This week a new Big Data startup company launched, Ayasdi, co-founded by Stanford mathematics professor Gunner Carlsson and based on his DARPA-funded research in the area of applied topology, with $10+million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures and Floodgate.
The technology, dubbed the Insight Discovery platform, is explained to be the “first machine learning platform that combines computer science and a branch of mathematics known as Topological Data Analysis (TDA) that visualizes the entire dataset.” Hundreds of machine learning algorithms, it says, go to work exploring datasets to in minutes automatically discover insights that can’t be determined through query-based or ad hoc approaches.

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A new resource has been announced on Best Buy’s BBYOpen blog: Metis Alpha. Like Best Buy’s earlier forays into Semantic Web use, this one started with a business problem. As the announcement states: “These days, consumers have a rich variety of products available at their fingertips. A massive product landscape has evolved, but sadly products in this enormous and rich landscape often get flattened to just a price tag. Over time, it seems the product value proposition, variety, descriptions, specifics, and details that make up products have all but disappeared. This presents consumers with a ‘paradox of choice’ where misinformed decisions can lead to poor product selections, and ultimately product returns and customer remorse.”

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Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch reports, “QuBit, a big-data startup whose analytics platform helps e-commerce sites with customer personalization, is today announcing that it has raised a Series A round of funding — $7.5 million led by Balderton Capital with participation from existing angel investors. Read more

Barbara Starr of SearchEngineLand reports, “Semantic markup is becoming more and more popular in conjunction with large scale SEO. Adding rich snippets to send rich signals to alert search engines as to the relevancy of your content − whatever vertical they may appear in − is not only a wise move, but an SEO best practice. Included below is an illustrative guide highlighting currently available Chrome extensions, which you can leverage to both test on-site markup as well as expose any information regarding your competitors. An example is illustrated [above], and what follows is a guide to getting the information.” Read more

Photo credit: FlickR/crd!

With Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday behind us, and Cyber-Monday right in front of us, it is clear the holiday season is in full force. Apparently, retailers – both online and real-world – are doing pretty well as a group when it comes to sales racked up.

Reports have it that e-commerce topped the $1 billion mark for Black Friday in the U.S. for the first time this year, with Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple taking honors as the most visited online stores, according to ComScore. Consumers spent $11.2 billion at stores across the U.S. on Black Friday, said ShopperTrak, down from last year but probably impacted by more people heading out to more stores for deals that began on Thursday night. The National Retail Federation put total spending over the four-day weekend at a record $59.1 billion, up 13 percent from $52.4 billion last year.

Not surprisingly, semantic technology wants in on the shopping action. Social intelligence vendor NetBase, for instance, just launched a new online tool that analyzes the web for mentions of the 10 top retailers to show the mood of shoppers flocking to those sources. The Mood Meter, which media outlets and others can embed in their sites, ranks the 10 brands based on sentiment unearthed with the help of its natural language processing technology.  Read more

Carsten Kraus, CEO of FACT-Finder reports, “Technology continues to push the travel, tourism and hospitality industry forward and make it more dynamic than ever before. But the next phase is where it gets REALLY exciting… In the UK alone, 78% of people still search via their desktop, but a growing number now also search via their mobile and tablet devices (13% and 9% respectively). But we are beginning to see some frustration among those who search for their holidays online, because search engine technology cannot match up to the imagination and sophistication of the human mind.” Read more

Schema.org has announced that GoodRelations is now fully integrated into the markup vocabulary backed by Google, Yahoo!, Bing/Microsoft, and Yandex (read our past schema.org coverage). GoodRelations is the e-commerce vocabulary that has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 (previous coverage).

In the official announcement, R.V. Guha (Google) says, “Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features.”

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Ryan Kim of GigaOM reports that Walmart has built its own search engine called Polaris. He writes, “Walmart is deploying a new internally-built search engine to power Walmart.com and ultimately increase sales conversions from searches. The Polaris search engine, developed by @WalmartLabs over the last 10 months, has been in use for the last few months onWalmart.com and has already boosted conversions to sales by 10-15 percent, the company said.” Read more

InternetRetailing features a new article discussing Whisk.co.uk, the brainchild of Nick Holzherr, keynote speaker of next month’s SemTechBiz UK conference. The article states, “A new website that promises to turn online recipes into supermarket shopping lists and online food orders is set to launch this autmn. Nick Holzherr, a former runner-up in BBC television series The Apprentice, is behind Whisk.co.uk. He aims to have all the UK supermarkets that trade online – Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Ocado and Waitrose – operational on the site by the end of the year. At soft launch, set to be in about two months time, the site will feature two or three supermarkets.” Read more

Damian Rollison has written an article discussing the application of semantics to local search. He writes, “Most U.S. residents live in suburbs and travel infrequently. Our habits keep us close to home, where we are already experts in the types of local businesses we visit every week. As I pointed out last time, we need the most help meeting less common needs. A truly forward-looking search application is one that can deliver rich, detailed information about the full range of local businesses.” Read more