eCommerce / Retail

Antidot, which makes the semantically-powered Information Factory and Antidot Finder Suite software, this month released its db2triples as open source component software, available here, which implements the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group’s proposed R2RML language and Direct Mapping, covered here.

Antidot, in fact, shared with the W3C its experience leveraging Direct Mapping and R2RML to, in just half a day, fetch information from hundreds of tables in a client’s Magento ecommerce database to transform it to a graph model. That’s normally a complex task, says Antidot founder and CEO Fabrice Lacroix, which would involve data transformation and database content indexing of an unknown database model. “No one [here at Antidot] knows the complex, dynamic data model from Magento, and it’s very difficult to reverse-engineer these sort of models,” he says.

“So with Direct Mapping and R2RML it is very easy to go directly from the database to the graph you need…and then extract just the business objects we need. We did it in just half a day. Imagine that. For such complex stuff that’s a very short timeframe.” Lacroix says that the company thought it only fair, after that success, to send something back to the community.

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Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO of Digital Bazaar, Inc., sat down with SemanticWeb.com to discuss Payswarm, a new standard that he is working on through a W3C Community Group. This article is Part 1 of 2.

SemanticWeb.com: What is PaySwarm?
Manu Sporny: It is a universal payment standard designed specifically for the Web. Think “an open source PayPal on steroids” – an open, patent and royalty free specification for Web Payments. The goal of PaySwarm is to make crowd-funding, world-changing ideas, buying and selling online as easy as sending an e-mail or an instant message. We want payment to be baked into the core of the Web so that exciting new companies can be launched on top of this truly open payment platform.

We want to enable anybody in the world to launch a PayPal, KickStarter, or Kiva. Think of what the Web did for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo. We think PaySwarm can do that for the next generation of start-ups that want to transform the way we reward each other on the Web. Improving the way we organize financial resources to enhance our personal lives and pursue endeavors that improve upon the human condition is at the core of what we’re doing.
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A recent interview takes a look at what Facebook’s recent platform changes mean for businesses. It begins, “Recently at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, the company introduced a series of action verbs into its social platform. ‘Read,’ ‘Watch,’ and ‘Listen,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained, were added to help build a ‘language for how people connect.’ The one missing word, of course, was ‘Buy.’ That’s really why Facebook and its army of content partners from news, publishing, music, and film and TV are rushing to set up shop on the famous platform with 750 million users.” Read more

MaterialSource, an online platform focused on the sustainable materials lifecycle, will relaunch with a semantic web focus by year’s end. In development by ontoforce, the revamped site will initially cater to users in its native Belgium, but it expects to expand to include an international audience.

The goal, says ontoforce co-founder and CEO Hans Constandt, who also is MaterialSource’s co-founder and CIO, is to “apply the whole philosophy of the semantic web to doing the work of connecting small providers” in the space. It wants to lower thresholds for these purveyors of products and materials for sustainable construction to get their data to their markets in an efficient and integrated way. His partners include ontoforce co-founder and COO Stephane Roelandt and co-founder and sales/marketing head Tom Vankemmel, as well as key developer Jaroslav Martasek.

“We’re putting semantic metadata around information from those providers’ materials,” says Constandt.

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A new article discusses how semantic technologies can and are changing the face of the online travel industry. The article states, “Shopping the experience means using customer benefits, words, and concepts to wrap the travel product in advance – to anticipate customer needs. It means creating an entry point or sidebar to create anticipation, set expectations, convey satisfaction cues and engage before the buying process. We have new tools and techniques with semantics and the semantic web. This is where customer benefits and concepts can be delivered with marketing (selling), and technology (presentation) in a new and cost efficient way.” Read more

Atosho has stepped onto the semantic advertising scene with a new ecommerce tool “which allows web users to buy products via a sophisticated web banner or widget, which the company refers to as a Microshop.” The article continues, “Imagine you are reading an article on a fashion blog and it mentions a certain pair of shoes from a designer. The Atosho tool would deliver those particular shoes or similar ones to the user on the same page. The user could then view the product, order it and pay for it without having to leave the page.” Read more

A new article reports that “Hewlett-Packard is looking to dump — er, spin out its PC business, and confirms that it has bought database and analytics vendor Autonomy for $10.3 billion. Plus, it is discontinuing its WebOS-based tablets and smartphones. Prepare for a major shift in the tech business and an acceleration of the ‘consumerized IT’ trend in which business users increasingly drive technology adoption and usage — and traditional IT moves further and further into the back office.” Read more

Google recently announced that they have created a rich snippets format for music. According to the article, “Since we introduced Rich Snippets back in 2009, we’ve created rich snippet formats for a variety of different content types, such as Events, People and Reviews, to show users relevant information about the content they can find on a site. Today, we announced the launch of rich snippets for music. With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages using the newly created music markup spec on schema.org, and search results for that site may start displaying song information in the snippet so that users know that there are songs or samples there for them to listen to.” Read more

A recent article informs online retailers that “Starting now, you’re going to need good structured markup on your X/HTML in addition to your white hat tactics. I see structured markup as being equally important to authoritative inbound links as a ranking factor when optimizing content. Why? Because search robots are designed to serve search engine users by matching their search query expectations, known as user intent. These bots are machines, and they’re trying to discern the human mind’s evaluation of information in answer to human-entered keywords.” Read more

A recent article reports, “In April, Walmart dropped $300 million on social media startup Kosmix to compete against Amazon with @WalmartLabs. Specifically, the retailer was targeting Anand Rajaraman, 38, and Venky Harinarayan, 44, who founded Kosmix, the creator of TweetBeat. The Stanford grads also founded Junglee, an e-commerce company that Amazon bought back in 1998 for more than $250 million (where they then worked for two years, building its marketplace division).” Read more