Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.
Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.
What's the best way to leverage the most information out of 140 characters? Should you get to learning Mandarin so each character can be a word? Or start forming German-style pseudo-word hashtags to get the point across? Or perhaps, you could parse the natural language, encapsulate the tweet in meta data and go from there.
We've already seen additional information stacked onto our Tweets, as with the geo-location API released last November, but Cascaad's SuperTweet API does more than wrap your tweet in client-provided data like GPS coordinates.
If you like Electronic Music, you might like Musique Concrète. If you like Cartography, you might like Map Projection. Into Head-mounted displays? Check out Organic light-emitting diodes! These are a few of the recommendations I've received this week from semantic, social recommendation service Get Glue and I'm pretty excited about it.
The book and media industries are going through interesting times, to put it mildly. As physical books prepare for their demise, the confusion around pricing of digital ones grows. Yet, whether physical or digital, to sell books you need marketing. People need to hear about a book before they buy it.
This is where the book review come in. Every publicist and publisher's dream is to land a positive review with an authoritative source. A good review in The New York Times or the L.A. Times used to be a pass to big figure sales. Sounds like it still should be, but it is not, because most book reviews are poorly formatted and cannot be recognized by Google and other software.
It's not every day you get to watch the birth of an Internet meme, but yesterday, I was there at the moment of conception. I didn't give birth to it but I certainly played a completely inadvertent and circumstantial part.
These days, the words "social media campaign" are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.
ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.
When we talk to our less technologically-inclined friends about Twitter, we often run across the objection that they really don't care what so-and-so ate for lunch today or what movie they are seeing tonight. And every time, we try to extol all the other benefits of the world's most popular microblogging service. But could we be wrong? Is Twitter mostly people talking about themselves and what they ate for lunch?
Well, SemanticHacker, the blog of contextual ad platform Textwise, has crunched some numbers and we may have to eat our hat.
2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, Linked Data is a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We've gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data.
The 10 products we've picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data. Connecting to other data, building new applications with data, sharing data, and more. These 10 products may not be the type of Semantic Web apps that the W3C envisaged in the 90s, but that no longer seems to matter. What's important is that the Web is becoming more meaningful - more semantic. See also our 2008 list.
When we first came across Faviki back in 2008, we were intrigued by the concept of a social bookmarking service built using semantic tagging capabilities. Instead of organizing bookmarks based on user-created tags, Faviki tags come from structured information extracted from Wikipedia. After Faviki's update earlier this year which improved the tagging process and introduced OpenID support, we again wanted to make the move to this semantic web-based service. There was just one thing standing in our way: no bookmark import feature.
Unfortunately, until now, the only way to use Faviki involved abandoning your extensive bookmark collection and starting fresh. Today, things have changed. Faviki has, at long last, added a Delicious import feature.
Once just a browser add-on that allowed users to surf smarter across several verticals, AdaptiveBlue's Glue is now a site-centric product that acts as both a hub and a spoke of the social web.
Glue's synaptic web-esque technology is based on a user's browsing across common sites such as Amazon, Wikipedia and YouTube, and those visits and any interactions (comments, "likes," etc.) feeding back to automatically create a taste profile and a web of affinity with other users and recommendations of other items or content across about a dozen categories, including music, books and movies. So, can this be done without violating users' privacy or - worse yet - frustrating and boring them into attrition?
