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. continued…

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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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“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.” continued…

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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.” continued…

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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. continued…

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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. continued…

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Swipp

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. continued…

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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.” continued…

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Chris Kanaracus of InfoWorld reports, “Salesforce.com continues to build out its Chatter social networking and collaboration software, with upcoming ‘social intelligence’ capabilities that will allow users to find information through new Topics and Expertise categories. Chatter is built into Salesforce.com’s underlying Force.com technology platform, allowing users of its CRM (customer relationship management) and other software to use social collaboration tools within a business context. Salesforce.com already gave Chatter users the ability to create profiles, and to follow users and system objects, such as a particular record. Chatter also has a recommendation engine, provides users with an ‘influence’ rating and has a Similar Files feature.” continued…

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Sean O’Neill of Tnooz reports, “ZapTravel‘s elevator pitch is that it’s ‘a smart Kayak for tailored deals when you don’t know where or when you want to go.’ Type in a query in natural language, like ‘go hiking in Italy in May,’ and the site will provide information on relevant flights, hotels and activities. While Google sometimes is able to resolve ‘SFO to LAX for April 4‘, ZapTravel claims to let users ask broad queries. Examples: ‘I’d like to get away from London for a long-weekend to a place with notable cuisine’ or ‘I want to visit a notable LGBT event in Europe in May.’ Or ‘We want to take a honeymoon to a beach destination staying in a 5 star hotel for under 1,000 euros’.” continued…

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Rado Kotorov of Venture Beat reports, “Many people delegate more and more to Siri (the electronic genie ‘in’ the iPhone) – from dialing phone numbers and finding directions, to taking dictation for SMS and emails. What if Siri could help us modulate the emotional tone of our messages? Would it make the world a better place with less conflict and argument, or would it leave piles of unread messages? Perhaps, but to be able to help in this aspect Siri will have to learn to do sentiment analysis: read text and determine its emotional charge.” continued…

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Rachel Metz of Technology Review reports, “Nuance is today announcing Voice Ads, a platform that will let companies create ads that people can talk to on smartphones and tablets. Mike McSherry, vice president of advertising and content at Nuance, says these could range from car ads that let you ask questions about the vehicle shown to ads for a sports network that allow you to get information about who won last night’s game or what time tonight’s game starts. The company has lined up partnerships with several ad agencies including Digitas, OMD, and Leo Burnett, as well as with mobile ad distribution networks JumpTap, Millennial Media, and Ad Marvel.” continued…

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A new release out of Indiana University reports, “Two researchers at Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Informatics and Computing have each been awarded the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of early career development. Assistant professors Apu Kapadia and David Crandall have each received NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program award designed to assist early stage scientists in building a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education. In receiving NSF’s CAREER Award, the two researcher-teachers are recognized for their work to ‘most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of Indiana University’.” continued…

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