Oktogo.ru: The Russian Version of Kayak and Travelocity

ZeptoLab Is Russia's Answer To The Super Popular Game Angry Birds

BigLion Is Russia's Answer To Groupon, And A Total Rip-Off

SurfingBird Is Russia's StumbleUpon

Vkontakte.ru: The Russian Answer to Facebook

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.

Additionally, some locations have one or two additional tabs: "Natives" and/or "Companies." Clicking on those tabs presents you with list of locally-born people and locally-headquartered organizations.

It's a relatively small project, but this type of functionality may become a part of your future news reading experience. For a national (indeed, international) publication like The Times, it's often interesting to see what stories local to you have been published. Also which local people and companies have been in the news recently.

It's encouraging to see Linked Data continuing its push into commercial areas like this.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication parter of the NYTimes.

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.

For example, the Icelandic startup Datamarket.com provides a fully flavored set of functionalities to visualize the data. Data time series could be visualized with several different types of charts, allowing the users to add dates, grabbed from the Guardian archive. The result is a handy way to make explicit the correlations between trends and historical events. Then, end users could access the data through REST APIs or export them in CSV or XML. Links to diagrams could even be shared on Twitter or Facebook, making Datamarket a fancy and pragmatic tool.

Factual, another platform recently raised $25 million dollars in a Series A funding, mainly impresses for its ability to join data sets. Different data sets are represented with different tables, slightly similar to a relational database where end-users could make projections, selections and joins on table fields. Then, some applications could be build on top of the aggregated data and the result embedded in a third-party website.

CKAN Data Hub is a remarkable initiative led by the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is probably the largest hub in terms of indexed data sets. Released as an open source project, it offers API access to search and browse the index, but it's not equipped with an explicit mechanism to directly manipulate the indexed data. However, what strongly differentiates CKAN from the others, is the emphasis it puts on data licensing: every data set can be published using any of a number of open licenses. Most of them are directly endorsed by the Open Knowledge Foundation, a group that is playing a leading role in this field.

The last goodie is Talis's Kasabi, which was demoed at the last Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. Kasabi offers interesting innovations powered by a pragmatical use of Semantic Web technologies. For any given data set, users can design their own REST APIs and re-publish them on the market, hinting at a forthcoming revenue model. What makes Kasabi one step ahead of others is the powerful mechanism provided by SPARQL to slice, select and remix the data. Once a query has been defined, the user could completely customize the response using an XSLT transformation. Under a certain perspective, Kasabi could be seen as an engineered showcase for the potentials of the entire Semantic Web technologies stack.

Following the 5 stars

Even if those platforms, and other well-known products such as Microsoft Azure or Infochimps, are concretely sustaining the tendency to open up the data, there are still obstacles to a harmonious and integrated data consumption. Data publication techniques, for example, vary from simple database exports with CSV files to sophisticated Semantic Web-powered platforms, such as data.gov.uk. This heterogeneity raises development costs and acts as a barrier to the development of an enterprise reuse of the data. Costs raised by all the implementation tasks needed to access the data, make them coherent with a specific application domain, curate them and, finally, generate business value from their usage.

Even if some markets are facing the need to standardize their internal representations, there's still a lack of Web-wide integration among different data sets. It's nearly impossible to link and access to different data sets published on different markets.

In addition, even when data are directly published on the Web, they do not really benefit from the web model. This lack has been recently pointed out by Tim Berners-Lee who proposed the 5 stars of Linked Open Data: a handy way to judge the data quality with regards to the license and the syndication technology used to expose them. The Linked Data paradigm is seen as a key to tackle the main issues related to data integration. The "webby way to link data" foresees unique URI-referenced entities linked together, machine-readable representations and open licenses as the main foundational ingredients to achieve web-scale open data consumption.

Datamarkets: quarterbacks in the emerging data economy

We can reasonably expect data markets, or whatever we'd like to call them, will play a prominent role in the emerging data economy. Once the revenue models for data publishers are clearly defined and accepted, and once a critical mass of 5-star quality interlinked data sets become available, a new wealth of opportunities for developers will emerge. In some sense, a virtuous revenue model should encourage big owners to open their data sets, consumers to offer their APIs with flexible pay-by-use fees and the various markets to compete on the value-added services they will be able to provide. The mission is all about building an ecosystem, rather than merely develop vertical search engines.

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.

Prior to approaching TripIt, Michael Hilton told me, Concur regarded the web 2.0 app as representing a sea change in the business travel industry. Mainly because TripIt was an application that was native to the smartphone. According to Hilton, who has been in the travel solutions industry for well over 15 years now, the smartphone has changed the dynamics of how people travel on business.

The innovation of TripIt, in the eyes of Concur's management, was that it gave travelers power. They felt that the app could be used to manage both personal and business trips. The idea behind the acquisition was that TripIt would enable Concur's customers to consolidate their travel data.

TripIt Was Already Eyeing Business Travel Market

The TripIt team had foreshadowed (or invited) the interest of Concur by launching a business offering in August of last year. Ostensibly this was a move designed to increase its revenue. Although the cynical amongst you might suggest it was to make TripIt an attractive acquisition target for the likes of Concur.

Regardless, it was probably a necessary move from a revenue point of view. Because although the consumer version of TripIt had a premium version for regular travelers, there was stiff competition in the consumer space from the likes of Dopplr, KAYAK and WorldMate.

So other than the obvious motivator of a big pay day, what attracted TripIt to Concur? TripIt co-founder Scott Hintz told me that from day one, TripIt was used by frequent travelers - which he said were mostly small or large business people. He admitted that it took some time for TripIt to recognize that in addition to its popular consumer offering, it could also offer benefits to employers.

In particular, Hintz told me, TripIt had a lot of requests from its users to create small business services. For example enabling office assistants, travel coordinators and others to manage the travel of other people in TripIt.

So while TripIt started out as a way to manage personal trips, the product was eventually extended to organize the trips of other people - typically in a business context.

TripIt is also now extending onto other devices; an an iPad app was launched in May.

Do You Concur With Concur Acquisition?

Much of the work currently happening between TripIt and Concur is in integrating the two services together. In May, it was announced that trips booked in Concur would be automatically copied into TripIt. The reverse data transfer (TripIt Pro to Concur) was announced at the end of June.

Overall, the acquisition by Concur was undeniably a great deal for TripIt. It got cash, stock in a larger, more stable company, and opportunities to flesh out its consumer app into a 'grown up' business one.

For Concur, it remains to be seen whether the bigco can successfully integrate a consumer-focused app into its heavily business-focused solutions. But as we all know, it's a business world increasingly dominated by online - and increasingly mobile - services. Concur couldn't have picked a better web 2.0 app in the consumer travel market, so at the very least it has smart new employees, access to sophisticated TripIt customers, and some very whizzy technology.

What do you think, was the deal a good one for both companies? What about for consumers?

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...

Specifically, here are the two main issues about Schema.org which leads us to suspect this is a land grab:

1) The 3 companies - Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! - write the schemas and host them centrally. These schemas sometimes directly compete with existing open standards - such as the e-commerce markup standard GoodRelations, which has been receiving solid take-up from the likes of Best Buy. Update: Martin Hepp, creator and lead developer of GoodRelations, replied in the comments that "Google and Yahoo have confirmed that they will continue to support GoodRelations in RDFa for product and offer information."

2) Whereas open standards like GoodRelations use RDFa (a simpler version of RDF, the main markup of the W3C-sponsored Semantic Web), the Schema.org markup will use Microdata - which is a spec written by Google.

RDFa Adoption Will Suffer

Schema.org will certainly lead to a decrease in RDFa usage, which ultimately hurts the W3C's long-running push towards the Semantic Web - that is, a Web with added meaning and structure.

Over the past year, RDFa received significant take-up from large companies like Facebook and Best Buy. It's particularly notable that Facebook used RDFa in its Open Graph protocol. Facebook is Google's main competitor in the social Web, so Schema.org could also be viewed as a competitive move by Google against Facebook.

Simply put, the argument here is that Schema.org is a strong push by Google (and less so Microsoft and Yahoo!) to be in centralized control of key aspects of Web markup - at the expense of W3C open standards. As Web data becomes more and more structured, we have to question any moves by a large, influential company that may put it in a position of control over that data.

Indeed, last year we raised the same questions about Facebook's Open Graph. Because although Facebook used RDFa, they used their own custom version of it. Despite this, both Facebook and the W3C argued that the Open Graph would actually help the adoption of RDFa.

Why Did Schema.org Choose Microdata Over RDFa?

ReadWriteWeb has learned of rumors that Yahoo! wanted RDFa to be a core component of Schema.org, but that Google and Microsoft insisted on Microdata. Why is that?

Microdata is the markup specification written by Google on which Schema.org is based. It's similar to RDFa, in that it adds semantics to HTML in order to provide more structure to Web markup.

Google explained the Schema.org decision to use Microdata over RDFa on a Google Webmaster Central help page:

"Historically, we've supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. Instead of having webmasters decide between competing formats, we've decided to focus on just one format for schema.org. In addition, a single format will improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we've found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we've gone with."

That explanation makes logical and business sense, but even so we have to ask why Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! chose to route around the W3C supported standard of RDFa.

There is some politics happening here, because Microdata is sponsored by a non-W3C work group called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which was formed in 2004 in response to the perceived slow development of web standards at W3C.

Is This a Land Grab by Google? You Tell Us...

Regardless of the politics, there is a real danger that Google in particular will come to control a significant part of Web markup through Schema.org.

While it is a positive sign that the major search companies are pushing for more structured data, the big question is about control. Why isn't Schema.org using RDFa, the W3C open standard, as the base for its schemas? Does Google now have too much influence over the future of structured data? We'd love to hear your thoughts about these important issues regarding the future of the Web.

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."

LexisNexis made its first foray into the perennially-attractive field of semantic search a year and a half ago. The new engine improves on the basic foundation, according to the company.

"Semantic search uses the science of meaning in language to produce highly relevant search results...The new semantic search technology takes this science to the next level by enhancing its ability to identify multiple concepts contained within a single search query. Thus, if a patent researcher asks the LexisNexis search engine to find information about a complex subject, the new semantic brain will actually identify various possible ideas contained in that request and return related concepts for each idea in their query."

The company has also launched the "Visualize & Compare" tool that allows users to compare and analyze any two or three result sets or lists of patents, providing a visual representation of the information the "brain" finds and presents semantically.

Semantic search, most famously in Ask Jeeves, the earlier iteration of Ask.com, is attractive but complex. That search engine was known, among other things, for hilariously inappropriate responses to seemingly simple questions. Smaller corporate databases responded to the semantic elements better and perhaps that will be the case with LexisNexis's rollout of their search.

Other sources: ResourceBlog

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.

Here then is our list of the top 10 Semantic Web products or implementations of 2010 (in no particular order).

Freebase

In July Google acquired one of the leading Semantic Web companies, Metaweb. Metaweb runs Freebase, an open, semantically marked up database of information. It looks similar to Wikipedia, but Freebase is all about structured data and what you can do with it.

Google already had a relationship with Freebase, pulling in its information to provide intelligent search results within Google News. With the acquisition of Metaweb, Google can now leverage the company's tools and data even further, especially within basic Web search results.

Freebase was one of our top 10 Semantic Web products last year and being acquired by Google validates its potential.

GetGlue

This year was a turning point for GetGlue, the service where users "check in" to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music and more. Last November, GetGlue changed its branding and launched a new website. It changed almost overnight from a geeky browser add-on called Blue Organizer to a destination website called GetGlue. Mobile applications followed soon after, enabling its users to interact with GetGlue while watching TV or at an entertainment venue.

The changes have been good for GetGlue. It's experienced strong growth this year, reaching over 600,000 users by the end of September.

Disclosure: GetGlue's founder and CEO, Alex Iskold, used to be a regular contributer to RWW.

Flipboard

The launch of the iPad in 2010 triggered a new round of innovation in the startup community. Few startups utilized the touchscreen UI to create a unique user experience more than Flipboard, a magazine reading application built specifically for the iPad.

It turns out that Flipboard isn't just a pretty face, it's also using Semantic technologies.

In July, Flipboard acquired semantic technology startup Ellerdale, whose intelligent data-parsing algorithms had previously been used to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker. Ellerdale's technology was used by Flipboard to design a more personalized real-time experience - determining what social updates are important to you and presenting them in its now familiar magazine-like format.

Hunch

Hunch started out as a Q&A service, but in August it re-positioned as a personalization service. It's a recommendation engine that shows you movies you want to see, books you want to read, vacation destinations you want to go to, and much more. The company is on a mission to "map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person."

Co-founder Caterina Fake told us in October that Hunch uses a decision tree model, as an alternative to search, to provide more personalized information to users.

Apture

Apture is a semantic contextual search service which continues to iterate strongly (it made our top 10 list last year, too). In August, Apture launched Apture Highlights, a plug-in that allows you to dive deep into any topic you discover on almost any page around the web.

When we first noticed Apture several years ago, it was a service that required publishers to load up linked pop-up widgets with multimedia of their own choosing. The company removed that barrier to entry with its August release. Everything is now automated and it's available almost everywhere. Indeed we liked it so much, we started using Apture on ReadWriteWeb (there is no commercial relationship, we just think the product adds to our site's user experience).

Next Page: Top 5 big organization implementations of Semantic Web technology. Featuring Facebook's Open Graph, Google's semantic search, and more...

Facebook

Arguably the biggest Semantic Web news of the year came in April, when Facebook announced a large-scale new platform called the Open Graph. The stated goal of the Open Graph protocol was to enable publishers to "integrate [their] Web pages into the social graph." Essentially, each web page can now become an 'object' in Facebook's social graph (which is Facebook's term for how people connect to each other in its network). This means that pages can be referenced and connected across social network user profiles, blog posts, search results, Facebook's News Feed, and more.

The Open Graph is a wide-ranging platform which includes features such as 'Like' buttons and publisher plug-ins. It also includes a simple, RDF-based markup. This requires publishers to include at least 4 metadata properties in each object: title, type, image, URL. There are a few additional properties which may be optionally added, such as site_name and description.

See also: Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors

Google Squared

The holy grail in web search technology is to be able to ask a simple question, in natural language, and get a simple answer. In May, Google announced that Google Squared was coming to its search results. Google Squared, which launched in 2009, adds additional information to search results.

The functionality was added to Google's traditional search results in two ways. Firstly, simple queries such as Catherine Zeta-Jones' date of birth elicited useful data within the search results:

By clicking "show sources" on the Squared-provided result, a list of sources appears showing you how Google arrived at this answer.

Secondly, Google Squared is being used to provide a new feature in Google's sidebar (another innovation by the search giant in 2010): "Something different". This feature provides a list of related searches that may be of interest, determined by looking at your current search term.

This year Google also reported strong growth in its Rich Snippets feature, which adds extra information to Google search results too - in this case, data like review ratings.

Best Buy

One of the themes of 2010 was the increasing usage of Semantic Web technologies by large commercial companies like Facebook and Google. Leading U.S. retailer, Best Buy, was another large company to impress in 2010 with its adoption of semantic technologies. Specifically, Best Buy used a Semantic Web markup language called RDFa to add semantics to its webpages.

Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at BestBuy.com, told ReadWriteWeb in an interview earlier this year that the primary goal of using semantic technologies was to increase the visibility of Best Buy's products and services. With data such as store name, address, store hours and GEO data being marked up using RDFa, search engines are now able to identify each of those data components more easily and put them into context. The use of semantic technology, Myers told us, led to increased traffic and better service to its customers.

Data.gov.uk

In January, Data.gov.uk launched to make non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers. It arrived six months after the U.S. government launched its Data.gov site, but from the start the U.K. site had more than three times as much data. At launch, Data.gov.uk had nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. By the end of the year, that had increased to over 4,600.

Data.gov.uk was one of the highlights of the year in Linked Data, which is when organizations or governments upload data to the Web in a format enabling it to be re-used and built on. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement.

See also: The State of Linked Data in 2010

BBC World Cup Website

The biggest sporting event of the year was the soccer World Cup, which was widely covered in the media. The BBC World Cup 2010 website used "dynamic semantic publishing" technology to enhance its daily World Cup reporting.

The site featured over 700 webpages and was powered by a semantic publishing framework. It boasted a comprehensive ontology (a map of concepts), that output "automated metadata-driven web pages" created on-the-fly. It was an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can add meaning and structure.

There you have it, ReadWriteWeb's selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products and implementations of 2010! Let us know in the comments whether you agree or not with our top 10.

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?

Aro Mobile, to catch you up, is a semantic technology software company led by CEO John Lazarus, a former Microsoft employee, now senior advisor to Allen's Vulcan Capital and board member at Evri, another notable semantic tech company, which recently went mobile too. Simply put, Aro's goal is to make our so-called "smartphones" much, much smarter by using machine intelligence to interconnect the apps we use the most, the core apps used in communications.

Semantic technology is a difficult concept to explain to mainstream users, but Aro demonstrates its potential by innovating on top of the PIM, the core communications applications that mobile users access daily. The software understands the language of mobile devices, including the way you chat via SMS, the way you email, even the way you Tweet. It can identify people, places and dates referenced in your emails, messages and calendar appointments and the importance of those items to you. Within Aro's graph of your social connections, it understands that there's a stronger connection between someone that you've emailed multiple times and someone who's only listed as an address book entry. That's the power of semantics, actually: the ability to understand.

We've seen semantic technology cropping up here and there lately, but mostly on Android devices. Keyboard replacement apps like SwiftKey and Siine, for example, are using machine intelligence to help you type more quickly with word suggestions - but not just suggestions based on a database of words in a given language, but those delivered through an understanding of how you - you personally - communicate. If you start typing "cy" on your phone, SwiftKey or Siine might suggest "cya!!!!," if that's the way you normally complete a text message conversation. Siine plans to take things a step further, with support for translation between languages and integration with other mobile applications, too.

Aro, along these same lines, wants to function as a conduit between the phone and the "cloud." Although it focuses on email for now, it will soon integrate with Facebook and Twitter to add another layer of data and understanding to your communications.

That's an explanation of Aro at a very high level, however. In practice, the app, or rather, the suite of apps installed function as your phone book, contact lists, calendar and email client. Even in its raw, early format, the app is smart. Very smart. It can identify a person, place or date, and then, when you tap on the item (identified objects are circled), a list of actions appear. If you tap a name, Aro may suggest that you edit the contact, add to your contacts, send an email, place a call, etc. And if you were to proceed, it knows what information to use - it knows the phone number to call or it could automatically fill in the contact details. The exchange of data between the apps is seamless - you don't have to copy and paste information from one app to another and you don't have to constantly toggle between apps, either. Everything talks to everything else.

For now, Aro serves as a useful personal assistant of sorts - in addition to its interoperable apps, you can use Aro search against your entire archive of data, the results custom-tailored to you. In a later version of the app, a location service will be added, allowing you to further personalize your search results. For example, a search for a "coffee" in a given city could return recommendations based on where you had been recently, as opposed to the sort of default list that appears in Google.

Design Challenges

As innovative as the technology is, the interface still feels too technical, as if built by engineers not designers. The objects Aro recognizes are circled so as to highlight them, like a teacher correcting a student's homework. Aro is training wheels for learning semantic technology. Here's a person, here's a date, it tells you. Tap this here. See what happens.

The text is circled because we, as Web users, can't quite grasp the concept of actionable data that's not highlighted in some way. We expect hyperlinks, colored and underlined, to direct our clicks. But links are going away, says Andrew Hickl, Aro's CTO. Semantic technology will eventually lead to their demise. In a decade or so, any object, any piece of data, anything that you can touch will be able to do anything and no one will need training to know that's the case - it will just be the way it is.

On iPhone, Limitations

Android was the perfect place for new, experimental technology like this to launch. Because Android isn't as tightly locked down as iPhone, there's room for software like this to take hold. There, Aro can behave more like individual applications and can more deeply integrate into various Android menus and functions.

As Aro prepares to launch on the iPhone, however, there are limitations. The iPhone Aro app when launched opens up the Aro suite of apps, the icons appearing as if in a folder. While the "apps" can still talk to each other, on iPhone they aren't really individual apps. The email "app" can't become the default mail app on the iPhone and the calendar "app" can't become the default calendar. This limits how deeply Aro's integration can be. You can't, for example, email a picture using Aro's email app - you still have to use the Apple-provided mail client.

For iPhone users, the level of control and consistency Apple provides is one of the key selling points of the device. Everything works as it should. But it's all Steve Jobs' vision - and while that's nothing to sniff at, not by any means - there's a reason why many early adopters are going to Android. The platform allows others outside of Apple to fully develop ideas of their own, too. And we get to watch them as they do, we get to test the apps in early alpha and beta formats, and we get to participate in the innovation that occurs.

Comparatively to iPhone's own core apps, Aro may not be as pretty, but its underlying technology needs a place to flourish and develop. Like other semantic apps, there needs to be a real-world playground where people can try these new things. For now, that playground is Android.

Aro is only one example of this. Siine and SwiftKey (mentioned above) are another. ON, a new company with an innovative take on the address book is yet a third. ON lets you maintain different profiles for different groups of users - one status message for friends, another for colleagues; one voicemail message for the boss, another for the spouse, and so forth. Like Aro, ON launched on Android, then dumbed itself down for iPhone. SwiftkKey hasn't even bothered with iPhone app. It's unclear how Siine will manage.

iPhone users wishing to get a taste of what's possible on Android can try Aro, when the app becomes available in Q1 2011. A lot of the functionality will still be present. But for iPhone users, trying Aro may feel like toying around with a demo. For full-speed immersion, try the Android version instead.

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."

IETF RFC 5988 is the document authored by Yahoo's Mark Nottingham for the IETF that explains the standard and this is the registry where you can find the 42 relations that have been accepted so far.

Hammer-Lahav continues:

"What the new RFC does is establish a registry and a simple process for defining new link relation types across formats (HTML5, XRD, Microformats, HTTP headers, ATOM, etc.).

"What is important about the new registry is its lightweight approach, allowing most stable documents to be used as reference specifications for new relation types. The process is used as a sanity check, and not as another bureaucracy slowing down innovation."

Hammer-Lahav says the HTML5 community has been particularly active in submitting Rels for inclusion in the registry. See also the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group's HTML5 rel directory. (Details)

Rich links, expressed across multiple languages, in a standardized semantic format, promise to act as a platform where programatic analysis can be performed on scale - making it far easier than ever before to bring together diverse resources from all around the web to create new experiences for application users.

The rel="me" link, for example, has enabled services like the Google Social Graph API to string together semantically marked-up profile pages owned by a single person across multiple different sites and social networks. That makes it easy to draw a picture of who a person is across different services they use, because their profile pages link out to their blogs or Twitter accounts, for example, using the rel="me" link relation.

That kind of cross-site functionality could be built for everything from bookmarks to content licenses to payments and more if the IETF's new web link relations markup proliferates.

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.

Not Just a Keyboard Replacement App

Several companies have already begun re-thinking the keyboard, including Swype, a keyboard replacement app which lets you drag your finger across the screen from letter to letter, and SwiftKey, which smartly suggests the word you may enter next (e.g. You type "t" and it suggests "the.") Similar to Siine, SwiftKey also makes use of semantics and machine learning to suggest the words you may type - that is the sorts of things you typically say in a conversation.

When Siine first enters the market, it may be confused as a direct competitor to apps like these, because it will initially arrive as an Android Market application. But Android is just the beginning - Siine aims to be an app you use on all your screens, coming next to the iPhone, the iPad, tablet PCs and the Web shortly after its Android launch. And according to the company, it will more than just a keyboard replacement application.

So what is Siine, exactly? Well, it's a little curious. Operating in stealth mode until recently, the company is still short on details, leaving much to be revealed during its launch at November's Under the Radar conference, an event showcasing new startups.

What We Do Know: Semantics, Understanding, Translation

Here's what we do know: Siine is a communication tool that will eventually exist for any platform where you enter text into a little white box. Whether you're SMS'ing on your Android, typing on an iPad, tweeting from a basic messaging phone or surfing the Web.

Siine doesn't just suggest words, it suggests the words you would say. For example, if you always sign off your text messages with "Cya!!!!!!!!!!!", Siine knows. If you say "like" all the time, Siine knows. If you use acronyms, Siine knows. It even knows what those acronyms mean. It even knows what acronyms mean in different languages. And it doesn't need to have giant dictionary-based databases on the backend to do all this because it uses semantics - a technology that enables the understanding of meanings and context of the words and phrases you use.

In short, Siine combines intelligence, semantics and the ability to understand you.

Business Model Still Flexible

For now, the company's business model is flexible - the company is in talks with several big-name handset manufacturers and mobile carriers, as well as VCs.

Siine's CEO Ed Maklouf's educational background plays well into the creation of a startup like this. While at Stanford, he studied Communications and Linguistics, so he has a better understanding of how people communicate with each other than the average entrepreneur. He and his small team have now put that knowledge into action in Siine and we're excited to take a look at what they've come up with.

Are you excited too? We thought so. In a couple of weeks, Siine will launch into private beta and we'll offer invites to our readers - stay tuned.

Above is the first and only image of Siine that the company is providing at the moment. It's notable for the fact that it doesn't look remarkably different than a standard keyboard. How does Siine turn that keyboard into a "revolutionary" new interface, exactly? We'll keep you posted.

Update! New Video!

Siine has just released a new YouTube video detailing its service a bit more. Although it's still vague on the specifics, you'll see there are some hints about how it integrates with applications - a feature that may position it as being both a virtual assistant and a keyboard replacement application.

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."

How Evri Uses Semantic Tech to Deliver the News

Evri's new apps aim to bring you the content you're most interested in and passionate about, with the signal filtered from the noise and the content distilled down to what really matters.

The semantic technology Evri is known for enables this, as it helps to understand what content is popular, but also what it means. For example, its football application wouldn't confuse Will Smith, the actor, with Will Smith, the football player for the New Orleans Saints. And after discovering the content, Evri can then rank it based on recency, relevancy and popularity.

It also doesn't require a large group of curators to make this happen. Instead, the ratio is more like one curator per hundreds, maybe thousands, of pieces of content. The curator's job consists only of pointing the technology in the right direction. This is curation at scale.

Mobile Apps Available Now: iPhone, Android (iPad Coming Soon)

Each mobile app features multiple views of the content it provides: a news view, a video view, a Twitter view and an "EvriThing" view, which is all the views combined.

The Twitter view could be an intriguing alternative to using Twitter lists. Although lists are currently one of Twitter's best features for curating and filtering content, Evri's "Twitter" view on a topic functions like a dynamic Twitter list of what's interesting, current and relevant.

The upcoming iPad app will do much of the same, except on a larger form factor. It will also let you add content from sources that matter to you - like your own Twitter and Facebook accounts. "Flipboard doesn't get popularity," said Hunsinger. It doesn't know what content should be featured bigger or smaller within the app based on popularity and other factors.

But that's only a temporary glitch - Flipboard acquired semantic data-analysis company Ellerdale and is in the process of integrating that tech into its backend to better determine the relevance of the information it displays.

Design Needs Work

Flipboard has great design, too. And Hunsinger says his company has learned from that design and will likely implement similar interactions. Flipboard didn't invent the magazine, after all. It just got it right on the iPad.

But when it comes to design, this is an area where Evri has some serious ramping up to do, especially if it wants to take on Flipboard. The mobile apps are somewhat garish in their color choices and include hard-to-read fonts. GigaOm's Liz Gannes even said "the Evri app design currently hurts my eyes." It's hard to disagree, and that doesn't bode well for the company's iPad plans.

But like Gannes, who said the idea has "promise," we see the potential here. Semantic technology plus content discovery plus mobile is a recipe for success, is it not?

The Evri apps are being announced today at GigaOm's Mobilize conference in San Francisco. They will be available on both iPhone and Android. The apps are monetized through affiliate advertising partnerships with Amazon, Apple and others so they're available for free.

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.

RWW: You were very early to spot some major trends that were happening, like Semantic Web and recommendation technologies. Can you tell us about how you've implemented the theory that you've written about in the past - what's worked, what hasn't worked and the lessons learned. For example, the Semantic Web. You've written a lot about that. Some of the things you've implemented probably haven't worked out quite as well as you may have thought they would, while other things may have worked really well...

Alex Iskold: There is a big validation inside GetGlue of these things that I've always talked about. There are the semantic bits and they're very important. To give you an example, here's something that is both really basic but also very striking: GetGlue widgets on partner sites.

To put a widget on the official Dexter web site, all they need to do is drop the widget in. They don't need to tell Glue what show it is - the widget will just know. For our competitors, this is actually a big barrier. They cannot do this, period. For us there is a simple tag, which we've developed over the years, that allows us to make it completely seamless for people to install our widget.

We developed a whole bunch of semantic web bits and they're in there [inside the product]. Our system has a unique identity for each show, for each group, for each movie. There's only one version of [each show/movie etc] and that's pretty powerful, because it makes the taste graph unique and complete. Versus if you were to have fragments [of information] then it's a bad user experience, because everybody's looking at a different thing. And then you can't do any analytics, it's just a mess. So that's why we have semantic web bits.

Recommendations

RWW: How about recommendation technologies, which you've written about before on our site. How have you implemented the theory in GetGlue?

Alex Iskold: Recommendations are very much part of what our users really enjoy. You go and you sign up with GetGlue, you click a bunch of things that you like and then every week we will go and look up a set of new movies, new books, new music - and we'll rank it just for you. We'll say "Hey, because you liked these five movies, this new movie that's coming out this week is probably going to be interesting to you." And people absolutely love that. It's powerful and it's also taken for granted. But there's a lot of heavy lifting to do that. To basically filter all of this for people. There's a lot of computing power and a lot of algorithms running.

Here's the interesting thing when you take it one level higher. We want people to take all of these crazy algorithms that we've got for granted. Because who really cares? As long as the software's fun and delivers utility. As long as it's perceived as a complete system. What does it matter what's inside? You just enjoy the experience.

New Platforms: Internet TV

RWW: Recently I spoke to Jim Spencer from Newsy. They are really interested in Internet TV, it's going to be a big platform for them. I imagine it's also going to be a big platform for GetGlue as well. Are you working towards that?

Alex Iskold: I am actually in the camp that thinks that the "Second Screen" is a simpler and faster way to get to the same place. [RM: second screen refers to when you use another device - such as an iPad, a laptop or a phone - to get supplementary information about, or interact with, whatever you're watching on the TV screen]

We're already here. We're already where we need to be. We're in the living room, and according to Nielsen, three out of four people use the Second Screen - which is, you are watching TV and you're also holding either a computer in your hand or you're holding an iPad or a phone. So we [GetGlue] are able to tap into TV consumption in the living room.

In terms of Internet TV, of course it's relevant to us. But I think that our biggest focus right now is building a loop, where people check-in and in exchange for check-ins they get tangible rewards. Right now, the way I look at Glue is that when you see a friend, that's a reward. When you get a suggestion, that's a reward. When you get stickers, from brands, that's a reward. Then can we picture a world where we start giving people real, tangible discounts. That's the big focus for us in coming months.

The Next Big Trends

RWW: You've done a lot of writing on ReadWriteWeb in the past, about future trends and trends that are evolving. So, what particular trends are you tracking closely at this point in time?

Alex Iskold: I have to confess that I've been really, really busy and I'm not able to think through as much about what's happening next. However, I can tell you one really recent example: ABC has an app that can synchronize content on an iPad to what's on TV. It is seriously stuff from science fiction. The lure of such technology is amazing.

I'm very bullish on tablets and the iPad specifically. It will be the next gen computer that controls more and more of your home. I recently got a new car which came with an iPhone interface. You just slide the iPhone in and it knows how to read what's on the phone and play the tracks, synchronize contacts, GPS, everything. And it's sort of like a complete plug and play. I didn't have to do a thing. I'm anticipating that soon more and more of that happens at home. So I think smart homes, where we'll see more computing devices and programs - controlling what's happening, from room temperature to lights to monitoring heat and electricity. And applications related to optimizing your bills. Because computers are way better at crunching numbers. A computer can check and see your usage. That's where I think things are headed.

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.

People Get Emotional About Entertainment

GetGlue changed its branding and launched a new website, GetGlue.com, last November. It changed almost overnight from a geeky browser add-on called Blue Organizer to a destination website called GetGlue. Mobile applications followed soon after.

"Once we launched the website," Iskold told me, "it made a world of a difference and ever since [we've had] exponential growth that continues to increase."

It wasn't until the re-launch that Iskold and company realized that their core users are emotional about the things that they're watching on TV and the things they're consuming.

"It was because we kind of stood back and said, what we need to do is create something that will be a fit for entertainment. The big insight was that it needs to be emotional. Our users are really emotional about GetGlue and about their entertainment - so that strikes the chord with them. That was a big turn around for us."

"When you you read a book," Iskold said (knowing that I am a book lover), "it's an emotional experience, right? Likewise, other people are very passionate about different forms of entertainment. Somebody may like True Blood, somebody may like Mad Men, somebody may be into classical music. Humans are attached to entertainment and entertainment drives our emotions. Everybody wants to talk about entertainment and essentially it's a form of self-expression. Which books you like, which movies you like, which shows you watch - it's self-expression and something that we'd like to discuss and tell each other about."

From Browser Add-On to Destination Website

It was fairly obvious to industry observers last year that the Blue Organizer browser add-on wasn't quite working - a few of us at ReadWriteWeb found it hard to keep using the product after the initial trial period. Despite the issues, the November re-branding and move to a different delivery platform was a drastic change. I asked Alex Iskold what drove the company to that? He replied that "a process for every start-up that ultimately succeeds is a process of iteration."

"I think it starts with the idea. The idea has always been the same, which is the vision of connecting people around entertainment that they love, around things they love. I mean you know that since day one, we were fascinated with the idea of why should we be separated by different websites? If you are a NetFlix customer and I am a Blockbuster customer, why can't we share each other's tastes and why can't we see each other's comments?

So this original idea is at the heart of the service, which is that we're connecting people around entertainment. But the delivery, as you said, just wasn't right. The browser add-on model was interesting and innovative. But the problem was it wasn't generating emotions and it wasn't resonating with people. I mean we had over two million downloads of the add-on, but it just wasn't the delivery [mechanism] that people ultimately wanted."

Iskold told me that the company had a bunch of internal conversations about how to move beyond the browser add-on. Eventually one of their investors told the team that they "cannot be this closed network." He encouraged GetGlue to be "part of the open web" and launch a destination website.

Usage Patterns

Seeing as the product changed so much, how do people use GetGlue nowadays?

"Well, we have a bunch of mobile apps," replied Iskold. "We have an iPhone app and we recently launched an iPad app. We have an Android app. We also have a mobile website. Most of the usage for checking in happens through the [mobile] apps. So it's a natural thing. You're sitting on the couch, you're watching Mad Men, you want to check-in and tell your friends what you're doing. Or you're at work listening to music and you can check-in."

In terms of browsing information on GetGlue, Iskold said that "most of the ratings are happening through getglue.com [i.e. the website], about 80% of the ratings." He suggested that use cases for browsing GetGlue are when the user is bored or nostalgic.

"I want to go in check out what my friends are doing but also read a bunch of lists - action films that I've seen, books that I've read. So you're just basically being nostalgic [about] entertainment and browsing through peoples' profiles. We see most of the ratings coming through this way."

I wondered whether a lot of the new mainstream audience has been coming in via Twitter and Facebook? Surprisingly, Iskold said that the opposite is more generally the case.

"People are sharing from GetGlue to Facebook and Twitter a lot," he noted. "They're sharing at a rate of three shares per minute to each network. On weekends and evenings, we're actually seeing over ten shares per minute to each of these networks."

I asked if the current audience contributes content (ratings, check-ins) at the same rate as the early adopter users that the browser add-on had? Iskold pointed to checking in and rating as two very common actions.

"Everybody rates. Ratings are huge for us. Checking in is a really light weight thing. Hey, so you checked in to Mad Men. But do you actually like the show? If so, then what other shows do you like? That's how you build your taste profile and then you get suggestions. Based on the suggestions, you check-in again. So the whole flow is basically when users get in they start checking in. It's really light weight. Then, over the next couple of weeks, they will build up their taste profile, with thousands of data points. And we will then be able to give them intelligent recommendations for what else to consume. And then because of the check-ins, they stay engaged. They can also get rewards from big brands and that's pretty exciting for people."

Partnering With Entertainment Brands

Another reason for GetGlue's recent momentum is the partnerships it has inked with blockbuster entertainment companies like HBO, Showtime, Fox, PBS, Universal Pictures and "dozens of other brands." At the end of last week, GetGlue announced its first major news network partnership - with MSNBC. It also obtained "a very exciting set of rewards" from ABC (the makers of Mad Men, a show that is obviously popular on GetGlue), Discovery HDTV and a couple of other networks.

I was curious to know how a partnership with an entertainment company usually works?

"There are various ways that partners promote GetGlue," commented Iskold. "The most basic one is like you said: they're promoting us through their Twitter accounts, through their Facebook accounts and sending their fans to us. Secondly, and you can see this on HBO for example, they have [GetGlue] units on their homepage. [For example] Sony Pictures has some units on their homepage which basically say: 'check-in with GetGlue to unlock exclusive rewards from us.'"

Iskold said that GetGlue will soon announce "partner check-ins" - which will be "essentially another way for partners to promote us."

"It's actually a really interesting use case. Most of the TV networks have full episodes online and they want people to come to their site to watch them - because they can run ads on those episodes. So it's economical for them. Imagine a widget on Showtime's Dexter web page, where you can be watching the show and at the same time check in and say "I'm watching Dexter on Showtime." The kicker is that the link will be shared to Facebook and Twitter, which will point [back] to Showtime's page. So for the networks, it's really interesting because it's a simple and viral mechanism to get people to spread the message, via fans you have watching on your web site."

In Part 2 of this interview, we explore Alex Iskold's product development philosophy and some of the trends that he's tracking.

Let us know in the comments if you use GetGlue or a similar product. Do you "check in" to entertainment things?

Disclosure: Alex Iskold used to be a feature writer for ReadWriteWeb, back in the old browser add-on days!

Invites available! Click through for link.

Focusing on the looks, though, is missing the big picture. Meshin is different from other email-based contact management systems including not only Xobni, but analysis engines like Gist, too. Where those companies hinge on the person - here's their title, where they work, their emails, attachments, their blog posts, their last Twitter update, etc. - Meshin actually analyzes the information found in the information streams it examines. It then extracts related conversations, related messages, related people and other semantically understood data. And it does so by looking beyond keywords. It knows what things mean. It knows if a word is referring to a person, place or thing. It can also surface related links and news from the Web for any given entity.

Already, the engine behind Meshin isn't limited to email messages alone. For example, if you subscribe to RSS feeds within Outlook, those are also understood as being a part of the relationship map with another person. If you subscribe to Twitter feeds within Outlook, again, those are analyzed, along with the other streams.

Meshin arose from a Xerox-funded project inside PARC whose goal is to commercialize older PARC IP for a broader audience. The project has been in development for only a year, with a small core team and support from PARC researchers. The long-term goal for Meshin is to extend itself beyond Outlook, in order to connect other types of information streams together. 

The researchers are contemplating where they should take the technology next - another email platform? An RSS reader? A standalone product? Should they open up Meshin APIs (application programming interfaces) for developers to use within their own applications and services? All these models are a possibility, but first the engineers wanted to just get the technology out there, in the hands of users.

We're helping them with that by distributing invites to the private beta. For access, click here.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/parc_releases_new_semantic_technology_in_form_of_an_outlook_plugin.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/parc_releases_new_semantic_technology_in_form_of_an_outlook_plugin.php Product Reviews Mon, 06 Sep 2010 07:45:52 -0800 Sarah Perez 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.

What is Semantic Linking?

On certain documents, there is a 'Related Documents' section that is populated using a "digital fingerprinting process." This process analyzes the source document and compares it to all other documents in SpringerLink. It "determines which documents are most similar to that article or chapter," the company states.

This is a vague description of "digital fingerprinting." Regardless, the feature does expose researchers to new documents they might otherwise have not seen.

What Else is New

SpringerLink has also added a revised subject hierarchy and a new PDF Preview feature.

SpringerLink now covers 12 major subjects - including mathematics, computer science, medicine, engineering, economics, law, humanities and social sciences.

The PDF Preview feature provides all readers with a free look inside eBook chapters. Subscribers to the service will also be able to explore the entire book and download specific content that they need.

SpringerLink is a good example of how books and academic articles are being changed by the Internet. It's encouraging to see semantic search being used in the eBook domain. Let us know in the comments if you're aware of other examples of semantic technology in eBooks.