Josh Constine of TechCrunch reports, “Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from BeatDeck, a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow’s superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup. Everyone (who isn’t a cold-hearted robot) loves music. That’s led lots of entrepreneurs to start companies aiming to help listeners discover new artists and songs. Read more

Frederic Lardoinois of Tech Crunch reports, “Maluuba, the Waterloo, Canada-based Siri competitor and TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Battlefield finalist, today announced that it has added two new features to its voice-powered personal assistant app for Android and Windows Phone: sports and TV schedules. With this, Maluuba users in the U.S. and Canada can now ask it for near real-time sports results and query the service for TV listings in their area by name, genre or channel. One aspect of the service the Maluuba team has always been proud of is the fact that it has managed to add additional domains to the service quickly. The service started out with 18 domains, including restaurants, movies and general knowledge queries, but the team has continued to expand the range of topics it can handle since then. It has also rapidly expanded internationally since its launch and launched its Windows Phone 8 app earlier this year, too.” Read more

David Meyer of GigaOM writes, “In the development of natural language processing, the semantic web and so on, e-commerce provides a rich breeding ground. Companies such as Amazon and Google always want to find better ways to learn what it is potential customers are looking for, so the technology follows the commercial imperative. A Berlin startup called Versus IO is trying to apply natural language algorithms in its product comparison service, and it’s just closed a $2.8 million Series A round to do so. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and also includes Dave McClure, who previously invested $100,000, and angels Lars Dittrich and Dario Suter.” Read more

BOCA RATON, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LinguaSys, Inc., the international provider of human language technologies producing highly customized multilingual text analytics and natural language processing software, today announced the release of CCC Interpreter to improve accuracy and efficiency in the implementation of Chinese Commercial Codes (CCC). CCC’s are used to identify people and businesses without using Chinese characters in banking, compliance, foreign currency, law enforcement, immigration and trade transactions. Read more

Mare Lucas of Wired.com reports, “Many postulate that the explosion in Big Data will usher in an insatiable demand for data scientists able to slice and dice data to guide more informed decision making within the organization. Others go a step further, bemoaning that a chronic data scientist shortage will hold back the full potential of Big Data. Concern is unsurprising. For years, the BI and data analytics conversation was framed around how to aggregate massive volumes of data and then unleash the data scientists to find the value. Today, despite the information deluge, enterprise decision makers are often unable to access the data in a useful way. The tools are designed for those who speak the language of algorithms and statistical analysis. It’s simply too hard for the everyday user to ‘ask’ the data any questions – from the routine to the insightful. The end result? The speed of big data moves at a slower pace … and the power is locked in the hands of the few.” Read more

Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar reports, “After years of steady growth, open data is now entering into public discourse, particularly in the public sector. If President Barack Obama decides to put the White House’s long-awaited new open data mandate before the nation this spring, it will finally enter the mainstream. As more governments, businesses, media organizations and institutions adopt open data initiatives, interest in the evidence behind  release and the outcomes from it is similarly increasing. High hopes abound in many sectors, from development to energy to health to safety to transportation. ‘Today, the digital revolution fueled by open data is starting to do for the modern world of agriculture what the industrial revolution did for agricultural productivity over the past century,’ said Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, speaking at the G-8 Open Data for Agriculture Conference.” Read more

Centurion, South Africa (PRWEB) April 26, 2013 — Gatfol serves base technology to provide digital devices with the ability to process human natural language efficiently.

The goal of truly semantic search has not yet fully been realized. The main problem is the enormity of ambiguous word permutations of semantic equivalence in even the simplest of phrases, which up to now has processing-wise required huge structured lexicons and ontologies as guides. Read more

Google has scooped up news aggregation summary service Wavii for $30 million, according to Reuters. (Google and Wavii haven’t officially commented yet.) Wavii’s service has been influenced by expert machine learning natural language processing work, as explained by founder and CEO Adrian Aoun in our interview here. In February, a blog on the site also explained its use of classification for NLP tasks like disambiguating entities, automatically learning new entities and relationship extraction. Late last year Wavii announced its iPhone app.

Reports have it that Google and Apple were in a bidding war over acquiring the venture, which has been likened to Yahoo’s Summly buyout in March (see story here). TechCrunch says the Wavii team will join Google’s Knowledge Graph division.
When it comes to delivering personalized intelligence about what’s up in the world, Wavii aims to better understand users and what they’ll want to see in their feeds not just via explicit topic follows, but also via various signals. These include which other topics are involved in the events they comment on, how often they click into events about each topic, what topics they search for and what topic pages they visit. It also includes other attributes of stories they care about besides the topics, and their interest level in a topic to guess what the interest might be in related topics.

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Nick Vivion of Tnooz reports, “The company formerly known as Swiftrank comes back with a new name and entirely new concept. The company changed its name to TravelShark in 2011, and followed a $5 million investment back in 2011 with a period of relative quiet. The company now no longer focuses on connecting hotels to travelers – it is on an ambitious mission to redefine reviews. Moving away from the arbitrary nature of the 5-star system, TravelShark distills a place into its most commonly referenced qualities. Called its ‘Essence,’ this is a wordgraph that highlights words most often used to describe a particular place. The genius here is that words are much more qualitative than stars. They deliver a much more comprehensive and descriptive view of a particular place. The star rating system has its limitations, as it is not an objective measurement of a place.” Read more

Sherpa, the number one virtual personal assistant for the Spanish speaking world, is now available in beta for the U.S. market. Starting today, Android smartphone users will be able to enjoy the platform’s many features – including searching for information, completing transactions, managing schedules and operating the device itself.

Sherpa arrives to the U.S. market with a broader knowledge base and more proactive and predictive capabilities than current market offerings and includes transactional capabilities that are unique in the virtual personal assistant category. Read more