Photo from Flick, from Leon Botha

We started this series 6 months ago with this post. It is also worth reading this post about the scale of change, what we are calling the 7 Factor Perfect Storm.

Since then we have covered 11 markets:

You can see the Index to all the posts here.

This is the final post where we summarize what we have learned.

Photo from Flick, from Leon Botha

We started this series 6 months ago with this post. It is also worth reading this post about the scale of change, what we are calling the 7 Factor Perfect Storm.

Since then we have covered 11 markets:

You can see the Index to all the posts here.

This is the final post where we summarize what we have learned.

Read more

This is Part 4 of our series on Semantic Enterprise, which is part of the Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series.

In Part 1, we looked at the overall market for enterprise software to see where semantic web technology could fit. The basic conclusion: it is part of the data integration business.

In Part 2 we dove a bit deeper into the types of opportunity for semantic web vendors and how they can position to win a big share of the $229 billion enterprise software market.

In Part 3 we looked at the “gorillas”, how the big vendors are positioning for the semantic web.

In this final Part 4, we look at the other end of the ecosystem, the semantic enterprise startups.

This is Part 4 of our series on Semantic Enterprise, which is part of the Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series.

In Part 1, we looked at the overall market for enterprise software to see where semantic web technology could fit. The basic conclusion: it is part of the data integration business.

In Part 2 we dove a bit deeper into the types of opportunity for semantic web vendors and how they can position to win a big share of the $229 billion enterprise software market.

In Part 3 we looked at the “gorillas”, how the big vendors are positioning for the semantic web.

In this final Part 4, we look at the other end of the ecosystem, the semantic enterprise startups.

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In Crossing The Chasm terminology, “gorillas” are the dominant vendors. Simple message for start-ups – don’t mess with them!

In this post, we want to understand what the gorillas are doing to apply semantic web technology to the enterprise. The gorillas in this market are: Oracle, IBM, HP, Cisco, Microsoft and SAP.

In Crossing The Chasm terminology, “gorillas” are the dominant vendors. Simple message for start-ups – don’t mess with them!

In this post, we want to understand what the gorillas are doing to apply semantic web technology to the enterprise. The gorillas in this market are: Oracle, IBM, HP, Cisco, Microsoft and SAP.

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This is the half-yearly report card on the Semantic Web. How are we doing in 2010? The breakthrough to the mainstream was predicted by Gartner to be in 2008. Oops, that did not happen. Gartner was not alone in predicting breakthrough only to be disappointed by the powers of inertia. So then we entered the “trough of disillusionment” when semantic web was banned by anybody trying to raise money or get a project approved.

But it feels different this time. Yes, we are evangelists here, not just reporters. We want this to be successful. And we know that wanting does not make it happen. But the signs of breakthrough now seem too real to dismiss.

In this post we look at 7 signs that the semantic web is crossing the chasm to the moanstream.

Image Courtesy Flickr and Paul Watson and (of course Geoffrey Moore)

This is the half-yearly report card on the Semantic Web. How are we doing in 2010? The breakthrough to the mainstream was predicted by Gartner to be in 2008. Oops, that did not happen. Gartner was not alone in predicting breakthrough only to be disappointed by the powers of inertia. So then we entered the “trough of disillusionment” when semantic web was banned by anybody trying to raise money or get a project approved.

But it feels different this time. Yes, we are evangelists here, not just reporters. We want this to be successful. And we know that wanting does not make it happen. But the signs of breakthrough now seem too real to dismiss.

In this post we look at 7 signs that the semantic web is crossing the chasm to the moanstream.

Image Courtesy Flickr and Paul Watson and (of course Geoffrey Moore)

Read more

We believe that there are two semantic technologies that are crossing the chasm from academia to the commercial mainstream – RDFa and XBRL. We have written about the reasons XBRL is important here and looked at the next wave of innovation here. Our full coverage of XBRL is here.

One sign that we track is employment growth. If firms are hiring, that indicates that their market is strong.

Rivet Software, an XBRL leader, has expanded from 12 to 140 employees in the last year.  That shows that they are doing something right. We spoke to Patrick Quinlan (CEO) and Kevin Berens (VP, Products) to get some insights into what is happening in XBRL land.

We believe that there are two semantic technologies that are crossing the chasm from academia to the commercial mainstream – RDFa and XBRL. We have written about the reasons XBRL is important here and looked at the next wave of innovation here. Our full coverage of XBRL is here.

One sign that we track is employment growth. If firms are hiring, that indicates that their market is strong.

Rivet Software, an XBRL leader, has expanded from 12 to 140 employees in the last year.  That shows that they are doing something right. We spoke to Patrick Quinlan (CEO) and Kevin Berens (VP, Products) to get some insights into what is happening in XBRL land.

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We have covered 9 markets in our Creative Destruction 7 Act series (Financial Services, B2B Media, Scientific Technical Medical Publishing, Education, Legal Publishing, Advertising, eCommerce, Accounting, Healthcare).

A quick summary would be; “in every market the incumbents are facing massive disruption”. Knowing how hard it is for incumbents to deal with disruptive innovation (as described in The Innovator’s Dilemma), we can be confident that some of these incumbents will fail to meet the challenge.

This will leave huge opportunities for entrepreneurs. There has never been a better time in history to be an upstart and a worse time to be an incumbent.

Precisely where are those opportunities? Well, if we knew precisely, we would be launching tomorrow! The entrepreneurs who will win are the ones who have deep knowledge of these markets, who can really understand the pain-points and have a unique solution. But we can offer a framework for thinking about these opportunities.

This should be helpful to entrepreneurs in either of these two places in your start-up journey:

1. Just figuring out what to build

2. Have built something, may have already launched, but figuring out if you have the right positioning.

Image courtesy Flickr and Sharon Yau.

We have covered 9 markets in our Creative Destruction 7 Act series (Financial Services, B2B Media, Scientific Technical Medical Publishing, Education, Legal Publishing, Advertising, eCommerce, Accounting, Healthcare).

A quick summary would be; “in every market the incumbents are facing massive disruption”. Knowing how hard it is for incumbents to deal with disruptive innovation (as described in The Innovator’s Dilemma), we can be confident that some of these incumbents will fail to meet the challenge.

This will leave huge opportunities for entrepreneurs. There has never been a better time in history to be an upstart and a worse time to be an incumbent.

Precisely where are those opportunities? Well, if we knew precisely, we would be launching tomorrow! The entrepreneurs who will win are the ones who have deep knowledge of these markets, who can really understand the pain-points and have a unique solution. But we can offer a framework for thinking about these opportunities.

This should be helpful to entrepreneurs in either of these two places in your start-up journey:

1. Just figuring out what to build

2. Have built something, may have already launched, but figuring out if you have the right positioning.

Image courtesy Flickr and Sharon Yau.

Read more

Three months ago on April 2nd, we wrote that “RDFa is the gateway drug to the semantic web”. This is an exciting story. RDFa is crossing the chasm into the mainstream. Our mission at SemanticWeb.com and the SemanticWeb Summit is to be “The Voice of Semantic Web Business”.

The emphasis is on business. Semantic Web technologies, like most new technology, has been funded in academia. Now the funding baton is being passed to business, both enterprise and startups.

Mainstream adoption requires a KISS value proposition. RDFa has that. RDFa helps your content be discovered. It cannot get simpler or more mainstream than that!

So we want to cover the news on RDFa, even if individual news items are not worth an entire blog post. So we monitor Twitter to identify the stories that look interesting to us.

We give our snapshot commentary on why this is interesting.

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Back in May we published the Semantic Web 100, our list of the people tweeting interesting stuff about the Semantic Web.

That’s a lot of people to follow and a fair amount of noise obscuring the signal – lots of tweets about the World Cup or where to eat/meet/drink as well as useful but repetitive retweets.

We look through a lot of tweets so you don’t have to. But we keep that job almost manageable by restricting our tweet-cruising to people in the SemanticWeb100.

By interesting we mean a) relevant to the Semantic Web b) something original, not simply a copy of some other content.

We did this via old-fashioned “curation” (ahem, its called “editing” to ye olde publishers). We read the tweets to identify the ones that look interesting to us. Call it Filter # 1. You can do your own Filter # 2 (what we used to call “reading”) after the break.

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The old rules of innovations were:

1. basic R&D funded in academia

2. first non-grant revenue from defense

3. first commercialization from either finance or healthcare

4 a looong time later, trickle down innovation to consumer.

That flow changed during the social media era.

The old rules of innovations were:

1. basic R&D funded in academia

2. first non-grant revenue from defense

3. first commercialization from either finance or healthcare

4 a looong time later, trickle down innovation to consumer.

That flow changed during the social media era.

Read more

We now turn to the Healthcare business in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series.

Healthcare accounts for about 15% of GDP in America. This is very, very big business. We have also seen that Healthcare is one market that is spending serious money on Ontology development; so it matters in our Semantic Web world. Healthcare also matters to all of the 6 billion people on this planet. So, this is a big subject. It is hard to do it justice, but I will try!

Lots of money does not equate to outcomes as this chart from National Geographic shows:

That line way up to the left that is literally “off the charts” is how much America spends. And we live about as long as everybody else. So that chart really introduces this series by emphasizing;

• 1. There is a lot of money at stake.

• 2. More importantly, healthcare determines how long you will live a healthy life.

• 3. 1 & 2 are not as well correlated as they should be – “could do better”.

• 4. Better knowledge dissemination could impact the healthcare outcome (ie how long we will live a healthy life) and Semantic Web is certainly going to play a big part in knowledge dissemination.

We now turn to the Healthcare business in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series.

Healthcare accounts for about 15% of GDP in America. This is very, very big business. We have also seen that Healthcare is one market that is spending serious money on Ontology development; so it matters in our Semantic Web world. Healthcare also matters to all of the 6 billion people on this planet. So, this is a big subject. It is hard to do it justice, but I will try!

Lots of money does not equate to outcomes as this chart from National Geographic shows:

That line way up to the left that is literally “off the charts” is how much America spends. And we live about as long as everybody else. So that chart really introduces this series by emphasizing;

• 1. There is a lot of money at stake.

• 2. More importantly, healthcare determines how long you will live a healthy life.

• 3. 1 & 2 are not as well correlated as they should be – “could do better”.

• 4. Better knowledge dissemination could impact the healthcare outcome (ie how long we will live a healthy life) and Semantic Web is certainly going to play a big part in knowledge dissemination.

Read more