Zite, the company that recently sold to CNN for $20 million, has launched version 2.0 of the company’s iPhone and iPad application: “For our current fans, don’t worry: we’ve kept all of the things you love about Zite. Our underlying discovery engine still looks at millions of articles each day and create a magazine unique to you based on your personal interests. You’ll discover interesting articles to read that you would have never found otherwise. And we’ll continue to bring you the best of your favorite magazines, newspapers, authors, blogs, and videos. But today, we’ve made Zite a lot better. Zite 2.0 is the evolution of Zite from a personalized magazine to an intelligent magazine. In Zite 2.0 we’ve focused on making Zite smarter than ever, introducing discovery at every turn, and designing Zite to be both beautiful and smart.” Read more

This week, Manning Publications is launching the book “Linked Data,” by David Wood, Marsha Zaidman, Luke Ruth, and Michael Hausenblas.

As part of that launch, Manning is offering a one-day 50% discount for readers of SemanticWeb.com. The discount applies to all versions of “Linked Data”: eBook, print books, and Manning’s “MEAP” books (more on MEAP below). To claim the discount, use coupon code “12linksw” when ordering.

This offer expires at 11:59 pm (US EST) on December 6, so if you’re interested, act fast!

About the Book (description by David Wood):

The flexible, unstructured nature of the Web is being extended to act as a global database of structured data. Linked Data is a standards-driven model for representing structured data on the Web that gives developers, publishers, and information architects a consistent, predictable way to publish, merge and consume data. The Linked Data model offers the potential to standardize Web data in the same way that SQL standardized large-scale commercial databases. Linked Data has been adopted by many well-known institutions, including Google, Facebook, IBM, Oracle and government agencies, as well as popular Open Source projects such as Drupal.

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IO Informatics recently announce the launch of IO Healthcare, “an extension of the company’s award winning life sciences platform, Sentient, into precision medicine applications including biomarker discovery, clinical trial optimization and decision support. By adding clinical, genomic, metabolic and proteomic information to the platform’s existing repository of public resources, IO Healthcare enables the earlier application of clinical information to enhance research and development.” Read more

According to a new article out of the company, “Instem, a leading provider of IT solutions to the global early development healthcare market, announced today it has released the next version of its OmniViz™ software solution enabling organizations to process larger datasets at greater speeds. OmniViz is a powerful data mining and analytics solution allowing users to analyze and explore critical information through its interactive and intuitive visualization technology. Utilizing sophisticated statistical and clustering algorithms, OmniViz processes and serves data to organizations to help reveal hidden patterns and features, allowing users to discover fresh insight and easily share that information with both colleagues and clients.” Read more

Concept Searching has entered into a partnership with Black Blade, “the information technology product and services company specializing in advisory, architectural, and technological consulting services, providing organizations access to subject matter expertise in Microsoft business software. This arrangement brings together Concept Searching’s expertise in metadata generation, search, auto-classification and taxonomy management, and Black Blade’s experience in designing, implementing, and operating services-oriented, modular, and maintainable enterprise systems that merge seamlessly with their business processes.” Read more

According to Charles Arthur of the Guardian, Microsoft has obtained a patent for augmented reality glasses, and the possibilities for semantic technology to be incorporated are endless. Arthur writes, “Microsoft has been given a patent on ‘augmented reality’ (AR) glasses that would enhance sports and other live events with streams of information beamed directly in front of the user – even including action replays and lyrics of songs. The move means that it could soon join Google in offering AR systems for widespread use, after the search giant unveiled its own Google Glass project earlier this year, intended to be used all the time as the user goes about their daily life.” Read more

David Meyer of GigaOM reports, “This year’s Slush conference in Helsinki has been a terrific event, with a very high standard of startup and a disproportionate number of great ideas floating around. One of the most intriguing has been that of Futureful, a sort-of-browser app that’s going to be made available to iPad users in the U.S. in January. Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It’s a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it’s an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser – you can’t enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content.” Read more

Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch recently reported that Brand Embassy has acquired Beepl. She writes, “UK-based Brand Embassy, a provider of social-media based customer care services, is buying Beepl, UK-based a semantic search site that launched in January 2012 to take on Quora, Answers.com, ChaCha and others in the Q&A space. Brand Embassy says it plans to integrate the company’s technology into its platform, which monitors social media sites to help brands engage better with customers. Brand Embassy’s clients include Vodafone, Telefonica O2, AVG, Diageo, Johnson & Johnson. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but it looks like it may have been a firesale of sorts.” Read more

Mike Johnston of CMS Critic reports, “Webnodes AS, a company developing a .NET based semantic content management system, today announced the release of a new product called Webnodes Semantic Integration Server. Webnodes Semantic Integration Server is a standalone product that has two main components: A SPARQL endpoint for traditional semantic use-cases and the full-blown integration server based on the SDShare protocol. SDShare is a new protocol for allowing different software to share and consume data with each other, with minimal amount of setup.” Read more

A new article out of Elsevier reports that the company and the University of Surrey “have signed a three-year agreement for access to Elsevier’s research performance benchmarking tool SciVal Strata. The University of Surrey is one of the few universities in the United Kingdom with a dedicated bibliometrician as part of its library staff. As a result, the role of the library is taking on a new, innovative dimension by driving the use of bibliometrics to help improve the institution’s overall research impact.” Read more