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.

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

In a nutshell, Evri allows you to explore and track topics. Its homepage displays a current hot topic (at time of writing, it was Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France), with other trending topics offered in the menu (for example 'Gulf Oil Spill' is a featured trend and 'LeBron James' is listed as "Trending in US & World'). You may also enter your own topic into the search bar. Evri is like a mix between Google Trends and Google News, with liberal sprinklings of Twitter and Facebook.

Whither Twine...

Evri made the news earlier this year when it acquired failed semantic web bookmarking application, Twine. Curiously, Hunsinger described Evri as "the inverse of Twine" - because Evri does all the work, rather than the user. Twine is an application that relies on its users to actively bookmark pages, a la the much more successful Delicious. Evri automatically collates topical information and presents it the user.

Update: Twine founder Nova Spivack wrote in and stated: "Twine was in fact highly automated as well, but in a different way than Evri - Twine used NLP [Natural language processing] to auto-tag every entry, generate summaries, and used graph algorithms to make recommendations."

Where Evri shares similarities with Twine is in the ability for users to track a topic. Hunsinger said that Evri users may "follow a story as it evolves over time, and tune it." He described this as being like a "mini blog" for its users.

Twine appears to have been of most use to Evri for its underlying technology. Hunsinger told us that Evri is using technology it acquired from Twine to extend Evri's categories and for advanced filtering.

What's Next

Evri is not short on ideas and innovation - for example it announced a Sentiment API last August. However some of these ideas are slow to eventuate. Hunsinger said that the Sentiment API is not in commercial deployment yet, because it requires much more media in order to calculate sentiment and it tends to work best with well-known people (like Barack Obama). However, Evri is working on incorporating data about shares, tweets, and more in order to beef up its Sentiment analysis engine.

The company is also currently working on what Hunsinger described as "Pandora-like recommendations," referring to the geographically-limited online music service Pandora.

Other expansion plans include launching one new channel per week, to extend Evri's topical coverage.

Can Evri Compete as a Consumer App?

Evri is an interesting product and is currently being used by media partners like Hearst and Canwest.

However, Evri will likely continue to struggle as a consumer offering. It's competing against a plethora of real-time news apps - everything from TweetDeck, Google News, Topix, Techmeme, and more. I wouldn't be surprised if Evri is eventually acquired by a big media company for its technology, much as Evri snapped up the struggling Twine for the same reason.

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.

Update: According to new reports this morning, Evri wasn't acquired. Instead, Evri acquired Radar Networks. We regret this error. For a full discussion see coverage rounded up on Techmeme.

We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

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.

Location-based Apps - Foursquare: Launched at SXSW, Foursquare is a location-based social application where users check in on their iPhone at various businesses and compete against their friend network for points. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's launch in March. Since then it has partnered with Bay Area Rapid Transit and a number of businesses to offer location-based deals to users.

iPhone App Recommendation - Appsfire: In a world where iPhones seemed to saturate the earth, Appsfire offers a great way for users to share their favorites. Launched in August, ReadWriteWeb praised the convenience of the iPhone app. Four months after downloading it, many of our RWW teammates are still sharing their apps via the embeddable Appsfire widget and the iPhone application.

Real-Time Search - Collecta: If you're interested in finding out the latest info on a particular product, Collecta offers real-time search with a variety of results including blog posts, photos and Twitter and Identi.ca posts. ReadWriteWeb covered the company's release, which launched in June. In September the company released its API to developers.

Twitter App Discovery - OneForty: Dubbed the "unofficial Twitter app store," OneForty is a marketplace where Twitter developers add their applications for discovery. End-users can add their reviews and recommendation to be featured on the service's front page. Launched in September, Oneforty breaks down the applications into easy-to-understand categories and features the most popular apps and recently uploaded apps on the homepage.

Next Page: Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 6-10

All-You-Can-Eat Music - MOG All Access: Although MOG has been around as a blogging network for a few years, earlier this month the company launched its much-anticipated $5-per-month streaming music service. The product's unique features include a discovery bar slider where users can play streaming radio and tweak the flow of recommendations to their liking. Coupled with an iPhone app that is promised to encompass offline caching, MOG All Access is a great service rivaled only by close competitor Spotify.

Web TV - Clicker: Launched in mid November, Clicker is considered the TV Guide for Internet television. The company indexes 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows and features a DVR-like playlist (including Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD) and integration with Facebook connect. Clicker also has a Boxee app that pulls in metadata for shows, channels and actors.

Semantic Search - Evri: Evri is a semantic search engine with a matching algorithm that creates connections between people, products and concepts. Launched in mid-June, ReadWriteWeb first reported the product's ability to distinguish between subjects, verbs and objects to make connections.

Conversation Aggregation - JS-Kit's Echo: While JS-Kit has been around for three years, the company' latest product Echo is a better iteration of blog comments. ReadWriteWeb first wrote about the product launch in July. The service allows users to embed a simple line of javascript in their blogs in order to gather a real-time stream of Diggs, Tweets, comments and reactions.

Augmented Reality - Layar: ReadWriteWeb readers first got a glimpse of Layar in June. Created by SPRXmobile, the service places images and data on the mobile browser for a new form of location-based augmented reality discovery. In July, SPRX released the company's first developer keys for the API and by August it had celebrated an Android release with an iPhone app to follow. The company currently has a gallery with several cool 3rd-party applications.

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.

At its heart, Eqentia is an aggregation platform. It promotes itself as "an aggregator of context, not just content." The way it does this is to add context in the navigation. Each portal has its own taxonomy, which Mougayar described as "a bit like a hierarchical tagging structure." He said that "we basically wrap any content with a semantic wrapper."

How it Works

Under the hood, Eqentia does "content harvesting" from social media sites such as Twitter, blogs and more. Currently Eqentia is getting content from over 13,000 feeds, collecting an estimated 65,000 articles daily.

Eqentia told us that it's indexed 20 million articles so far. The largest topic currently is Outsourcing, with 90,000 articles. Other topics include: Cloud Computing: 60,000; Supply Chain Management: 40,000; Twitter: 20,000; Social Media: 11,000.

Eqentia then does "text mining and filtering" and the results are run through an "Aggregation Engine" (which has rules for sources and filters). Finally there is what Eqentia calls "Semantics Management" - including entity extractions, taxonomy definition, controlled vocabulary.

What The User Gets

Eqentia is starting off with a focus on "professional" content topics. It will target business and technology content, ignoring more mainstream topics like current affairs, sports, entertainment.

Eqentia is launching with 3 products:

1) Out-of-the-box portals. These will give general users free access to topic streams (of which there are 12 at launch, with more coming). There will be email options, widgets and RSS feeds available.

2) Personalized portal. These can be private or public. [note: this is what ReadWriteWeb has signed up for]

3) Enterprise. A SaaS platform that can be customized. A stated use case is for large companies to "disseminate organized news intelligence for their employees across distinct groups or market segments."

Conclusion: Tough Competition, But Important Market

The proof will be in the pudding as to how Eqentia compares to OpenCalais and Evri. We've been very impressed with both OpenCalais and Evri in our previous coverage, so Eqentia has high standards to live up to. In particular Eqentia is going to have to nail the User Experience, because it is relying on its interface a lot to give value to the user.

Finally, Mougayar noted to us that "if web 2.0/social media rewarded the socially savvy user, the semantic web/web 3.0 will reward the research oriented user." It's a nice marketing line, but we are apt to agree that products like Eqentia, OpenCalais and Evri are bringing much needed smarts to the oceans of content in the Web.

At first we thought Evri's API would simply rank things as positive or negative, much like the Twitter tracker twendz does today, highlighting positive, negative, and neutral items. However, the sentiment API does so much more, allowing you deeper insight into the "who's," and "what's," and "why's" associated with the particular expression or feeling.

To be more specific, according to the announcement, Evri lets you:

• Find the percentage of positive and negative expressions of sentiment made by an entity, or about an entity. For example, find out what percentage of things being written about the iPhone are positive and which percent are negative.
• Discover who is criticizing and who is praising a particular person, place or thing. For example, see who is criticizing and praising Microsoft right now.
• Read what praisers and critics are saying about an entity. For example, see what the GOP are saying about the Democrats.
• Discover who or what your favorite entity is bashing and why. For example, see who Lance Armstrong is complaining about.
• Discover who or what your favorite entity is praising and why. For example, see who the World Health Organization is commending and why.

When unleashed upon the web as a whole, this could unearth a veritable goldmine of information. Just thinking of how many different ways it could be used is enough to blow anyone's mind. Of course, marketers will be the first to jump on board, looking for practical ways to track the feelings about their companies, clients, and brands and why they're changing, but an engine that understands sentiment could do so much more than just this. It can literally take the pulse of the web the way we take the pulse of Twitter using apps like the above-mentioned twendz to rank trends as positive or negative.

Demo: The "Vibology Meter"

To demonstrate what Evri can do, the company created a widget called the "Vibology Meter." (Sadly, no link is provided). The widget not only ranks the good or bad "vibes" about a particular entity (in the example, Barack Obama), but also explores topics associated with that entity and whether or not the primary entity feels positively or negatively towards them. For example, the widget shows Obama is negative towards the GOP and Rush Limbaugh but feels positive about Michele Obama. (Well, that's good!)

When you click on any one of the associated topics (or click on "anything" to see all topics of either positive or negative slant), you're then presented with a sidebar of information. Here, snippets from articles found on the web display along with a title, link, and timestamp.

Of course, this is just a simple example of the Evri API in action. We're sure the developers out there can think up even better ideas than this.

Challenges Ahead

The challenge now for Evri is to keep expanding its index in order to track more sources to rank. At the moment, the engine doesn't track a large slice of the web the way a typical search engine like Google does - in fact they don't even claim to be a search engine...despite what that "Go to" box on their homepage would have you believe. Instead, Evri looks specifically at the people, places, and things on the web and maps the connections between them.

To determine these connections - and now, the associated sentiments as well - Evri pulls from a limited number of "highly regarded" sources. That means you'll definitely see a site like CNN used to rank a person like Obama, but the myriad of tiny politico blogs will be ignored. That's actually a shame, since delving into this "long tail" of the web could give a better overall picture of how all people really feel, not just the sentiments expressed on high-profile sites written by top bloggers and journalists. Still, we know indexing and parsing this long tail is something that's much easier said than done.

In the end, what Evri's doing, even on this smaller scale, is definitely interesting. We hope to see the new API put to good use in the near future.

Web Products

Nokia Acquires Symbian; Takes on Google's Android

Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. This week the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source. Nokia clearly aims to challenge Android, the open source mobile operating system of Google. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says that it wants to create "the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications".

See also: last100's analysis and Setbacks for Google's Android

Evernote Opens to All: Fantastic Promise, Disappointing Execution

The highly anticipated "memory augmentation" service Evernote opened to the public this week and you'll probably want to check this service out just to see what it tries to do. We may change our minds after more lengthy testing, but so far this combination of a bookmarking, note taking and photo cataloging service with apps for the desktop, web and mobile - not to mention the Optical Character Recognition powered search - adds up to a whole lot of potential ... and frustration.

Evri Beta Launches: Search Less - Understand More

Evri, a Paul Allen backed semantic search engine, launched into a limited beta this week. Evri was first shown publicly at the D6 conference. Evri's CEO Neil Roseman likes to talk about Evri in terms of organizing content instead of calling it a search engine. At its core, however, Evri definitely is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.

Facebook Targets Chinese Market

Social networking site Facebook has launched a Chinese-language version of its web site. Users logging into the site from the Chinese mainland are now being redirected to zh-cn.facebook.com, where users can choose between a version in simplified or traditional Chinese.

See also: China's Facebook Clones

LinkedIn and The Strange Case of The Disappearing (IPO) Market

Is LinkedIn worth $1bn? Yes. Why? Because Bain Capital says it is. The stock is not public, so you and I cannot trade it. The whole notion of the average punter trading tech stocks (or the average punter's pension fund trading it on your behalf) seems rather quaint, from some bygone era. But why has the public market for tech stocks disappeared? Where has it disappeared to? Will it ever return? The LinkedIn financing offers some clues to these questions.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Yet Another Unsolicited Yahoo Turnaround Strategy - YAUYTS

Watching Yahoo's decline is rather sad. It is the result of nothing more or less than creative destruction. Meeting that challenge head-on is incredibly tough. Very, very few companies make the transition. IBM, led by Lou Gerstner, met the challenge of the PC era in his epic turnaround (described in the book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance). Microsoft has struggled mightily to remain relevant in the Web era and they are as smart and driven as it gets. What's so incredible is seeing the speed of these transitions - to see a big successful Web start-up like Yahoo marginalized by technology shifts.

Our Kids Are Failing - And It's All Wikipedia's Fault!

Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. This week news broke out in Scotland about how the internet was to blame for Scotland's failing exam pass rates. According to the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC), Wikipedia, among other sources, was cited as the reason as to why the students were failing. Is this a case of the internet making us stupid? Or do students just need to learn how to use the new research tools of the web a little more appropriately?

Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change

In April, Umair Haque posted a manifesto on his blog on the Harvard Business Publishing web site where he called for today's investors and start-ups to start building applications to "change the world" instead of just making apps that make money. He challenged Silicon Valley to find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and then pledged that he would help by providing free consulting. Recently, he revisited this topic...

YouTube Continues to Destroy All Competitors in Declining Video Market

YouTube's huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that's up 26% from it's May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.) In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

See also: The Top 40 Online Video Producers in May - This List Might Surprise You

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.