Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Semantic content discovery company EVRI has a new CEO in Will Hunsinger, a veteran whose experience in the search and discovery world dates back to his roots at Business.com, the business search engine and directory, and contextual ad vendor Overture Services, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2003.

Hunsinger’s heritage in building consumer Internet properties includes driving the consumer Internet experiences at Gap Inc.’s online brand and most recently being the entrepreneur-in-residence at venture capital firm Maveron LLC, whose portfolio includes many start-ups aiming at transforming the consumer experience.

Hunsinger will be drawing on that experience in his plans to enhance EVRI’s mission of helping consumers sort through the ever-growing volumes of information on the web — much of it coming in the form of unstructured data and hard-to-filter sources such as social networking applications — and find related content, and make some meaning out of it all. While the mission stays the same, Hunsinger says one somewhat meatier shift for EVRI as a company will be leveraging its technology to support its recognition that it’s the consumers’ choice about where and how they’ll spend time on the web to discover and engage with content.

“There’s always a place for EVRI.com to demonstrate the power of our technology, but we don’t want to make the decision for consumers about how they want to drive that value,” he says.

Recent partnerships with content publishers such as The Washington Post and The Times of London that use its technology to recommend other articles to readers point to that, as does Hunsinger’s thinking that the company can do more to extend the potential of developer relationships. Developers can use the Evri API to get access to Evri’s mapping of the entity web, or the web of people, places and things connected to one another via language, and Hunsinger says down the line developers can expect additional functionality to be exposed via its API.

“When you have this type of powerful functionality and underlying data, a corpus of entity relationships, and you tap into the creativity of the broader developer community, then you unleash the potential for people to come up with interesting implementations to solve consumer problems that maybe within the four walls of your own company haven’t been thought of,” he says. “We’re exploring that as another avenue to expose the value of EVRI beyond EVRI.com and our current relationships.”

Given the speed at which huge volumes of user-generated, unstructured data is being created every day — faster than consumers’ ability to make sense of it — Hunsinger says the company’s next immediate efforts will revolve around some interesting ways to help consumers make sense of all that information. He won’t be specific about how, but he does say that, assuming social media apps such as Facebook and Twitter remain as open as they have been and let others build upon their platforms, EVRI plans to be around to complement their services.

“We feel like we provide functionality that’s value added to what they do,” he says. “We intend to be part of that movement and a productive member of that growing economy.”

There’s co-opetition and then there’s competition, with a slew of emerging companies with some similar ideas to EVRI’s, if not in whole at least in part. Back at Maveron Hunsinger says he saw the semantic space accelerating, and one of the reasons he made the move to EVRI has been his belief that it was one of the companies that is answering the challenge of scaling semantic web technologies to the point where consumer applications can be delivered without destroying the quality of the experiences.

“I found EVRI from a technology perspective and from a business angle to be the most compelling solution out there as it related to the application of semantic we b principles and the consumer problem,” he says.

CTO Deep Dhillon, the principal architect and technical visionary behind EVRI’s technology, adds that from EVRI’s perspective, competition is a good thing.

“There’s something big happening — the semantic web arena, also aggregated search and the intersection of search with social media,” Dhillon says. “I think we’re privileged to have high quality competitors in the sense that we are all in one ecosystem.”

Competition is in fact driving opportunities as new marketplaces are being defined, he thinks — when a competitor lands a deal to use its semantic search to enhance another company’s online content, for example, that opens other companies’ minds and it opens doors. “Company Y sees Company X did some deal which they may have not considered before, but now they come to us saying they want to find out more about how we can solve this problem,” he says.

“At the end of the day, if there wasn’t competition exploding in this space we’d all be talking to ourselves,” Hunsinger adds. “That’s validation out there that we are solving problems.”

That said, Hunsinger explains that building out the economics behind the site takes a back seat to its focus right now, which is building out its suite of products and services and building its audience engaging with it. “There are multiple ways we can monetize those relationships, but right now that’s not the stage the company is at,” he says. “Now it’s forging those partnerships, solving problems for consumers in the right way, and building relationships.”

A New Approach to Scaling

Hunsinger also says he was impressed with the company’s approach to taking the semantic web to true consumer web scale. Dhillon explains that EVRI’s technology scales both with respect to the data itself, and with respect to user and usage volume.

“The most important thing is not just can you scale but can you do it cost effectively to meet business goals,” he says.

To these ends, EVRI takes a careful approach regarding the news and content it indexes. “It’s not that we couldn’t index the whole web but we’d need a lot of machines and we’re at an early stage to do that,” he says, so the focus is on natural language content such as articles and blog postings. On the entity end, EVRI has a dozen categories, from people to places to organizations. Consider that when it comes to people alone, there’s about six billion of them on the planet now and somewhere around 100 billion who ever lived, so its entity strategy is to focus on household-name entities at first, and over time push things down further, he says.

With respect to how it’s running all this, it’s leveraging the Amazon EC2 cloud, and it’s built all its indexing and searching from the ground up to be fully distributed, Dhillon says.

The biggest challenge is staying in front of a very fast-moving curve. “For me it’s making sure we are moving with the same urgency at which the consumer wants solutions,” Hunsinger says. “There’s just an explosion of energy in this space and we want to ride out in front of that and be a leader in this space.”

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