Josh Constine of TechCrunch recently shared some of the cooler features of TipSense, a great company from last year’s SemTechBiz Start-Up Competition. Constine writes, “No one wants to read thousands of reviews. You just want answers. Luckily there’s TipSense, a new startup whose algorithm sorts big messy data sets. TipSense’s site DishTip tells you what to order at restaurants, for example, while its AppCrawlr deduces an app’s best and worst features and lays them out with competitors on a comparison chart. TipSense is so smart I bet it gets acquired… or at least fields plenty of buyout offers. That’s because while people won’t shut up about big data, few companies have viscerally proven to consumers why it’s important. David Schorr built and bootstrapped TipSense over the last four years to change that. I met him at SXSW, was very impressed, and he agreed to let me write the first official interview with him about his stealthy startup.” Read more

The Guardian reports, “The [British] government has launched an open consultation on the guidance that public authorities will use to enhance the right to data in the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. These provisions, covering the re-use of data and the form in which it is made available, are expected to come into force in April 2013, and – delivering on a commitment in the open data white paper – we are opening up the process of developing the guidance to the public. The white paper presented clear actions to strengthen people’s access to data, improve its usability and ensure that its full potential for economic and social growth is unleashed.” Read more

James Grundvig of the Huffington Post recently interviewed Tagasauris CEO Todd Carter regarding Big Data. Grundvig begins, “The deluge of big data pitted against the diminishing returns of time is the greatest challenge consumers and businesses face today. To sift through the ocean of data in a fast, seamless way will become the next evolutionary step in social media. It’s easy to collect data in a warehouse, but difficult to pull the integral data that can be accessed, analyzed, and acted upon. Without the ability to filter out the background noise of information, efficiency gains won’t be realized and opportunities will be missed. And that could be something as simple as people’s time.” Read more

David Meyer of GigaOM reports that Finland is going to use crowdsourcing to create new laws. He writes, “Who makes laws? In most of the democratic world, that’s the sole preserve of elected governments. But in Finland, technology is about to make democracy significantly more direct. Earlier this year, the Finnish government enabled something called a “citizens’ initiative”, through which registered voters can come up with new laws – if they can get 50,000 of their fellow citizens to back them up within six months, then the Eduskunta (the Finnish parliament) is forced to vote on the proposal.” Read more

Tom Simonite of the Technology Review reports, “Personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri may be useful, but they are still far from matching the smarts and conversational skills of a real person. Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated a new, potentially better approach that creates a smart artificial chat partner from fleeting contributions from many crowdsourced workers.” Read more

Recently, we reported about the Open Knowledge Graph project, an effort to crowd-source a Google Knowledge Graph API. The project seems to have taken off quickly, with over 2,500,000 triples collected as of this writing (and climbing quickly). We spotted this post on Google+:

The last line, about the “public non-service announcement” left us wondering…is the project under pressure to scale back or worse, to shut down? Is this work competitive with Google or does it hurt their business interests in some way? We have been watching, and haven’t seen any announcement yet, but the post certainly left us waiting for the distinct sound of a dropping shoe. Then we saw this follow-up, with ominous Latin:

Read more

FindtheBest (the site where users can compare some 700 topics side by side, initially discussed here) has some new capabilities on tap. This includes what it says are soft joins for relating together diverse data sets.

“Joins is a very hard database connection between two tables. Soft joins are a little more semantic,” says CEO Kevin O’Connor, co-founder of DoubleClick. “We’re linking a lot of data sets together on a loose basis.” To the end, he says, of trying to “cross-relate information a lot more, trying to discern all the data we have and give it some semantic meaning into ways people can understand it. It turns out there’s a huge, huge number of these semantic relationship between our data.”

Read more

The Semantic Web Blog mentioned here, there is speculation that the Siri intelligent personal digital assistant technology may come to light in Apple’s fall iOS 5 release. Which is all well and good for users on Apple’s mobile platforms, but myBantu founder and vice president of products and strategy Bharath Yadla sees an opportunity to bring personalized recommendations for entertainment to a wider swath of the populace. The iPhone and Android version of its application, to join its web and Facebook applications. officially launch next week.

“We see absolutely a great opportunity with other platforms from a mobile standpoint,” he says. “And when you leverage the application on Facebook, that is a predominant presence.”

What users are leveraging in this intelligent assistant is its ActiveRelevance platform for providing relevant and personalized recommendations based on their profiles and queries. The platform leverages both artificial intelligence and social relevance, assessing some nine dimensions, including personal interests, proximity of choices, popularity, and peer influence, in order to deliver a handful or two of results. The social relevance comes by way of crowd-sourcing recommendations from sites such as OpenTable and Rotton Tomatoes, friends on social networking platforms, and the output of search as well as semantic engines. Users can enter their requirements in natural language, such as top romantic restaurant nearby, for the ActiveRelevance engine to parse intent and come to some conclusions.

Read more

A recent interview with Ranker CEO and Founder Clark Benson takes a look at what how the semantic start-up is making the most of crowdsourcing. Benson stated, “My whole life, I’ve been making lists of things… I also like the power of semantic data on the web, and the idea of linked data, so that you can really extract a lot of meaningful data and value from facts or opinions in a linked way. You can slice and dice information and pivot on almost anything, if that data is well-linked. The concept for Ranker came from merging the two together. The idea was to allow people to list and rank items, and use that to generate meaningful value as a recommendation engine. There are lots of things you can do with data if you can clearly organize it. The idea, is to take what has been unstructured data, and add structure to it.” Read more

In a new article by Mike Bergman, Bergman discusses the power of the semantic web to democratize information: “I think one of the most pervasive and important benefits from semantic technologies in the enterprise will come from the democratization of information. These benefits will arise mostly from a fundamental change in how we manage and consume information. A new ‘system’ of semantic technologies is now largely available that can put the collection, assembly, organization, analysis and presentation of information directly in the hands of those who need it most — the consumers of information.” Read more