The Common Crawl Foundation’s repository of openly and freely accessible web crawl data is about to go live as a Public Data Set on Amazon Web Services.  The non-profit Common Crawl is the vision of Gil Elbaz, who founded Applied Semantics and the AdSense technology for which Google acquired it , as well as the Factual open data aggregation platform, and it counts Nova Spivack  — who’s been behind semantic services from Twine to Bottlenose – among its board of directors.

Elbaz’ goal in developing the repository: “You can’t access, let alone download, the Google or the Bing crawl data. So certainly we’re differentiated in being very open and transparent about what we’re crawling and actually making it available to developers,” he says.

“You might ask why is it going to be revolutionary to allow many more engineers and researchers and developers and students access to this data, whereas historically you have to work for one of the big search engines…. The question is, the world has the largest-ever corpus of knowledge out there on the web, and is there more that one can do with it than Google and Microsoft and a handful of other search engines are already doing? And the answer is unquestionably yes. ”

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What do big companies have that most emerging businesses don’t have to help them get value from Big Data? Well, to start with, there’s lots of money and a ton of technology resources.

Never fear. At the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business conference in Berlin, Christopher Testa, CTO of startup WhiteBox Inc., plans to give companies with considerably fewer resources than giants like Google and IBM insight into how to use Big Data as a small, lean startup. His guidance will draw from his own past experiences at Google training AdSense; lessons learned studying the development of IBM’s Watson; and his current efforts to apply Big Data principles to create an expert system for amateur radio operator license exams at his own startup, with limited engineering resources. Most recently Testa was head of engineering at Ad.ly, and that will factor into advice about how to run a data center with free and open source solutions, too.

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Mark Walsh reports that Healthline Networks has made a deal with Drugs.com to sell targeted advertising on the site exclusively. Walsh writes, “The partnership expands the reach of Healthline’s HealthWeb to nearly 55 million unique monthly visitors, or roughly half the audience seeking health information online. Under the agreement, Healthline will sell direct response and brand advertising on behalf of Drugs.com, as well as create sponsored content areas on the site and enhance ad opportunities on Drugs.com’s mobile properties.” Read more

Atosho has stepped onto the semantic advertising scene with a new ecommerce tool “which allows web users to buy products via a sophisticated web banner or widget, which the company refers to as a Microshop.” The article continues, “Imagine you are reading an article on a fashion blog and it mentions a certain pair of shoes from a designer. The Atosho tool would deliver those particular shoes or similar ones to the user on the same page. The user could then view the product, order it and pay for it without having to leave the page.” Read more

If the future of web content is mobile, so too then goes the future of advertising. Mobile ad network Mobile Theory and ad technology company NetSeer want to be there for that future.

The two have teamed up with the goal of mobilizing NetSeer’s concept-based advertising, which uses algorithms to pinpoint relevant and related concepts based on the subject matter in a particular article, in the service of contextual ad delivery. On a mobile site for investing, NetSeer’s ConceptLinks might display related topics like “Exchange Traded Funds” and “Portfolio Management,” which are monetized links for the publisher, the company says. NetSeer says it already has several hundred publishers using its platform on the web.

Mobile Theory does the work of making an ad unit appear and function properly in a mobile environment. CEO Scott Swanson says that takes some work. On mobile platforms smaller, screen sizes, different screen ratios, ability for users to change orientations, and those users’ desire not to click on an ad and land somewhere else all must be considered. “We had to develop an ad unit that works completely different in mobile, to be faster, more simple, and more immediate than we do in online,” he says.

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