Anthony Ha of Tech Crunch reports, “Sherpa, a personal assistant app that launched initially in the Spanish-speaking world, just announced that it has raised $1.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors. Sherpa users can speak or type their requests, and the app answers them by collecting information from around the web. The company has also partnered with PayPal and other services, so that users accomplish tasks like making travel reservations and transferring money.”

Ha continues, “The technology was developed by founder and CEO Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria. He actually stopped by the TechCrunch office last fall to show off the app and to compare the results to what you would find in Siri and in Wolfram Alpha. There were, in fact, a number of cases where he’d asked some factual questions and get more complete and relevant answers from Sherpa than the competition. (To be clear, that was a pretty limited test. Read more

Algebraix Data Corporation today announced its SPARQL Server(TM) RDF database successfully executed all 17 of its queries on the SP2 benchmark up to one billion triples on one computer node. The SP2 benchmark is the most computationally complex for testing SPARQL performance and no other vendor has reported results for all queries on data sizes above five million triples. Read more

Attensity, the leading provider of enterprise social analytics and engagement applications, today announced the release of Attensity Respond 6.0, a new release of Attensity’s Respond application designed to address the specific challenges facing the next generation of multi-channel social customer contact centers and marketers in large corporate environments.

Respond 6.0 provides a unified customer listening post where customer requests in social media as well as in emails, and other channels are automatically -and intelligently- analyzed, classified and routed to appropriate departments for response. Read more

Dusten Carlson of SocialNewsDaily reports, “Gamer social startup gamesGRABR has been selected as an alternate finalist in the Entertainment and Gaming Technologies category of this year’s SXSW Accelerator competition… gamesGRABR is a social network created for both casual and hardcore gamers, and is dedicated to gaming culture. The network is built around direct links to retail goods as well. Think of it as Pinterest-meets-Amazon for gamers… Over 500 companies submitted to present at the marquee event for SXSW Interactive Festival’s Startup Village, which hosts 56 finalists showcasing some of the best new tech innovations to a panel of hand-picked judges and a live audience.” Read more

Max Engel of HypeBot recently identified the smart use of data as one of three major trends currently shaping the future of product development. He writes, “The role that data plays goes beyond analytics. Open platforms and API’s allow for the creation of product mash-ups that have broken down barriers to content availability. One cannot underestimate the brilliance of platform-focused companies like SoundCloud and Spotify that allow innovation to occur rapidly and unfettered. Similarly, structured data is going to be increasingly impactful. Facebook’s Open Graph, for example, projects the foundation for the oft-mentioned semantic web.” Read more

According to a recent article out of the company, “InteliChart, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based, vendor-neutral technologies that facilitate healthcare information exchange, has selected Clinical Architecture’s Symedical® Server for semantic interoperability and comprehensive terminology management for its suite of health information exchange solutions. InteliChart will use the solution to improve the way it represents, stores, processes and shares clinical and administrative data with different systems, which will result in the exchange of more meaningful data.” Read more

Rip Empson of TechCrunch reports, “Ginger Software is on a mission to become the go-to spell-checking tool for Android. This week, the Israeli makers of natural language technology designed to help native and ESL speakers better express themselves, released its latest free mobile app for Android, called the Ginger Keyboard.  Simply put, the Keyboard is a straightforward, easy-to-use proofreading app that allows users to correct full texts with one click. While there are plenty of proofreading and grammar apps to be found in Google Play, most of them are educational apps, grammar exercises and dictionaries. However, Ginger’s new app is meant to your cross-app proofreading tool, as it integrates with any and all Android apps you have installed on your phone, whether it be SMS, email, Twitter or Facebook.” Read more

According to a new release, “Ontology Systems, the semantic search company for structured enterprise application data, is set to lift the covers on a forthcoming major release of the Ontology semantic search platform.  Visitors to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week will get a sneak preview of Project Rothko to see how businesses will be able to search and centralise applications, databases, files, spread sheets and ad-hoc data from anywhere across the enterprise; without the cost and risk of integration. ‘The term ‘paradigm shift’ may be well worn, but it’s completely on the mark for our ground breaking technology.’ said Benedict Enweani, CEO and founder of Ontology Systems.” Read more

According to a new article, “Tempo AI, an SRI International spin-off venture, introduces the Tempo Smart Calendar for iPhone, a cutting-edge personal assistant application centered on a person’s day. The Tempo Smart Calendar is a mobile productivity app that analyzes data from a user’s mobile calendar and applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance meetings and events throughout the day. It finds and neatly organizes everything needed to be fully prepared, such as contacts, emails, and related documents, and puts them in context. In a single tap, anyone can complete common tasks, saving time and reducing stress. Using Tempo Smart Calendar is like having a personal assistant prepare for what’s next – not only providing the right information, but anticipating and understanding what a user intends to do with it.” Read more

According to a new article out of the company, “Equivio, a provider of analytical solutions for e-discovery, today announced that it has launched Themes, a breakthrough content analytics application that identifies themes and thematic relationships across document collections. Intended for the use of lead litigators, legal strategists and investigators, Themes enables the rapid and intuitive exploration of a case repository. Themes is part of Zoom, Equivio’s end-to-end e-discovery platform for predictive coding and analytics.” Read more