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.