A new article reports that Siri has found its first real competitor in Evi: “Evi, which went live on Monday evening, is not the creation of a Google or a Microsoft. It’s the brainchild of William Tunstall-Pedoe, a British start-up entrepreneur who until a few years back taught computer science at the country’s august Cambridge University. ‘Evi Lives!’, his start-up, True Knowledge, announced on its blog Monday evening, as the app first became available for download for iPhone and Android users. Within hours it had shot to being the top download in the lifestyle category of Apple’s App Store, crashing True Knowledge’s servers.” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

Twelvefold Media (previously BuzzLogic) today introduced the Mindset Index, a tool “to help brands better understand the intent and motivation of their target audiences. The Mindset Index analyzes the top 12 motivations that drive consumer action, in relation to a brand, product or topic. These include: Information Seeker, Review Seeker, Expert Advice Seeker, Looking to Shop, Deal Seeker, Affinity For, Excitement, Enthusiast, Early Adopter, Trend Follower, Planner/Planning For, and Activity Taker. The results deliver to advertisers a clear understanding of what is motivating a target audience, and how this compares to competitors and online averages. By understanding mindset, advertisers are able to define and execute media strategies that leverage an increased understanding of what drives their consumers.” Read more

Mark Walsh reports that Healthline Networks has made a deal with Drugs.com to sell targeted advertising on the site exclusively. Walsh writes, “The partnership expands the reach of Healthline’s HealthWeb to nearly 55 million unique monthly visitors, or roughly half the audience seeking health information online. Under the agreement, Healthline will sell direct response and brand advertising on behalf of Drugs.com, as well as create sponsored content areas on the site and enhance ad opportunities on Drugs.com’s mobile properties.” Read more

A leading biopharmaceutical company has chosen Semantelli’s CoProtect software to manage its online and social media reputation. The article reports, “Semantelli’s compliance ready, life sciences specific social listening solutions have helped top companies uncover previously unknown threats and opportunities emerging from web and social media… In August of 2011, Semantelli launched AETracker to help pharmaceutical companies monitor and manage adverse events reported on company owned Facebook pages and other social media outlets. Since the launch, AETracker has been deployed by top 10 pharma and OTC companies to manage and protect brand sponsored social media outlets.” Read more

 

 

Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve covered (here and here) the year past for the semantic web. So now let’s see what might be in store for the year ahead.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our podcast here for more insights into what 2012 may hold.

• Interest in sentiment analysis exploded with the growth of the social Web, although its reputation suffered due to the prevalence of low-grade Twitter-sentiment toys, simplistic, wildly inaccurate systems that misled many into criticism of the concept where it was the cheap implementations they’d tried that were faulty.  In 2012, sentiment analysis will come into its own: Automated (and crowd-sourced!) mining of attitudes, opinions, emotions, and intent from social and enterprise sources, at the “feature” level, linked to real-world profiles and transactional data. — Seth Grimes, founder, Alta Plana Corp

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We recently rounded up some thought leaders’ perspectives on the big semantic trends of 2011 – most (if not all) of them positive. Here’s some further perspective about where hopes and expectations fell a little short of reality:

• The biggest lost possibility was not rethinking the whole RDF stack. Instead of actually reducing complexity, it seems the direction is hiding complexity. This makes its proposition unattractive for web developers. – Andraž Tori, Founder and Director, Zemanta

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Rafe Needleman recently reviewed Nanocrowd, a movie recommendation engine that uses semantic analysis to provide users with optimal film suggestions. Needleman writes, “Rather than collect your viewing history and asking you to rank what you’ve seen (as Netflix and Tivo do), Nanocrowd lets you start with one movie and then it tries to tease out what it is about that film that you’re liking right now. Then it finds more like that.” Read more

Kevin Fitchard recently asked the question, “Is Google scared of Siri? Is Yelp? Is Facebook? If they aren’t they should be, as should any mobile website, service or app that depends on advertising for revenues. Siri is just the beginning of a new wave of user interfaces (UIs) that will gradually shift our attention away from our phones’ screens, allowing us to interact with our devices in ways that don’t involve tapping keys and staring at pixels.” Read more

To accompany our recent podcast looking back on 2011, we’ve accumulated some additional perspectives from thought leaders in the next-wave Web space on the year that’s quickly passing us by.

Some highlights follow. You’ll see respondents hit on some common themes throughout, such as Big Data, sentiment analytics, specific vertical industry adoption, and the standards space:

 

• SKOS has become an increasingly popular entry point for organizations that want to use semantic technology in practical applications without worrying about the more complicated aspects of semantic web technology. – Bob  DuCharme, solutions architect, TopQuadrant

 

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Barb Darrow reports, “The new SAP Social Media Analytics service aims to bring more consumer-centric smarts to SAP customers by pairing NetBase semantic search and analytics with SAP’s own business intelligence expertise. The cloud-based service will let ‘business users look at Facebook, Twitter, [and] news feeds to get insight on market trends, what people are talking about, perceptions and a deeper level of information [about] their purchasing intents or what’s driving their conversations,’ said Byron Banks, SAP’s VP of business analytics solution marketing. A graphical dashboard will bring query results from both NetBase and SAP analytics to an iPad or other screen of choice, the two companies said.” Read more