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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."

When semantic recommendations service Evri launched two years ago, the product (backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) was seen by many as a type of search engine. Nowadays, Evri models itself as a topic-based news service; in particular, tapping into the real-time streams of mixed media coming from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sources.

At the recent Semantic Technology conference, I sat down with Evri CEO Will Hunsinger. He called Evri the "topical equivalent of a Facebook stream."

The semantic web is one of the leading trends we track here at ReadWriteWeb, so it was big news to us earlier this month when Evri announced it was acquiring Twine creators Radar Networks. Following the announcement, Twine CEO Nova Spivack wrote an inspiring and lengthy farewell blog post detailing the acquisition, and the story behind the development and growth of Twine. Towards the end of the post, Spivack outlined some lessons for budding entrepreneurs based on what he learned through his startup experience.

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.

If you've ever believed that semantic search is meant exclusively for researchers, then Meaning Tool might prove you wrong. Through Popego, the semantic search engine allows you to add your online profile and interests such as "gadgets" or "current news". From here, Meaning Tool serves you entertaining content from across your social graph. ReadWriteWeb took a look at how the tool works and how it just might bridge the gap between scholars and social media junkies.

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups.

The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following 10 have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem.

At the SemTech conference in June I met with William Mougayar, founder and CEO of a semantic news platform called Eqentia. At the time the product was in development, but it is officially launching today. In a nutshell, Eqentia aggregates content into topics using semantic technology. In that respect it is similar to OpenCalais (our coverage) and Evri (our coverage). While all three products have different focuses, each semantically tags and aggregates content in a contextual manner.

The difference, claims Eqentia, is that "with Evri or OpenCalais, the onus is on the programmer." Eqentia says that with its product, "the content is already semanticized and all you have to do is to place it on your portal while preserving your SEO." The other two companies may disagree with that, but let's take a closer look at Eqentia.

Semantic search engine Evri can now understand how the web feels with the launch of their new sentiment web API. While busy scouring the net for people, places, and things and determining the relationships between them, the search engine is now able to understand the feelings associated with these entities, too, be them positive or negative. Using the API, developers can build applications for things like market intelligence, market research, sports and entertainment, brand management, product reviews and more.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reported on Nokia's buyout of the open source mobile OS Symbian, reviewed a "memory augmentation" service and a semantic search engine, and looked at what LinkedIn's strategy tells us about the IPO market. On the trends side, we contributed our 2 cents to Yahoo's board, investigated another Wikipedia controversy, analyzed the capacity of web 2.0 to bring about "change", and explored the online video market.