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

Our own Jenny Zaino recently discussed some of the interesting developments that Google announced at the Google I/O event yesterday. Francis Bea of DigitalTrends adds to that discussion with a few other developments shared by Google: “With Google I/O introducing and hyping the tech company’s latest batch of products today, Google also announced a whopping 41 new features to Google+. Along side this update, it was revealed that there are currently 190 million active Google+ users – a number Google likely feels compelled to focus on in the wake of news about dwindling user activity.  Read more

Boston, Ma (PRWEB) May 15, 2013 — Cambridge Semantics has announced that the Anzo Pharma Competitive Intelligence Solution has won the 2013 SIIA CODiE Award in the highly competitive category of Best Business Intelligence/Analytics Solution. As the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, the SIIA named Cambridge Semantics one of just 27 CODiE Award software category winners. Read more

[Editor's Note: This article originally included an incorrect link. The correct link to view the 2013 "Top Semantic Start-Up Competition" is http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/sessionPop.cfm?confid=70&proposalid=5265".]

The finalists of the 2013 “Top Semantic Start-Up Competition” have been announced. This year’s finalists represent a broad spectrum of entrepreneurship within the world of semantic technology. The announcement states, “At the 2013 Semantic Technology & Business Conference, SemanticWeb.com and WebMediaBrands will award one company the prize as ‘Top Semantic Technology Start-Up.’ At 12:30 pm Monday, June 3^rd, companies will have the opportunity to compete on stage as they deliver their pitches before a panel of expert judges! The companies competing will have met the following conditions: (1) Have a demonstrable product (at least in ‘beta’ stage) in the SemTech and or SemWeb space, (2) Have received no more than a Series B round of financing.”

The finalists are: Read more

[Article edited for clarity.] Moscow, Russia, May 10, 2013 –(PR.com)– Center of Intelligent Information Technologies INTELTEQ, a small but fast-growing Russian company that specializes in semantic modeling, was included in Gartner’s list of Cool Vendors in Information Governance and MDM (Master Data Management) 2013 report. The company utilizes a semantic modeling tool called Semantic Topology. Read more

Photo courtesy: Flickr/rvaphotodude

Last month at its MarkLogic World 2013 conference, the enterprise NoSQL database platform provider talked semantics as it related to its MarkLogic Server technology that ingests, manages and searches structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data (see our story here). The vendor late last week was scheduled to provide an early access release of MarkLogic 7, formally due by year’s end, to some dozens of initial users.

“People see a convergence of search and semantics,” Stephen Buxton, Director, Product Management, recently told The Semantic Web Blog. To that end, a lot of the vendor’s customers have deployed MarkLogic technology as well as specialized triple stores, but what they really want, he says, is an integrated approach, “a single database that does both individually and both together,” he says. “We see the future of search as semantics and the future of semantics as search, and they are very much converging.” At its recent conference, Buxton says the company demonstrated a MarkLogic app it built to function like Google’s Knowledge Graph to provide an idea of the kinds of things the enterprise might do with both search and semantics together.

Following up on the comments made by MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom at his keynote address at the conference, Buxton explained that, “the function in MarkLogic we are working on in engineering is a way to store and manage triples in the MarkLogic database natively, right alongside structured and unstructured information – a specialized triples index so queries are very fast, and so you can do SPARQL queries in MarkLogic. So, with MarkLogic 7 we will have a world-class triple store and world-beating information store – no one else does documents, values and triples in combination the way MarkLogic 7 will.”

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Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch reports, “Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too. This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before. It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.” Read more

[NOTE: This guest post is by Peter Haase, Lead Architect for Research and Development, fluid Operations.]

Industry engineers waste a significant amount of time searching for data that they require for their core tasks. When informed about potential problems, diagnosis engineers at Siemens Energy Services, an integrated business unit which runs service centers for power plants, need to access several terabytes of time-stamped sensor data and several gigabytes of event data, including both raw and processed data. These engineers have to respond to about 1,000 service requests per center per year, and end up spending 80% of their time on data gathering alone. What makes this problem even worse is that their data grows at a rate of 30 gigabytes per day. Similarly, at Statoil Exploration, geology and geographic experts spend between 30 and 70% of their time looking for and assessing the quality of some 1,000 terabytes of relational data using diverse schemata and spread over 2,000 tables and multiple individual databases [1]. In such scenarios, it may take several days to formulate the queries that satisfy the information needs of the experts, typically involving the assistance of experienced IT experts who have been working with the database schemata for years.

Siemens and Statoil Exploration are hardly the only companies faced with time-wasting Big Data issues, but the root of these issues is not simply the “big” aspect of their data. The real challenge is finding a way to efficiently and effectively mine data for value and insight, regardless of its volume.

Read more

Derek du Preez of Computer World reports, “The Financial Times (FT) has appointed John O’Donovan as its new Chief Technology Officer, who will lead the FT’s technology strategy across development and operations teams. O’Donovan joins the publication from the Press Association, where he was director of architecture and development, and has also previously worked as the chief architect for BBC News, Sport and Weather. Whilst at the BBC, O’Donovan played a key role in building some of the company’s flagship products, such as the BBC iPlayer, as well as the widely used sport APIs for the Olympics Data Feed.”

He continues, “The FT said that O’Donovan has ‘delivered influential technical strategies that have become widely adopted, using semantic technologies and architectural patterns for dealing with complex integration in modern technical environments.’ Read more

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 07, 2013 — TheBrain Technologies, the leading provider of dynamic visualization and knowledge management software, announced its newest release to its online secure cloud services for information management and team collaboration.

TheBrain Cloud Services, also known as WebBrain.com, lets users create and synchronize their digital Brains online and across multiple devices. Digital Brains are a collection of users’ ideas, notes, files and link relationships all organized and related the way each user thinks.

TheBrain Cloud Services is host to millions of digital Thoughts from users around the world. Read more