Alissa Lorentz of Wired reports, “With all the hype around Big Data, we’ve become extremely proficient at collecting data – be it from enterprise systems, documents, social interactions, or e-mail and collaboration services. The expanding smorgasbord of data collection points are turning increasingly portable and personal, including mobile phones and wearable sensors, resulting in a data mining gold rush that will soon have companies and organizations accruing Yottabytes (10^24) of data… So it’s all dandy that we’re getting better and better at sucking up every trace of potential information out there, but what do we do with these mountains of data? Move over Age of Content, enter the Age of Context.” Read more

UpWest Labs reports, “At a Demo Day held in Palo Alto, UpWest Labs unveiled six new under-the-radar startups from its third graduating class of their startup accelerator focused on supporting Israel’s best entrepreneurs.  The six startups presented a broad spectrum of technologies including context-aware & mobile content solutions, data mining & semantic technologies, mobile ecommerce platform and online video infrastructure.” Read more

PowerSearch has announced the release of PowerSearch 5.0: “This release includes predictive search analytics, file exclusion and advanced tagging functionality. Predictive search analytics give the user the ability to analyze a word and view how it is used in the context of the documents in the collection. It also provides a count of document hits and term frequency for the current word and synonyms or related words (and frequency counts of those terms) of the selected word. The ability to see similar words allows the user to modify their existing search criteria resulting in a more accurate document set. By being able to see the word in the context of the documents, further analysis of words near the current word can be performed as well. PowerSearch uses Princeton University’s WordNet lexical database project to suggest words by ‘conceptual-semantic and lexical relations’.” Read more

Crystal Semantics, a pioneer of semantic advertising solutions recently announced the “deployment of its leading semantic targeting technology within AppNexus, the real-time advertising platform used by ad networks, demand-side platforms, and other leading online advertising companies.”

According to the article, “The co-operation enables clients of the AppNexus platform to target campaign relevant content by selecting from Crystal Semantics 3800+ semantic categories to optimize their display advertising campaigns. Read more

A new article takes a look at an up-and-coming semantic search company: “Meet Pragmatech, founded in 2009 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the United Development Company (UDC), based in Doha, Qatar. It has since opened a research and development branch in Jounieh, Lebanon, just outside the capital, Beirut. The company’s engineers define semantic technology as a set of techniques, tools, and algorithms intended to enable intelligent filtering, querying, searching and understanding of unstructured context by meaning rather than keywords.” Read more