Andrew Nusca of ZDnet recently interviewed MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson about his company’s use of machine learning. Nusca writes, “When I last wrote about MindTouch, the San Diego-based company, I mentioned that there was a lot of money on the line—$83 billion, according to one market estimate—to get customer service right. MindTouch’s latest gambit? Machine learning. Read more

Photo Courtesy: Flickr/katerha

Among the topics covered at this week’s Sentiment Analysis’ Symposium was an exploration of just how much the negative or positive expression of sentiment about a company or a product really matters – and in what context it does. (Another one, which The Semantic Web Blog covered yesterday here, looked at the expected transition from sentiment to emotions analytics.)

Augie Ray, director of social media at Prudential Financial, and formerly a social media leader at USAA and Forrester, recounted some of the bigger blow-ups online in recent years: The passenger whose guitar was broken by United Airlines and made a Youtube video that went viral; NBC’s 2012 London Olympics coverage that was criticized for dissing a tribute to the victims of terrorist bombings, among other things; and Bank of America’s being castigated for its announced plan to institute debit card fees.

“We live and die by the concept that negative sentiment matters,” he said.

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What’s next in sentiment analytics? The road’s pointing to a deeper understanding of emotions.

“We still are clearly at the nascent level regarding text and sentiment analytics,” said David Rabjohns, CEO of social intelligence company MotiveQuest, speaking at yesterday’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium, the event organized by Seth Grimes’ Alta Plana Corp. “There are much higher levels of emotional depth still to be mined.”

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TVTechnology.com reports, “Veveo, a provider of semantic technologies to bridge the usability gap in connected devices and applications with intelligent search, discovery and personalization solutions, has been awarded four new patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, bringing its total count of issued patents to 38. The new patents relate to improving search experiences in the context of current usability trends around social, device based universal search, or semantic and intelligent searching capabilities.  The patent entitled ‘User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user relationships’ (USPTO number 8,423,583) covers incremental search capabilities based on relationships of users.” Read more

Steve O’Hear of TechCrunch reports, “The idea of matching prospective dates based on shared interests is about as old as dating itself. But understanding how one set of interests relate to another, certainly at scale, is arguably something that machines can do a lot more efficiently than humans, so why not harness that capability for match-making purposes. Loveflutter, which soft-launched in New York last month, and gets a UK push today, aims to do just that. Powered by Freebase, the 37-million strong open database of people, places and things acquired by Google in 2010 and now part of the search giant’s Knowledge Graph, the online dating site connects people based on shared interests.” Read more

TORONTO, April 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ - Forrester Research Inc. has highlighted Flybits, a Toronto-based startup company, as the number one context-aware tool for its emerging cloud and context-aware middleware solution.

Anthony Mullen’s report, “Emerging Touchpoints Require a Marketing Mind Shift,” encourages marketing professionals to increase corporate investments in innovative practices and procedures in areas such as customer experience, analytics, IT and product design — all of which the Flybits framework addresses. Read more

Robert D. Hof of the MIT Technology Review recently discussed “deep learning” as one of the ten breakthrough technologies of 2013. He writes, “When Ray Kurzweil met with Google CEO Larry Page last July, he wasn’t looking for a job. A respected inventor who’s become a machine-intelligence futurist, Kurzweil wanted to discuss his upcoming book How to Create a Mind. He told Page, who had read an early draft, that he wanted to start a company to develop his ideas about how to build a truly intelligent computer: one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own. Read more

Swipp, which in January launched its social intelligence platform and consumer social networking app (see our story here), today follows through on the plans it alluded to then of letting businesses leverage its technology for merging social and knowledge streams. Structured data is at the heart of the Swipp platform, with the Freebase entity graph providing reference knowledge and context for topics; its value propositions are that comments are tied to a specific, exact topic and that it creates a real-time Index for users’ social data sentiment scores for each topic that can be combined and sorted by geography, time, gender, and age.

The new Swipp Plus tool suite, the company says, draws on its social intelligence platform to prepare businesses – from consumer brands to content providers – to better connect with customers on today’s social web. Swipp Plus now enables them to leverage capabilities in its platform to add a Swipp widget to their web sites, blogs, maps, QR codes, and various online arenas around pieces of content, particular products, or concepts, and it also is working to build out mobile capabilities for direct feedback.

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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

Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times recently wrote, “Say you need a latté. You might pull out your phone, open the Yelp app and search for a nearby cafe. If instead you want to buy an espresso machine, you will most likely tap Amazon.com. Either way, Google lost a customer. Google remains the undisputed king of search, with about two-thirds of the market. But the nature of search is changing, especially as more people search for what they want to buy, eat or learn on their mobile devices. This has put the $22 billion search industry, perhaps the most lucrative and influential of online businesses, at its most significant crossroad since its invention.” Read more