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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Last week The Semantic Web Blog covered the launch of the SindiceTech Assisted SPARQL Editor as an open source project, noting that SparQLed also is part of SindiceTech’s commercial suite for large enterprises building private linked data clouds. This week, we’ll dive a little deeper into SindiceTech and its progress since the founders of the Sindice web of data search engine turned their attention to focusing on the commercial application of its technology as a real-time semantic warehousing infrastructure, which leverages cloud computing for integrating and normalizing the massive amounts of data the enterprise must deal with.

As SindiceTech founder and CEO Giovanni Tummarello explains, companies actually approached his team to help them make a reality of their visions to use RDF and SPARQL, as the best knowledge representation and querying technologies available, by providing the missing scalability and stability. Sindice.com was evidence that the technology the team had developed could answer these enterprises’ needs; currently there are about 700 million semantically marked-up web pages indexed in the Sindice.com search engine, with a live updated index of some 80 billion triples daily. Its database is over 5 terabytes.

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Ecosystem image via Shutterstock

As the Semantic Web Blog recently noted, 3RoundStones’ Callimachus Enterprise emerged as the winner of the Top Semantic Technology Start-up competition that was held at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) in San Francisco a few weeks ago. The commercially supported Linked Data Management system, now being piloted by eight companies, will this summer be released to the general public as Version 1.0.

Callimachus Enterprise is distinguished not only by its technology, but by CTO David Wood’s presentation that spoke to the real business needs of the enterprise today – including rapidly demonstrating value, in its case around exposing, connecting and visualizing disparate enterprise content – and also in that it provides a way for organizations to deal with their enterprise information in an entirely cloud-based solution. It leverages the Amazon cloud.

“A lot of companies are using cloud-based solutions for travel and expense tracking,” says CEO Bernadette Hyland. “But this is the beginning of a new wave.”

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Dollars to donuts most folks haven’t ever found a place to eat courtesy of neural networking technology before. Generally, Internet searches for spots to have a bite come courtesy of friends’ Facebook recommendations, services like Yelp, and even some semantically-powered offerings such as BooRah, now an Intuit company.

But the collection of neuroscientists, computer scientists, astrophysicists, and creative artists behind Nara, launching into public beta today, have taken the advanced neural networking route to automate, personalize and curate web dining experiences for users – though there’s more to come on the future menu. President and CEO Tom Copeman says of the company, which in April secured $3.6 million of a $4.5 million equity offering, that its cutting-edge neural network and proprietary and patented algorithms and process for analyzing tons of web data, and personalizing it, including considering user feedback on the suggestions it offers, is creating a whole new category.

That is the pure-play digital lifestyle brand that “creates an emotional connection between us and the Web. We’re trying to change how people think about the web, and from sense of what it means to me, and makes sense to me, and how personal it is to me.”

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Facebook IPO not panning out for you? Well, there are other opportunities out there where you can get in on the ground floor for a lot less.

Take a Kickstarter project dubbed Gooey Search – it’s trying to get funding of at least $125,000 by June 8 for its consumer-facing technology, based on latent semantic analysis (LSA). It has as its goal delivering the best and most accurate Google search results in what it calls a Gooey Graph real-time diagram of discovered network concepts, while keeping user privacy intact.

With the recent announcement of Google’s Knowledge Graph, do we need another way to probe the leading search engine? Ed Heinbockel, founder, president and CEO of Visual Purple, is betting we do. “To me [what Google’s done] validates the approach we’ve gone down in terms of visualizing and letting you navigate search. It’s the same direction. The question is can we provide value to that equation,” he says.

Where he sees the opportunity: “What drives us a lot is that we’re very concerned about the direction that privacy and the Internet are going,” he says. “And we think the quality of the results they give back to users isn’t in the order it should be.”

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