Derek du Preez of Computer World reports, “The Financial Times (FT) has appointed John O’Donovan as its new Chief Technology Officer, who will lead the FT’s technology strategy across development and operations teams. O’Donovan joins the publication from the Press Association, where he was director of architecture and development, and has also previously worked as the chief architect for BBC News, Sport and Weather. Whilst at the BBC, O’Donovan played a key role in building some of the company’s flagship products, such as the BBC iPlayer, as well as the widely used sport APIs for the Olympics Data Feed.”

He continues, “The FT said that O’Donovan has ‘delivered influential technical strategies that have become widely adopted, using semantic technologies and architectural patterns for dealing with complex integration in modern technical environments.’ Read more

Narus, Inc., a leader in big data analytics for cybersecurity solutions, today announced it has been honored with three awards from Info Security Products Guide‘s 2013 Global Excellence Awards. Narus Chief Technology Officer Dr. Antonio Nucci won the “CTO of the Year” award, and was a Gold winner in the “People Shaping Info Security” category. The company was also presented with a Bronze Award for its Narus nSystem cybersecurity solution in the “Security Products and Solutions for Government” category. This recognition reaffirms Narus’ position as an industry thought leader and pioneer in cybersecurity technology. Read more

In the same way that Columbus “discovered” a New World that was already there, more businesses may be about to discover the world of semantic web technology that’s been there all along.

Photo credit: Flickr/torkildr

Their expeditions in this direction, not surprisingly, are likely to have a Big Data hook. In a recent survey, New Vantage Partners queried the connection, asking respondents, “What data structures and standards are of particular interest in your Big Data initiatives?.” It listing among the choices flat-file, relational, graphs, and yes, Semantic Web technology.

Read more

The Semantic Technology & Business Conference has been underway since Sunday, with tutorials and lightning sessions catching audience interest. The conference presentations get underway today, most of them following on the heels of the opening keynotes given by Bart van Leeuwen, firefighter and architect at netage.nl; Jay Myers, web architect at Best Buy; and Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, a part of Experian.

Best Buy, as readers of this blog know, has been diving deep into the semantic web waters under Myers’ direction for a few years now, and he shared that journey with the audience at SemTech.

Read more

Algebraix Data has announced that CTO Christopher Piedmonte and Product Manager Arthur Keen will be presenting Algebra Unlocks SPARQL Performance at the SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco. According to the article, “Mr. Piedmonte and Dr. Keen will provide a technical presentation to attendees that will show how Algebraix® Technology can unlock SPARQL performance. Algebraix technology leverages newly developed data algebra to dynamically re-factor queries as algebraic expressions of prior result fragments and optimally order queries to improve result re-use.” Read more

Ryan Kim recently spoke to Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori regarding the company’s role in the growing smart personal assistant field. Kim writes, “When I first heard of Zemanta, I thought of it as a great tool for bloggers, helping recommend links, content and images. And it does that quite well, helping some 80,000 active users. But after talking with Zemanta’s CTO and co-founder Andraz Tori, our conversation turned to the bigger picture of what New York-based Zemanta is doing. And it’s really in a similar vein as Apple’s Siri, IBM’s Watson and other services. We’re now entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests and questions in real time.” Read more

Semantic Systems is seeking a new Chief Technology Officer in New York, NY, “to lead the next generation of our platform and beyond. The ideal candidate will have excellent skills in Java/Scala, Semantic Web, RDF/OWL, Sparql, AI, distributed systems and hopefully the Real-time Web.” The post continues, “Candidates must have a bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science (or a related field) and have extensive experience as a VP or CTO.  Start-up experience is important, as is a proven track record in building effective, scalable and distributed systems. You’ll also be passionate, sharp, energetic and excited about the future of semantics and real-time – just like we are!” Read more

Marc Hadfield, Chief Technology Officer of Inform will be at SemTech 2011 to present the Inform Service. According to the article, “Inform Technologies provides semantic services that deliver the rich metadata used for selecting content and ads for publisher customers including CNN, CBS Interactive, and the New York Daily News. Inform is also applied to user-generated content, such as the Yuku network of sites, which includes over 40,000 forums, 10 million registered users, and more than 1 billion pieces of short-form content.” Read more

Steve Scott, CTO of Cray will be on hand at next week’s Semantic Technology Conference to discuss Cray’s Extreme Multithreaded Technology (XMT) System. According to the article, “The Cray XMT System is designed specifically to run challenging big data graph analytics workloads that bring traditional systems to their knees. Many problems in the semantic space are particularly well suited for this system and the Cray XMT holds the promise of advancing the application of semantic technologies to big data analysis. This talk will describe the motivation, architecture and potential application areas for this unique machine.” Read more