Megan Geuss of Ars Technica reports, “On Friday evening, a jury ruled that Cisco owes patent licenser XpertUniverse Inc $70 million in damages for obtaining patented technology in a fraudulent manner, Reuters reported. The jury ruled that Cisco owed an additional $34,000 for violating two XpertUniverse patents, as well. XpertUniverse, a New York-based company, brought the case in the US District Court of Delaware. The company said that Cisco violated non-disclosure terms agreed upon when the two organizations started working together in 2004. The agreement stated “Cisco would distribute technology XpertUniverse had developed to efficiently match customers with call center experts,” wrote Reuters.” Read more

Nueva Solutions, Inc. is searching for a Search System Developer in San Jose, CA. According to the post, the company is looking for candidates with the following skills: “Solr, FAST, RDF, SIOC, DITA, SKOS, OWL, Splunk, Data Visualization, Log analysis (Search, Web & CMS), Data Classification, Thesauri Creation, Ontology/Taxonomy Management, Semantics, Statistics.” This is a six month contract position working with Cisco. Read more

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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A new infographic demonstrates how the internet of things has overtaken the internet of people. The article notes, “While we were asleep at the switch learning to ‘plus one’ on Google, the Internet of Things (IOT) just exceeded the number of people that reside on the planet. Beyond just smartphones and tablets, that number of ‘things’ that connect to the Internet will only continue to scale as the growing number of connected gizmos, appliances – and even cows – are coded and catalogued to send messages to the Web.” Read more

There are great conversations and education taking place at SemTech 2011 San Francisco this week. Tonight, we will feature the “Lightning Sessions,” five minute talks. There are two concurrent tracks: a business-focused track and a technology-focused track. We will be covering both simultaneously. Whether you are here at SemTech or joining us remotely, we hope to see you here tonight at 4:45pm PST.

The presence of presence as part of unified communications deployments increasingly is being felt by enterprise users. It’s paying off in better productivity, but it’s when presence gets semantic that the real magic can start to happen.

That’s something that DERI and Cisco, as part of the multi-party Lion2: Enabling Networked Knowledge project funded by Science Foundation Ireland, are exploring. The idea is to “bring more granularity and more meaning to presence than state,” says Cisco lead architect Keith Griffin – that is, an indication that you are available or away. After all, just because you’re sitting at your desk doesn’t necessarily mean you are fully or even partially available, and just because you are on the phone doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t free to respond to instant messages. “The Semantic Web provides more intelligence to that.”

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Cisco has signed a deal with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at Irish university NUI Galway “to create the next wave of enterprise social networking tools for the workplace of tomorrow.” The deal is estimated at €500,000: €400,000 for the further development of Cisco Quad, an “enterprise social networking and collaboration platform,” and €100,000 for a strategic research project entitled “Advances in Real-Time Data Integration.” Read more

Over the past two years I’ve tried very hard to help define the potential application for this technology area in the context of Information Technology disciplines or problem spaces – out of those efforts has come a focus on:

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The 2009 Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) took place June 14-18, 2009 in San Jose, California. SemTech is produced by Semantic Universe and brings together the entire marketplace of semantic technology vendors, developers, researchers, start-ups, investors and customers. Here is a small sample of the hundreds of companies who signed up to attend:

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