A new matchmaking app from one of the founders of Adaptive Semantics hit Facebook yesterday. Adaptive Semantics, you may recall, developed the JuLiA semantic text-parsing technology that’s now part of AOL’s toolkit, courtesy of its Huffington Post acquisition.

Kingfish Labs is the startup that created Yoke, and it includes Jeff Revesz as CTO. Rob Fishman, who was Huffington Post’s social media editor, is the CEO of the company, which recently received $500,000 in seed funding. Yoke’s take on the online dating scene is to bring people together with the help of an ontology graph: Its algorithms explore entities, the connections between them, and the strength of those connections to discover common interests between people that just might lead to a real-world bond.

Yoke is deeply connected into the Facebook API, Revesz says. With users’ permission, it accesses basic data such as birthday, location, and education history, and also pulls their Likes in music, bands, artists, movies, books and some general areas outside those categories. Ditto for their closest friends (again, with respect to their privacy settings, so no guarantee as to how far it can get for each individual). Behind the scenes, Yoke mashes up its Facebook Graph data with data from Amazon, Netflix, and Echonest (which powers Spotify radio) to produce an ontology of interest entities for connecting users together. These three sources were chosen, Revesz says, because they’re the easiest to work with, the biggest and the best.

“We’re looking both for similarity information and ontology information,” he explains – that is, for example, how closely two movies might resemble each other, and what entities they might share in common, such as the same director or actors. So, if someone likes one particular movie, the ontology of interest entities can be used to show other people who like similar things.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2012 report was just published, and among the findings is that efforts by most top news sites to monetize the web in their own right are still limited. Few news companies, it reports, “have made much progress in some key new digital areas. Among the top news websites, there is little use of the digital advertising that is expected to grow most rapidly, so-called “smart,” or targeted, advertising.”

 

 

Failing to make a lot more hay from digital ads is problematic for traditional news companies given the decline in print circulation and in its ad revenue, too. The report says that in 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, which it calls an even worse ratio than in 2010.

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We sat down with Mike Tung, CEO of Diffbot to learn more about this innovative technology that takes a different approach to deriving meaning from web pages.

SemanticWeb.com: What is Diffbot?
Mike Tung: Diffbot is a technology that allows software applications to interpret web pages the way human beings do–visually.  We offer an API to developers that lets them visually extract semantic information from web pages depending on the page type.  We’ve observed that the entire web can be classified into roughly 30 structural page types and have trained our visual extraction algorithm on two of those page types so far–frontpage and article pages.

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SemanticWeb.com is pleased to announce that we are sponsoring a Web Mining Hack Day, Saturday, June 25, 2011 in Palo Alto, California. More details below after the jump.

Hosted by AOL, and organized by Diffbot and StartX (the Stanford University incubator), the Hack Day promises to be a great opportunity for back-end coders and UI/UX design experts to get together with the goal of building exciting semantic applications. The organizers suggest that participants will be able to:

1. Meet and network with other web mining experts, hackers, and students.
2. Learn about new semantic technologies and open web APIs.
3. See the new the AOL West Coast Headquarters, StartX, Stanford University’s startup accelerator.  Have some pizza on us.
4. Hack on new ideas and show off your projects.

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We reported a couple of months back about how AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post delivered some more semantic technology to its doorstep. But that’s not the only semantically-related project underway there: Amit Moran, R&D Manager at the AOL Relegence team, is working on a movie sentiment ranking project using Twitter and other social media data. It should see the light of day in the near future on one of its properties.

“We are developing a general infrastructure for sentiment analysis that deals with finding out what people think of entities in a content stream,” Moran told attendees at the recent Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York City. The use cases for sentiment analytics are wide – what do you think of a restaurant, or a politician, for that matter  – so domain specificity becomes important in its actual application. AOL went with movies as a first option – not a surprising choice given its ownership of sites like Moviefone.

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In the wake of AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post, bystanders have reacted with confusion. Stephen Colbert, for example, teased the $315 million purchase by creating The Colbuffington Re-Post and offering his site up for $316 million.

 A recent article comments, “In what current chatter has labeled a last and perhaps impotent attempt at salvation for AOL (see their marriage to Time Warner), it appears that this latest venture could yield some unexpected advantages.  HuffPo has been attracting record readership.”

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What got a bit lost in the news about AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post was that the deal also gets the Internet content provider some more semantic technology (the company’s past acquisitions include social/semantic matching Q-and-A platform Yedda, for example). In addition to The Huffington Post having been an early adopter of Thomson Reuters Open Calais semantic web service to identify and extract entities, facts and events for localized content initiatives, the site last year acquired Adaptive Semantics and its JuLiA platform for helping publishers discover the leaders in their social graph.

That acquisition now could bear fruit for AOL in influencing community engagement across a whole lot more web sites. AOL properties include community-specific sites such as the Patch network of localized news and events information, the DailyFinance business and investment news site, Autoblog, and many more.

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VatorNews

AOL buys 5min Media for rumored $65M VatorNews 5min’s VideoSeed semantic technology contextually matches the company’s most relevant videos with a syndication partner site’s existing text content, … AOL Reportedly Buying Video Syndication Company 5min For $50 – $65 Million TechCrunch AOL Acquires 5min Media, Web’s Largest Video Content Syndication Platform MarketWatch (press release) all 42 news articles »

Back when I was an industry analyst (VP, E-Business Strategies at the META Group, since acquired by Gartner), I often had to critique emerging markets.  Unlike venture capitalists, industry analysts are privy to product roadmaps from publicly-traded companies, including the industry giants (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM).  And unlike i-bankers, they are privy to product roadmaps from start-ups.  And as a kicker, some analysts (actually, only those with the largest firms; back then, primarily limited to those analysts with Gartner, Forrester, META and Giga) get a lot of great feedback from CIOs and other end users.

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