David Amerland of Imassera recently wrote, “It seems that $1 billion plus change these days is what’s required to buy a photo-sharing app (if you’re Facebook), a global phone manufacturer (if you’re Google) or a microblogging site (if you happen to be Yahoo). Beyond the jaw-dropping numbers that are casually bandied around for these acquisitions lies a game plan that has every major player struggling to position themselves for relevance and longevity in the semantic web. This ‘new’ web is characterized by two related things: data and connectivity and these happen to be the exact same building blocks out of which web verticals are created.” Read more

The upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco (June 2-5) will feature a number of sessions, panels, and keynotes focused on semantic web start-ups. The Start-Up Competition will highlight some of the most promising new companies in the world of semantic technology today, and other events will expound the strengths and successes of companies that have made it past the term “start-up” to full-fledged “competitors.” Read more

Robin Wauters of The Next Web reports, “Seattle startup GraphLab claims it is building the ‘fastest machine-learning analytics engine for graph datasets’, based on the popular open-source distributed graph computation framework with the same name, and it has just raised capital to come through on its promise. Founded by scientists from the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley, GraphLab today announced that it has secured $6.75 million in a financing round led by Madrona and NEA.” Read more

Ben Cole of SearchCompliance recently interviewed information management expert Jeffrey Ritter about the latest e-discovery breakthroughs and best practices. Asked about the biggest breakthroughs in e-discovery, Ritter replied, “There are four of them worth mentioning. The first breakthrough that has never been appreciated in the legal community is the use of visualization patterning technology… The second… is the development and implementation of audit management tools in the field of e-discovery and the related legal services.” Read more

Vienna, Austria, May 18, 2013 –(PR.com)– Semantic Web Company (SWC), developer and vendor of PoolParty Semantic Suite, joins OpenLink Integration Business Partner Program. SWC will make Virtuoso an integral part of its products and services portfolio. This portfolio includes training, implementation, and product development covering Linked Data, Semantic Web, and Big Data projects. Read more

Our discussion of Big Data at SemTechBiz, begun here, continues:

The Enterprise Linked Data Cloud Needs Semantics, And More

Another exploration of Big Data’s intersection with semantic technology will take place at this session, where Dr. Giovanni Tummarello, senior research fellow at DERI and CTO of SindiceTech, will talk about the former becoming an enabler for the latter to be really useful in enterprises. “A lot of people say it’s via Big Data that semantic technologies like RDF will see a coming of age and clear applications in certain industries,” he says. There’s value to adding data first and understanding it later, and to that end, “semantic technologies give you the most agile tool to deal with data you don’t know, where there’s a lot of diversity, and you don’t know what of it particularly will be useful.”

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A new panel has been added to the lineup for next week’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco. Incubating and Investing in Semantic Startups will give attendees the opportunity to meet entrepreneurs who have recently raised millions in venture funding for their startups. Attendees will also:

• Learn from the leader behind the technology transfer program that was the birthplace of Siri and is now incubating Tempo, Desti and Trapit.
• Learn from the experience of people responsible for evaluating startups as targets for potential investment, incubation, and/or acquisition.
• Learn about the do’s and don’ts for positioning your idea for incubation and venture for funding. Read more

CHANDLER, ARIZ. — The paper investigates the application of semantic model design and technology in industrial operations integration and the evolving role of Semantic Computing in operations management.  Semantic (data) modeling as a core component of application architecture is compared to more familiar architectural integration patterns. As operations functions are described, the value of semantic models is illustrated through a series of examples that should be familiar to the reader. Read more

There will be a lot of Big Data talk at the upcoming SemTechBiz event in San Francisco.

The opening keynote, for example, will be given by Abhishek Gattani, senior director at Walmart in the WalmartLabs. In a conversation in advance of the event, Gattani told The Semantic Web Blog that he’ll be focusing on the idea that businesses should embrace the mindset of using external data – social and web data – to solve internal problems. “This is what happens when you run an enterprise – external factors influence your market,” he says, whether that’s a new product being launched or a lower-priced competitor coming into play or a natural disaster or economic event taking place. The data about those things exist outside your own company’s realm, but combining your information with that could lead to interesting prospects and extraordinary results.

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David Ramel of ADTmag writes, “What the heck are you doing reading this article? You should be boning up on your Big Data developer skills. Well, if you like making the big bucks, that is. Yes, the Big Data skills shortage shows no signs of shrinking even after several years of hype. That means great opportunities for data developers. ‘By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions,’ stated a recent McKinsey Global Institute report. And where there’s hype, there’s money. ‘Salaries reported by those who regularly use Hadoop, NoSQL, and Mongo DB are all north of $100,000,’ claimed a recent report from the 2013-2012 Dice Salary Survey.” Read more