Whisk, the U.K.-based service for matching online recipes with online ingredients-shopping, went live in a big way at year’s end, with a partnership with TV channel and recipe publisher Food Network. As its iOS and Android apps rolled out to accompany its browser plug-in, Food Network in the U.K. featured a button on its recipe search engine for a widget that taps into the service, which is underpinned by semantic technology and a cloud infrastructure. A recent second round of angel funding also has taken the service’s total investment to more than £500,000.

Whisk co-founder Craig Edmunds reports about 12,000 app downloads so far, and about a 1.5 percent steady click-through from the button on the publisher’s site – right where it expected to be at this point, he says. Getting the big-name Food Network signed on actually changed plans a bit for the service, which The Semantic Web Blog covered earlier here, and whose co-founder Nick Holzherr was a keynote speaker at the London SemTech event.

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The Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK took place in London last week at the Millennium Goucester Hotel, and a number of themes emerged from the two-day event. A few of the sessions are highlighted below, but first, let us turn to some of the attendees to share some of their favorite insights and takeaways:

Public Sector Semantics

There was a lot of interest in the Public Sector work. One of the presentations that highlighted the Open Data movement was Nigel Shadbolt‘s Keynote presentation about the recently launched Open Data Institute. We have covered the ODI here, and Professor Shadbolt shared some exciting insights and perspectives on the Open Data economy. In his presentation, he referred to a report on which he collaborated that was published by Deloitte Analytics. This free white paper is available for download.

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What do you get when you mix two parts natural language processing with a little personalization, and add in a dash of the cloud? The answer is Whisk, a U.K. company building a service that lets users purchase the ingredients for any recipe they find on the Internet.

“The crux of it is that you can take any recipe on the ‘Net and turn it into a transaction in on online market,” says co-founder Craig Edmunds. “There’s a machine translation problem from the recipe up through to our internal language, which is one NLP problem, and then another is from our internal language into online markets.” Another leg of the work is that the service seeks to not match to just one item at a market but as many as possible, and consider user preferences as to which is the optimal product, too.

At the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in the U.K., Edmunds will be considering how the issues of machine translation, manual intervention, personalization and the cloud intersect in creating a service that adds all the ingredients they need for dishes they find online straight into their online shopping basket.

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