In America, 240 million people are wired...to the Internet. And in Russia, 60 million people are online. That's nearly half of Russia's population of 142,946,800. Russia is currently the largest Internet market in Europe, and its Internet population has been steadily growing year over year. The population of Internet users has just hit 42.8% of the entire Russian population. Last year, we wrote about the top 10 startups of 2011. But what are the top Russian startups? And are they all just American knockoffs?
Earlier this month the New York Times launched a beta testing playground called Beta620. It's a site for the news organization to try out new web experiments, some of which may graduate to become full-fledged New York Times products.
An interesting Semantic Web experiment went live this week, called Longitude. As the name suggests, it presents a geographical interface for accessing content from The Times. It uses The Time's large store of metadata, along with Linked Open Data from the Web.
More than two years after President Obama's memorandum on his open government initiative, thousands of public authorities and organizations worldwide have embraced the main idea behind it. Opening up data and making them publicly available on the Web has been recognized as a key to fostering transparency and collaboration within public administrations and with citizens.
From census data, to cadastrial maps, everyday a new data set pop ups on the Web, as a quick glance at the #opendata hashtag on Twitter shows.
In January of this year, mobile travel management app TripIt was acquired for up to $120 million by Concur, a company founded in 1993 that provides "integrated expense and travel management solutions." TripIt, founded in late 2006, was one of my favorite 'web 2.0' apps. At the end of 2007, ReadWriteWeb named it one of 10 Semantic Apps to Watch. From the early days, TripIt had managed to pair its sophisticated technology with an easy to use interface. The back end was technological fairy dust, but for the user it was almost deceptively simple. As I described the app in 2007: "you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest."
Last month in Seattle I met up with TripIt co-founder Scott Hintz and Concur co-founder Michael Hilton (currently Executive VP, Worldwide Marketing). I was most interested to find out how a trendy consumer-focused travel app found its way into the more rigid, paperwork ridden world of corporate travel management - and how it's faring.
Last week the Web's three leading search companies - Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! - announced a new structured data collaboration called Schema.org. It includes more than 100 new types of website markup for content like movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. The stated aim of Schema.org is to "improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages."
However, is this collaboration routing around existing web standards, as promoted by the governing web body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)? Since the news was announced, we've discovered that the W3C was not consulted about Schema.org. And given that Google dominates the search market, should we be worried that Google will control a substantial part of the markup used on webpages if - as expected - Schema.org gets significant take-up? Here's why the alarm bell should be rung...
If you're old enough, you'll remember LexisNexis (especially the Nexis part) as a revelation - a way to search through tons of news articles, features, papers and more to research a topic or a person without having to wade through the endless green rows of "Readers' Guides." It has stayed relevant because of its focus - the Lexis part of the name refers to legal searches - and innovation. Its latest is a new semantic "brain" to power its search.
According to the official announcement, "The next-generation semantic search technology identifies the meaning of multiple concepts within a single search query to help users zero in on core concepts faster and make fewer revisions to their search queries."
Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. We kick off the 2010 'Best Of' series with our selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products and implementations of the year.
This year we've chosen 5 products by semantically charged startups and 5 implementations by large organizations. The startups represent the cutting edge of Semantic Web. Each has made an impact on the Internet this year, with user growth and innovation. The organizations we've selected - which include Facebook, Google and the BBC - offered the best examples of large scale deployment of semantic technology.
Aro Mobile, a mobile communications startup backed by Microsoft's Paul Allen, made waves back in October when it emerged after three years in stealth as a suite of interconnected applications for Android smartphones. Installed as a single download from the Android Market, Aro places icons on user's homescreens: Phone, Email, Browser, Calendar, Contacts and Messaging. These are the core "PIM" (personal information manager) applications on mobile devices.
Because of Android's relative openness, Aro is able to completely integrate its PIM solution onto the Android mobile platform. But now, as the company prepares to launch its iPhone version, compromises had to be made. This begs the question: can innovation around core apps even work on iPhone?
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published a Request for Comment on a proposed standard for link relations across multiple web formats. From rel="stylesheet" to rel="bookmark," rel="payment," and rel="me," according the the consensus of the IETF community members, link relations are now first class citizens with a centralized Registry where they can be found. The IETF is a nearly 25 year-old Internet standards body.
What does that mean? "Web linking is the most fundamental web building block," says Yahoo! standards wonk Eran Hammer-Lahav. "Typed links - links with a clear semantic meaning - existed on the web since the very beginning, but for the most part lacked any generally acceptable definition... Agreeing on what a link type means across formats is critical for a semantically rich web, in which links are used to provide a richer user experience, as well as better search and automation features."
As the world shifts to using more tablets, touchscreens and mobile devices as the point of access to the Web, there's an increasing need to rethink the keyboard. On smaller form factors, the traditional method of tap typing may no longer be the best way to enter text on a screen. Enter Siine, a semantically-based, intelligent interface that evolves the keyboard.
But this is no mere keyboard replacement "app," it's much more. It's a communication platform. A universal translator. A system that learns how you speak and then speaks for you. Siine is the future of text-based communication - or, at least that's what the company says.
