Photo Courtesy: Flickr/KitAy

A little over five hundred years ago, Columbus sailed to a new world. Today, the media industry is on a long, strange trip of its own, as traditionally print-focused media companies continue to try to figure out how to evolve their models to fit the New Web World.

Perhaps TheMediaBriefing.com, a new site from startup Briefing Media Ltd., can help them navigate these tumultuous waters and again set foot on solid ground. Founded by Neil Thackray (who headed up the launch of The Industry Standard in Europe) and Rory Brown (formerly a managing director at Incisive Media, which purchased Searchenginewatch.com and the Search Engine Strategies Trade Shows from Jupitermedia, now WebMediaBrands, in 2005), the site combines exclusive original content from media industry executives with specialist sources of information for the industry drawn from the web’s wealth of bloggers, social media, newspapers, analyst reports, research data and traditional trade media.

The founders’ background in media means they very much understand how challenging the space is today, and how important it is for media companies to harness insight into how they’re going to survive the changes underway. “A lot of publishers I know are actively trying to clone their brand in APAC, because it will be five or ten years before they’re hit there by the digital challenge, but that’s part of the problem as well,” says Brown. “People are trying to find a way of replicating the past. A new iPad app, for instance, is just harping back to ways people used to make money, so the site talks a lot about the digital challenge openly, and doesn’t really try to fudge those issues. This is mass disruption going on. The best way you can get through it is experiment and learning from others.”

Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/takomabibelot

There were two acquisitions in the semantic web space this week. One you definitely heard of: Yahoo bought semantic web-based platform Dapper, as it is a big play in the former’s continuing push into the dynamic display ads space (co-founder Eran Shir explains here).

Perhaps another of the acquisitions didn’t make it onto your radar, but if you’re one of the one million non-profits in the U.S. trying to attract dollars with few resources in a time when giving’s been tight, it will be of greater interest to you. Blackbaud, which provides primarily fundraising-related software and services to the sector, acquired NOZA, reportedly the world’s largest searchable database of charitable donations that contains nearly 50 million donation records to U.S. nonprofits as well as more than 2 million Canadian giving records.

Blackbaud counts approximately 22,000 customers located in 75 countries using its technology, with the largest organization reaching a donor base in excess of 25 million individuals. It had revenues of $309 million last year.

With NOZA, formerly a partner, now a piece of its portfolio, Blackbaud sees an opportunity to dive deeper into the analytics space, and help customers and potential clients more finely tune their ability to target the sources most likely to support their causes – the goal being less manual work required to identify those individuals or organizations and fewer dollars spent on chasing less likely givers. Charitable contributions have been either flat or down, depending on which sector you look at, Blackbaud notes. “Last year was the first year, if you exclude inflation, that giving was down in probably 20 years,” says Chris South, vice president of Target Analytics, the Blackbaud company that’s been working with Noza in a partnership capacity. “So some are doing well, but there are more that have been feeling the pain as consumers have felt the pain of these times.”

Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/cotaro70s

Where’s semantic search going?

That’s a question that will be explored at the upcoming Semantic Web Summit – and here’s a preview of how one expert in the space plans to answer it. (The title of this blog, apologies to James Carville, is a hint.) Drawing both on his reading of the story, “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet” in the September issue of Wired</a, and personal experience watching his own kids interacting in cyberspace, Expert System USA CEO J. Brooke Aker thinks that semantic search lies within applications.

The two threads come together like this: The Internet as a means of exchanging information is fine, but the Web itself is messy and chaotic and dead-ending as the volume of information grows and keyword searches as a means of navigating it becomes ever more frustrating. And today’s younger generation is already blazing a different interaction trail – for them, the Internet typically is less about Googling things and more about living in its premier application, aka Facebook. There was an ah-ha moment in that for Aker: Where once (and quite often still) we think of applications as limiting compared to the freedom and potential connectedness of the Web, that equation is changing thanks to big pipes with rich bandwidth and no latency, the inexpensive and always-on capacity of the cloud, the openness and configurability of APIs for building Internet apps, and polished UIs that bring the desktop experience to Internet and mobile platforms.

Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/Sahaja Meditation

Customer service takes place across many channels these days – the traditional call-in contact center, but also over the Internet through chat, email, and social media. Companies are adapting to that new reality, but perhaps not yet leveraging as well as they might the insight they’re gaining from these many mediums in ways that can benefit all customers’ experiences, rather than just solve problems on an individual basis.

Perhaps that can start to change, as text and sentiment analytics vendors pair up with some of the big players with software for analyzing customer interaction recordings – which is starting to happen with last week’s announcement that Clarabridge and call center workforce optimization vendor Verint have paired up their technology capabilities to understand interactions across talk and text channels.

Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/ Rennett Stowe

The Semantic Web Blog has taken an extensive look at how the semantic web can bring changes to the education space in a number of ways, from changing the “old school” textbook publishing model , to utilizing semantic web technologies to support online interaction on curriculum development, content, and learning among educators, parents and students, and other aspects of the Open Education Resources movement that’s all about making it easier to reuse, remix, revise and redistribute online content and tools for making the learning experience connected and collaborative.

The latest development on this front is the public launch, set for later this month, at the EDUCAUSE conference of the EdUnify SOA Governance Framework Initiative. EdUnify is described as a shared, neutral, community-based Web services registry and suite of semantic web tools designed to reduce costs of integration and improve efficiency by providing a service-oriented architecture governance framework for education.

Read more

Gil Elbaz struck gold when he sold the company he co-founded, Applied Semantics, to Google for its AdSense technology. But AdSense was the outgrowth—not the foundation—of why Elbaz founded the company in the first place. Applied Semantics’ mission, which turned out to play well in the search and ad space, was to build very smart categorization engines to understand language – words, their meaning variations and relationships – to ferret out the value within data.

After four years at Google post-acquisition, Elbaz followed his heart back to what he calls his idealistic notion of building huge databases of information. Formally launched last October, the vision behind his Factual, his new venture, was creating large databases that aggregate facts in many formats from hundreds of millions of web sites – health, government, media and education among them – and clean up and give structure to that massive amount of data, along with tools to help developers merge and mash it up. The company has just retooled its web site to reflect the closer focus it plans to have on the development community, with enhanced developer tools, and on the local vertical. In conjunction with that, it last week launched geo-coded data for nearly 14 million local US businesses, and for millions of businesses located in the UK, Japan, Italy, Indonesia, and Australia, among others.

Read more

Photo credit: Flickr/kevindooley

The Semantic Web is so very much about adaptability – adaptability of data to serve new purposes, adaptability to top-down and bottom-up approaches, and delivery of a whole new Web space that users will adapt to, without necessarily even realizing the mechanics behind the change. Semantic Web entrepreneurs are discovering that adaptability matters to their own business models as well, when the field is still so green, many people still aren’t 100 percent sure about why the Semantic Web might matter to them, and potential big customers may be skeptical about the street cred of an emerging company in a space that may still feel a little blurry to them.

Take the case of startup Bueda, co-founded by CEO Vasco Pedro. It originally envisioned that its tagging technology would come in handy for scenarios such as helping content sites rich with video and images better monetize advertising opportunities around their user-generated content, as well as generally help publishers with support for improved recommendations and search accuracy. The idea got people’s interest, says Pedro, but also left them a little confused. At its matching engine API’s launch a few months back, “we had an interesting set of use cases,” Pedro says, but acknowledges it was too general and diffuse for users to easily grasp onto. There was a lot of input about how to enhance the API, but to what clearly understood end? “Unless there’s a very clear motive for using it people are just going to dip their toes in. So we had to eat our own dog food and come up with an application that uses the API.”

Read more

A recent report from Gilbane Group senior analyst Lynda Moulton makes good reading for enterprise business leaders who want to better understand why and how their organization can – and should – consider semantic software technologies as core to turning the vast amount of information business units possess into knowledge that they can act on.

The paper, Semantic Software Technologies: Landscape of High Value Applications for the Enterprise, has as its focus helping enterprises identify, select, and implement the appropriate software for work functions (marketing, customer services, BI, content management, enterprise search, e-discovery for R&D, etc.).

Read more

A human who reads this naturally would understand the links between the references:

“I went to the store and got a magazine for my mother and father. She liked it. He didn’t care for it and so he’s going to see a movie instead. It’s about a trapeze artist.”

A real live reader would know that it is the writer’s mother who is the “she” who liked the magazine; the writer’s father who is the “he” who didn’t; and that the “it” that was both liked and pooh-poohed is the magazine – and the “it” that concerns a trapeze artist is a completely separate reference to a movie.

It’s harder for machines to accurately connect such links between an originally named entity and then the pronouns or other references subsequently used in its place — and then accurately relate each instance of the same entity to its intentions, positive or negative impressions, or other signals. But semantic technology web service OpenAmplify, which just entered its V. 2.1 beta release, is aiming to start cracking the related entity nut with the addition of Co-reference to its core “meaning” platform.

Read more

There’s a fun comparison app on FindtheBest.com, the new venture from Kevin O’Connor, the mind behind DoubleClick. FindtheBest is a comparison engine that lets users find a topic (business schools, eBook readers, teeth whitening strips), compare options up against each other (just how much hydrogen peroxide is in a particular whitening system anyway?), sort and narrow data with smart filters, and make a decision based on what they discover.

That includes helping them determine, with a side-by-side chart comparison, which Q&A site might best serve their needs – which is how you get to compare FindtheBest with some 40 other options, including ones we’ve discussed here, such as TrueKnowledge and Swingly. For the Q&A comparison app, you can see things like which has the best Alexa ranking; how each site generates answers; or whether affiliate links pop up in answers.

Read more