Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

SemantiNet announced today that its Headup technology leaves its closed beta and becomes publicly available as Version 1.0.

The semantic web plug-in for the Firefox browser is designed to help users find contextual relationships of the disparate data that resides out there on the web, and provide a real-time connection to the information you’re viewing on a particular web site.

Previously only available as part of a limited, closed beta, Headup can be downloaded for free as of today via http://www.headup.com and http://addons.mozilla.org, Headup is available for both the Windows and Apple OS X Operating Systems using the new Microsoft Silverlight technology. End-user privacy is maintained throughout the discovery and sharing process.

Headup’s semantic engine retrieves personalized, meaningful information in real-time about the data that specifically interests the individual user. With this information, Headup can seamlessly and contextually “understand” how dispersed data across the Web is related and connect it in real time, alerting the user that there is additional information of interest.

Semanticweb.com decided to give it a try. And one of our first explorations reveals that if established companies aren’t paying attention to the power of social networks and the semantic web yet, they had better start — and soon.

Take this example: On Facebook I highlighted the word “Ticketmaster” in a friend’s posting, and “head-upped” it, so to speak. The pop-up Headup box gave me a summary of the business, some of the latest news about it, and also data about competitors — including some ones I’d never heard of before, like Fanprice.com (a site that lets you set the prices for the tickets you want to buy). It’s an easy click right over to a heads-up information box on those competitors — in the case of FanPrice, the box includes the news that of a Ticketmaster exec leaving for FanPrice, and a host of YouTube videos created by FanPrice.com itself.

A strong reason for why a company like Ticketmaster wants to pay close attention to how these two worlds are intersecting can be found in the videos that populate the Ticketmaster Headup box. Not a one is Ticketmaster-created, and at least a couple of them are downright unflattering.

There’s the Boycott Ticketmaster video, for example, and if that doesn’t tell you enough about the poster’s feelings for the company, than its name likely will: The video was uploaded to Ticketmaster by ScrewTicketmaster. Then there’s “The Downside of Paperless Tickets,” a YouTube video slide show posted by littlevinegar whose commentary points out what the poster perceives to be the big problem with the conditions around the provider’s paperless ticket policy – and it doesn’t spare the graphic language (note to SemantiNet: Can semantic web engines accommodate parental filters for some of these things!?).

Of course, users could find items like these video clips before by searching on YouTube, or manually piecing together the connections between various components (like their friends’ interests in Music, Twitter feeds on where they bought concert tickets, and the like), but the takeaway is that tools like Headup are making it a lot easier to surface these connections and a lot more likely that more users will do just that.

While an organization can’t stop that, it seems to me that many companies need to be more conscious of the fact that things of this sort are happening at all, with content being broadcast well beyond a specific venue to wherever a user happens to be (head up of course got me to the same content — unflattering videos and all– from the Ticketmaster site, for instance), and doing some of its own brand damage control around that.

As a consumer, though, you could find yourself whiling away the hours with the connections revealed by Headup. I’m speaking from personal experience here: In the Headup summary box related to me and my friends’ activities and recommendations, I’ve spent the last hour intermittently re-watching a video of kittens trying to climb up a slide … funny stuff!

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!