamp down on peer-to-peer networks and are actively restricting heavy usage of 'unlimited' connections. For users, however, there is very little transparency in this process and it can be very hard to figure out if an ISP is actually actively throttling a connection or preventing certain applications from working properly. In reaction to this, Google, together with the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and the PlanetLab Consortium announced the Measurement Lab, an open platform for researchers and a set of tools for users that can be used to examine the state of your broadband connection.
Today is being observed as the second annual International Data Privacy Day by the United States government, Canada, 27 European countries and a number of big corporations, including Yahoo! and Intel.
Though data privacy is a big issue these days - it's not a whole lot of fun to think about. We offer below a list of four things you should make sure to know about regarding privacy, including some pointers to discussions of how the privacy situation today is more complicated than a traditional approach to privacy protection may allow for. We're not going to focus on how to get your tin foil hat to use PGP encryption, we've got a short list of things that all of us realistically should know about for a baseline of online privacy awareness.
Managing your podcast subscriptions on the iPhone and iPod touch while on the go and without having access to your computer is not exactly an enjoyable experience. Last year, Apple rejected Alex Sokirynsky's Podcaster from the App Store because it duplicated "the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes." Now, however, Podcaster has returned to the App Store as RssPlayer (iTunes link), which brings back most of Podcaster's features, though with some frustrating concessions to Apple's iPhone SDK.
This morning, the OpenID Foundation announced that PayPal has joined the OpenID Foundation Board, becoming the first financial institution to join the Foundation as a sustaining member. Andrew Nash, Sr. Director of Information Risk Management, has been named as the PayPal representative on the Board. PayPal's commitment to the cause is another vote of confidence for OpenID, especially considering PayPal's role dealing with sensitive financial data.
