Joab Jackson of Network World reports, “IBM has started a new practice to help organizations interact more effectively with their customers through the use of social media and other emerging technologies. ‘Today, businesses have a completely different way of engaging customers,’ said Mahmoud Naghshineh, IBM vice president of services research, noting that social media and mobile technologies have provided organizations new forms of feedback from their customers. ‘There are all these new ways of reaching out to people [but] you need to know when the right time is to engage.’ The IBM Customer Experience Lab will provide clients with access to both IBM researchers and IBM business analysis consultants, who will generate new ways for clients to communicate with customers and employees.” Read more

Jacob Albert of Quartz reports, “First, they suggested taxing Google’s personalized ads to boost French advertisers. Then, they tried to tax Google News to finance the French press. Now, the French government is thinking about taxing the collection of personal data by Internet companies, according to a report put out Jan. 18. The main target would be American companies like Google, Facebook, or Amazon, whose data mining efforts generate enormous advertising profits but precious little tax revenue for countries like France.” Read more

Joe Mandese of Online Media Daily reports, “In a surprising twist for the advertising industry, the hottest new model being developed by digital ad platforms is flipping the historic model between advertising and content: Instead of editorial or entertainment content being a conduit to distribute advertising, advertising is becoming a means for distributing content. The latest manifestation of this trend comes from Kontera, a company that helped pioneer the field of so-called ‘in-text’ advertising, which today will unveil an ambitious new initiative enabling advertisers to pull any form of content — including ‘owned,’ professionally produced or user-generated — directly into some new, dynamically served advertising units.” Read more

Seth Grimes of Information Week recently shared his insights regarding the where sentiment analysis is heading next. He writes, “Whether in conversation or posted online or to our social networks, subjectivity and sentiment add richness to human communications. Captured electronically, customer sentiment–expressions that go beyond facts and that convey mood, opinion, and emotion–carries immense business value. We’re talking about the voice of the customer, and of the prospect, patient, voter, and opinion leader.” Read more

A recent article reports, “As publishers, consumers and law enforcement get more sophisticated, so will the bad guys. It is doubtful fake reviews can ever be fully eradicated. The problem is that even amateur FROs realize that encouraging positive review posts about an establishment only goes so far… Those electing to go negative on competitors can be problematic.” Read more

Expert System’s Cogito semantic technology is attracting international customers in the financial sector. According to a recent article, “Intesa Sanpaolo, a leading European banking and financial services organization, is among the Finance and Insurance sector clients who have chosen Expert System’s Cogito semantic technology to identify and analyze sentiment for customer feedback.” Read more

Intenuum recently announced that it has launched its first product, TeeVlog, which is based on “State-of-the-Art semantic search and smart learning algorithm. TeeVlog™ pushes customized TV-related content based on multi-path input instead of inputting one-path registered user based recommendation. In addition to core ‘search and smart learning technology’, Intenuum has also implemented SNS (Social Network Service) features to provide users the easiest way to share information they find from the services.” Read more

A recent article talks about a young company in the realm of augmented reality: Wikitude, a company that is “leading the charge on today’s Augmented Reality front. Wikitude has seen a number of accolades over its short three year history, including today’s announcement of their pre-installation on every future BlackBerry device.” CEO Martin Herdina describes augmented reality as “an enrichment of reality, via additional information and virtual content, making it much more than just some text overlaid on top of an image. It could be text, but we’re seeing more and more video and animation enrichment, including 3D object overlays.” Read more