Evri, a semantic content discovery engine for real-time content, has decided to switch gears and change its focus. "Going forward, we consider ourselves a mobile company," said Evri CEO Will Hunsinger. To that end, the company is now launching a handful of new mobile applications that use Evri's core technology to enable the discovery of relevant news and media on the topics you care about.
Currently, the mobile lineup includes apps for tech, football, baseball, celebrity gossip and rock music, but dozens more are in the works. There's even an iPad app coming, which Evri describes as a "smarter Flipboard."
Yesterday we looked at the evolution of GetGlue, a service that allows you to "check in" to TV shows, movies, music, and more.
One of the striking things about GetGlue is how it has used cutting edge web technologies (recommendations, Semantic Web) to build a future-proof foundation. And how it has taken advantage of currently hot platforms (like iPhone and iPad), while also targeting future platforms (like Internet TV). In Part 2 of our interview with Alex Iskold, the founder and CEO of GetGlue, we find out how he's steered his company towards the future. We also find out what other trends Alex Iskold is tracking currently.
Sometimes a successful web product takes a while to find its niche. Occasionally it morphs into a different product altogether, along the way. Both things have happened to GetGlue, the service where users "check in" to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music - indeed, to just about anything.
I caught up with GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold to discuss the evolution of the product since its inception. It's changed from an under-used geeky Firefox browser add-on, to a mainstream service where hundreds of thousands of people check-in to Mad Men and other popular entertainment shows. How has GetGlue made this transition? One word, by getting emotional.
The Palo Alto Research Center is releasing new semantic technology, based on Xerox PARC IP, in the form of an Outlook plugin called Meshin. At first glance, Meshin looks like the ugly stepsister to a similar Outlook tool called Xobni, as it also loads into an email sidebar window, displaying sections dedicated to recent conversations and a summary of attachments shared back and forth via email, among other things. But what makes Meshin different is the engine powering it underneath: a semantic technology that uses "natural language processing" to understand entities, how they connect and what they mean.
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SpringerLink is a platform for eBooks, journals and reference works totalling over 4.8 million documents. The service has just launched a re-design, with new semantic linking features that enable users to access related content across eBooks and journals.
The semantic linking feature displays links to related content from SpringerLink's archive. It's similar to the 'see also' feature on ReadWriteWeb and the related entries functionality on many other news web sites. What's interesting about SpringerLink's implementation is that the related content is from book chapters and journal articles.
Ask.com launched in 1996 and even though the site went through a number of changes through the years (remember Jeeves?), it is still one of the first services many Internet users think of when looking for a site where they can get their questions answered. Today, after trying to compete with Google as a general search engine for a while, Ask.com is getting back to its heritage by launching a new question and answer service that mixes results from Ask.com's search engine with answers the company found on other Q&A sites and the ability to address questions to the Ask community directly. The end result feels a bit like a mix between Bing, Yahoo Answers, Quora and Aardvark.
The stealthy Kleiner Perkins-backed startup called Flipboard has now been revealed to be, as some suspected, a social application for the iPad. The new Flipboard iPad app bills itself as a "social magazine" - that is, one which aggregates status updates, tweets, photos and articles from those you're connected to on social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook. These updates are beautifully laid out into an easily digestible view which you can flip through with your fingers.
This blog was founded in 2003 on the philosophy of a read/write Web - a Web in which people can create content as easily as they consume it. This trend eventually came to be known as Web 2.0 - although others preferred Social Web - and was popularized by activities like blogging and social networking.
It would be easy to say that the 'social' element is still the primary part of today's Web, since the popular products of this era enable you to say what's on your mind (Facebook), what's happening (Twitter), or where you are (Foursquare). All of these are mostly social activities. But more significantly, these and other products output data that will increasingly be used to build personalized services for you.
The Semantic Web is all about structuring data so that humans and computers can more easily interpret the Web and discover relevant data for a wide variety of purposes. Google, a company built on the ability to advertise based on contextual data, announced today a major acquisition in the Semantic Web space. As of today, Metaweb, maker of Freebase and a leader in the Semantic Web, has joined forces with Google.
The soccer World Cup has now ended, with Spain the victor. England was unceremoniously dumped out before the quarter finals - but if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country. A post on the BBC Internet site explains how the BBC World Cup 2010 website used "dynamic semantic publishing" technology.
It's an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can have added meaning and structure.
