Google has scooped up news aggregation summary service Wavii for $30 million, according to Reuters. (Google and Wavii haven’t officially commented yet.) Wavii’s service has been influenced by expert machine learning natural language processing work, as explained by founder and CEO Adrian Aoun in our interview here. In February, a blog on the site also explained its use of classification for NLP tasks like disambiguating entities, automatically learning new entities and relationship extraction. Late last year Wavii announced its iPhone app.

Reports have it that Google and Apple were in a bidding war over acquiring the venture, which has been likened to Yahoo’s Summly buyout in March (see story here). TechCrunch says the Wavii team will join Google’s Knowledge Graph division.
When it comes to delivering personalized intelligence about what’s up in the world, Wavii aims to better understand users and what they’ll want to see in their feeds not just via explicit topic follows, but also via various signals. These include which other topics are involved in the events they comment on, how often they click into events about each topic, what topics they search for and what topic pages they visit. It also includes other attributes of stories they care about besides the topics, and their interest level in a topic to guess what the interest might be in related topics.

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Google Analytics gives web site owners good information about what’s clicking with visitors to their site, how those users got there, and more. But, attaining that insight can be somewhat laborious for those not well-versed in the tool and its interface, says Nick Cassimatis, associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He’s the founder of natural language processing technology startup SkyPhrase. His take: Apply SkyPhrase to the task, and things get a lot easier.

The startup in February began private beta testing of its NLP interface to Google Analytics. “Google Analytics lets you ask things like how many people from California visited the site last month, or which of your pages were most visited on mobile devices,” says Cassimatis. “Our system lets you ask these questions in natural language and get answers to them” more seamlessly than using Google Analytics alone.

Previous to bringing its NLP help to Google Analytics, SkyPhrase had a public site that let users run natural language searches of their Gmail or Twitter accounts, as well as flights and music.

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The Semantic Web Blog earlier this month covered the news that Ontology Systems is updating its Ontology semantic search platform to Version 4.0, which was previewed last week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Following that, we had an opportunity to catch up with CTO and co-founder Leo Zancani to learn more about the upcoming version of the platform that features new search capabilities under the Project Rothko code name banner, as well as the just-released Version 3.7, and how the telco and financial sectors its technology is focused on can leverage it.

The company’s Ontology platform connects its Ontology Intelligence 360 and Ontology Integrity Manager solutions. The former builds dependency models of business entities by looking at data in existing enterprise systems, and the latter is a data integrity solution that measures and monitors in an ongoing way the data alignment among various different systems that talk about the same thing. Those two products, Zancani explains, “depend on quite finely modeled data, so there are quite strict semantic models inside them. Data that is taken from existing systems populates those strict models, and customers are interested in then using the data in those models to drive business processes,” he says. Due in Version 4.0 that should debut in April, “Rothko adds the capability on the side that says, that’s great, but there also is value in the data you don’t want to or need to or can’t afford to model right now, and you can access that with a much more direct search capability.”

What’s the call for this two-tiered search approach in the verticals Ontology Systems is focused on? Take the telco sector, where the company founders have a long history. The industry, says Zancani, is in crisis now, as vendors like Apple and Google eat its lunch, and as the fallout from major consolidation among telco players makes traditional data integration economically untenable.

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Ron Callari of InventorSpot recently discussed the history of Siri and the rise of virtual personal assistants. He writes, “Back in May, 2009, I wrote about the first iteration of Siri, titled: Siri, Advice from Virtual Personal Assistants. For those who haven’t followed the iPhone evolution, while Siri was first integrated into iPhone’s operating system with their ’4S’ launch, it existed as stand-alone app previously. Fueled by artificial intelligence, it was a harbinger of what was to come in the new age of Web 3.0 and semantic technology… Siri prior to being acquired by Apple was the largest ‘artificial intelligence’ project in the U.S. at its time. Made possible by a $150 million DARPA investment, the project included 25 research organizations and institutions and spanned 5 years.”

He goes on, “Back then, according Bianca Bosker of the Huffington Post, ‘Siri boasted an even more irreverent tone — and a more robust set of skills.’ Read more

When Don Thorson and Charlie Constantini looked at the social graph – some 1 billlion connected people all sharing information at an incredibly fast pace – they saw a problem, and an opportunity. Data extraction wasn’t playing as big a role in the picture as it could, so the possibility that all those connected users out there could actually be gaining knowledge proportional to the size of the social network wasn’t being realized. How to return more value to end users? Thorson, whose career has spanned the video game, computer, Internet and communications industries and companies including Atari, Apple, Netscape, and Ribbit, says there had to be a way to “unlock what the world thinks about everything with the optimistic view that all of us are smarter than any of us.”

So was Swipp born. The startup – co-founded by CEO Thorson, Chief Swipp officer Constantini, and CTO Ramani “Nara” Narayan (both also Ribbit veterans) – and its new social intelligence platform launched yesterday. Its aim is to extract the wisdom of the crowd in a global, aggregated way with a solid data structure foundation as its starting point. Swipp’s effort to merge the worlds of social tools and knowledge tools is based on organizing data around terms or topics in what Thorson calls a “pure data” approach – not an interpreted or extracted one – allowing for data to be aggregated, displayed, and archived around a specific person, place, or thing.

So, when a consumer “swipps” – enters a topic via the web or a mobile device, adds a comment about it, and scores it so that their rating becomes part of the Swipp Index (its stock index of social intelligence) – he or she gets what Constantini calls a “one-two punch of what the world is saying and the truth.” That is, you get to see what people are saying socially about that exact topic, and the Index, which is the combined social data for each topic that can be sorted by geography, time, gender, and age. For the reference knowledge and the context behind millions of topics, Swipp leverages Freebase and its entity graph of people, places and things.

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The Huffington Post recently shared an inside look at the origins of Siri. The article states, “The world got its first inkling of the quick wit that would make Apple’s Siri an icon during a packed press conference held before an auditorium of tech elite. ‘Who are you?’ an Apple executive asked the assistant. ‘I am a humble personal assistant,’ Siri answered to appreciative laughter. More like humbled personal assistant. That press conference was actually Siri’s second coming-out party. When the virtual assistant first launched in early 2010, it was a standalone iPhone app called Siri created by a 24-person startup with the same name, a company Apple would later acquire.” Read more

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

Search engine Yandex, which like Google, Bing and Yahoo takes advantage of sites using schema.org markup to improve the display of search results, today released a search app for the iPad. The other major search providers have already accounted for the iPad in their search portfolios.

According to the release announcing the news, the Yandex Search App offers a tablet-optimized, intuitive interface marked by the ability for users to open pages as tabs in a browser – as many as they wish – so they can switch between tabs and search results within one screen.

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Ever wish you could have the computer from Star Trek? Now you can. Jon Mitchell of ReadWriteWeb reports, “The new version of Google’s Search app for iOS is available in the App Store, and it’s a good thing, too. This app now offers Google’s version of the Star Trek computer.  Just speak a question in natural language, and Google will reply immediately with the answer. Google submitted this update to Apple in early August. It showed a demo on August 9 that blew my mind. The speed and accuracy of this app’s answers — which, of course, Android users are already used to — shows just how much Apple users are missing out due to Apple’s insistence on bypassing Google with Siri.” Read more

Dan Ritter reports, “Google has grown in the spotlight recently. The company pushed against record highs on September 25 and is looking particularly good in the wake of Apple’s iOS 6 maps fiasco. The two tech giants have been exchanging blows for a while, and Google’s next stab is directed at Siri, as it prepares to launch Google Now. Siri is well known as Apple’s ‘sassy assistant.’ Google Now won’t come with any personality more exciting than HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it might be just as smart. Instead of sourcing information from third parties like Yelp, it will use Google’s semantic-search feature, Knowledge Graph. Google Now will also combine the company’s legendary data parsing with its advanced artificial intelligence to predict what someone will ask, and answer it ahead of time.” Read more