David Meyer of GigaOM reports, “Amazon has announced the launch of a new development center for cloud technologies in Germany, with locations in both Berlin and Dresden. According to a statement from the company, the 70-plus engineers that Amazon will hire will work on technologies for supporting various hypervisors, management tools and operating systems. This is effectively a major expansion of the development team Amazon has already had in Germany since buying Berlin-based Peritor last year – a purchase that led to the release of the OpsWorks devops toolkit this February.” Read more

Earlier this month Gartner named semantic technologies to its top ten trends list (see our story here). Recently, we caught up with Gartner vp and distinguished analyst Debra Logan, the lead author on the semantic technologies section of the Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting Information Infrastructure, 2013, to learn more about sem tech’s earning a place on the list.

One interesting point Logan made is that the top ten trends list actually is a reflection of inquiries Gartner sees from its end-user clients. So, semantic technologies’ spot on the list would seem to indicate a bubbling-up of real-world, enterprise interest. As Logan sees it, it’s very much about information overload, about minimizing the risk and maximizing the value of the data on their hands, and about the availability now from providers like Amazon and Google of infrastructures for analyzing Big Data sets.

“If we could get the same meaning from data, we might actually know what is going on, because we sure don’t now,” says Logan, of the quandary facing enterprise IT leaders. “They are struggling with definition issues and reconciliation because of the proliferation of different IT systems.”

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In the fall Google updated its Google TV platform to Version 3.0, touting features like its new Voice Search. This week, expect to hear about a slew of new products with the technology onboard launching at the CES show in Las Vegas.

Google recently reported on its Google TV blog that new partners added to its Google TV list include Asus, Hisense, and TCL.  LG, Sony, Vizio and others will have refreshes of their set-top boxes, integrated TVs, and IPTV boxes with the latest Google TV platform on board.

Consumers that buy into these offerings also will be increasing their exposure to Google’s Knowledge Graph. The Google TV platform’s advanced voice control for changing channels or finding content of personal interest to watch (live or via Internet streaming), its new programming guide app, and its other smarts deliver results with the help of the vendor’s own Knowledge Graph, according to GIGAOM. With the Knowledge Graph, search queries run against a database of entities and relationships — it’s the search engine’s way of, as Google says, understanding “things, not strings.”

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Amazon is looking for a Data Scientist in Seattle, WA. The post states, “Are you a data analysis ninja? can you seamlessly transition between OLAP/Relational, Graph/RDF and Hive/EMR without breaking a sweat? want to dive deep into the world’s largest financial/contract transaction system and help formalize our ability to make it automatically actionable for our mission critical LOB systems? This is a new effort within Vendor Systems that requires the ability to work independently and efficiently and come up with solutions that are sustainable and efficient and directly impact Amazon’s bottom line, if you want to leave a mark on the future of Amazon, this is your chance.” Read more

Instagram. Tumblr. Pinterest. The web in 2012 is a tremendously visual place, and yet, “visual media still as dumb today as it was 20 years ago,” says Todd Carter, founder and CEO of Tagasauris.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and Tagasauris has put its money on changing the state of things.

Why is dumb visual media a problem, especially at the enterprise-level? Visual media, in its highly un-optimized state, hasn’t been thought of in the same way that companies think about how making other forms of data more meaningful and reasonable can impact their business processes. A computer’s ability to assess image color, pattern and texture isn’t highly useful in the marketplace, and as a result visual media has “just been outside the realm of normal publishing processes, normal workflow processes,” Carter says. Therefore, what so many organizations – big media companies, photo agencies, and so on –  would rightly acknowledge to be their treasure troves of images don’t yield anywhere near the economic value that they can.

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Photo credit: FlickR/crd!

With Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday behind us, and Cyber-Monday right in front of us, it is clear the holiday season is in full force. Apparently, retailers – both online and real-world – are doing pretty well as a group when it comes to sales racked up.

Reports have it that e-commerce topped the $1 billion mark for Black Friday in the U.S. for the first time this year, with Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple taking honors as the most visited online stores, according to ComScore. Consumers spent $11.2 billion at stores across the U.S. on Black Friday, said ShopperTrak, down from last year but probably impacted by more people heading out to more stores for deals that began on Thursday night. The National Retail Federation put total spending over the four-day weekend at a record $59.1 billion, up 13 percent from $52.4 billion last year.

Not surprisingly, semantic technology wants in on the shopping action. Social intelligence vendor NetBase, for instance, just launched a new online tool that analyzes the web for mentions of the 10 top retailers to show the mood of shoppers flocking to those sources. The Mood Meter, which media outlets and others can embed in their sites, ranks the 10 brands based on sentiment unearthed with the help of its natural language processing technology.  Read more

Early in the summer, The Semantic Web Blog introduced readers to Nara, an advanced neural networking service to automate, personalize and curate web dining experiences for users. (See that story here.)

The service is moving ahead with the launch today of its mobile version, as well as in other respects. “We’re now doing a full-on consumer launch of a polished product on both the web and mobile [platforms],” says CTO Nathan Wilson. “People really are clamoring for the mobile component, especially for this [dining] use case.” Versions for both the iPhone’s iOS and Android operating systems are available.

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The recommendation problem is a machine-learning problem, says  startup Jybe, and one that it aims to address with its iPhone app that now is in beta. Coming soon (though not immediately) to the iPhone 5, which will require some redesigning to maximize real estate, the mobile app supports earlier iPhones, the iPod touch and iPads running iOS 4.3 or later.

Unlike services such as Yelp, that are more reviews than recommendations, Jybe takes the “serendipitous discovery” approach to real-world goods and services (movies, books, restaurants, and dishes). Founded by CEO Arnab Bhattacharjee, CTO Tim Converse, and chairman of the board Tuoc Vinh Luong, a team with a slate of experience in the search engine industry at names like Yahoo and Powerset, Jybe looks to provide implicit search, i.e. search without query. “The only way to figure out your interests is to figure out who you are, what you like and surface things interesting for you to consume,” says Bhattacharjee.

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Amazon.com is searching for a Software Development Engineer: Semantic Knowledge and Discovery in Seattle, WA. The post states, “The Amazon’s Semantic Knowledge team is solving challenging practical problems. We use semantic knowledge to power next-generation product discovery systems on the web and mobile devices. Bring your love for machine learning, data analysis, natural language processing, Bayesian inference, Big Data, semantic web, or massively scalable systems. Add your ability to solve practical problems with agile coding. Web development skills will be put to good use building new experiences for customers. We’re inventing new forms of product discovery for mobile devices, so don’t forget about passion for new technologies such as the Kindle.” Read more

Common Crawl now is providing its 2012 corpus of web crawl data not just as .ARC files, but also is releasing the metadata files (JSON-based metadata with all the links from every page crawled, metatags, headers and so on) as well as text output.

Semantic web projects that use its corpus include the work of Web Data Commons, which last month created a new analysis on vocabulary usage by pay-level domain in its microdata and RDFa dataset.

With the metadata files, users don’t have to extract the link graph from the raw crawl, which, says Common Crawl Chief Architect Ahad Rana, is “pretty significant for the community. They don’t have to expend all this CPU power to extract the links. And metadata files are a much smaller set of data than the raw corpus.” Similarly, the full text output that users now can run analysis over is significantly smaller than the .ARC file raw content.

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