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.” Read more

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’.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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’.” Read more

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

Esther Schindler of IT World recently discussed a number of new technologies that have a definite cool factor in addition to plenty of real world applications. She focuses on facial recognition technology: “The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology used clever geek bait to attract me to its booth: video clips from The Big Bang Theory. Formally, the project ‘focuses on the exploration of new methods in computer vision to enable detection and analysis of faces and people in both images and video’… For instance, touching the screen can bring up the actor’s record on imdb.com (destroying any argument with your spouse that begins, ‘Really, that’s the same actor who was in an episode of Firefly!’), or enabling better video search results (such as, ‘Show me all the scenes with both Sheldon and Penny’).” Read more

Bitext, provider of multilingual technology of Text Analytics for the main European languages, has announced the publication of the Portuguese version of the “Bitext API Demo” (http://svc8.bitext.com/api-demo), the demonstration platform of its semantic API. Along with Portuguese, there are already three languages available (English and Spanish are the other two) for testing Bitext API for free.

The services available in this platform are Entity and Concept Extraction, Sentiment Analysis and Categorization. This API can be tested using some pre-established texts and also interactively (by entering everyone’s own text). It is also possible to test the API programmatically, thanks to its easy integration into third-party systems. Read more

Micheal Dumiak reports, “In a quiet lane in Belarus’s capital, across from playgrounds and tower-block apartments, sits an old textile factory with a courtyard mural of a smiling Vladimir Lenin. Upstairs is something unexpected—60 programmers and artificial-intelligence researchers implementing algorithms and building databases for a sprawling semantic-search platform. This is what Ken Klapproth calls the ‘factory’ for the Invention Machine, a 20-year-old software firm in Boston (recently acquired by Colorado-based IHS) that specializes in natural-language processing. Klapproth leads product marketing for Invention Machine and is a solid supporter of Minsk’s IT scene.” Read more

Veveo, [a company we have covered previously and] a leading provider of semantic technologies to bridge the usability gap in connected devices and applications with intelligent search, discovery, recommendation and personalization solutions, today announced that the company will showcase its semantic Knowledge Graph-based solutions at the upcoming TV Connect 2013. The company will be demonstrating advanced new conversational interface technology for television and video, as well as personalized channel guides and recommendation solutions being rolled out by one of the leading cable providers in the US. Read more