TVTechnology.com reports, “Veveo, a provider of semantic technologies to bridge the usability gap in connected devices and applications with intelligent search, discovery and personalization solutions, has been awarded four new patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, bringing its total count of issued patents to 38. The new patents relate to improving search experiences in the context of current usability trends around social, device based universal search, or semantic and intelligent searching capabilities.  The patent entitled ‘User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user relationships’ (USPTO number 8,423,583) covers incremental search capabilities based on relationships of users.” Read more

According to an article out of the company, Jinni launched a “radically new NLU (natural language understanding) discovery engine to power the first voice-activated video guides that understand natural human language. Until now, the voice-activated TV experience was limited to basic commands because that was all the guide could process. The Jinni NLU engine leverages the company’s unique Entertainment Genome™ to interpret natural human speech and derive the underlying meaning to enable rich, intuitive interaction between users and their TVs.  Now users will be able to simply tell their TV what they are in the mood to watch and Jinni will find the most fitting content from live TV, VOD and any other available video catalog.” Read more

Zite, the company that recently sold to CNN for $20 million, has launched version 2.0 of the company’s iPhone and iPad application: “For our current fans, don’t worry: we’ve kept all of the things you love about Zite. Our underlying discovery engine still looks at millions of articles each day and create a magazine unique to you based on your personal interests. You’ll discover interesting articles to read that you would have never found otherwise. And we’ll continue to bring you the best of your favorite magazines, newspapers, authors, blogs, and videos. But today, we’ve made Zite a lot better. Zite 2.0 is the evolution of Zite from a personalized magazine to an intelligent magazine. In Zite 2.0 we’ve focused on making Zite smarter than ever, introducing discovery at every turn, and designing Zite to be both beautiful and smart.” Read more

Dan Rowinski of ReadWrite reports, “The integration of old media and new media can often be like trying to mix oil and water. Even when smart media entities have been proactive in approaching the new digital paradigm – the world of smartphones and tablets, social and serendipity – they have failed either through poor decision making or not putting in a full effort. But CNN is different. Where many newspapers and cable companies have faltered, CNN has thrived. A lot of the credit goes to  the cable news company’s acquisition of Zite, the makers of a popular iPad news app.” Read more

A new article reports, “Microsoft has announced a deal with Israeli movie startup Jinni, licensing its semantic discovery technology to bring personalised recommendations for films and television shows to its varying array of desktop, mobile and gaming devices. The Redmond-based software giant is quiet on the details but it is likely it will use Jinni’s Discovery Engine and Entertainment Genome to help classify databases of television shows and films, sorting them into mood, plot and style to allow for easy discovery on a variety of Windows devices.” Read more

A recent article reports, “mgMEDIA, developers of multi-device digital content distribution platform Open4Content and Jinni, innovators of the only taste-and-mood based discovery engine for movies and TV shows, today announced a new strategic partnership to deliver a fun, intuitive and highly accurate Jinni semantic discovery experience. The Jinni discovery engine will be built in to the core of mgMEDIA’s over-the-top platform, Open4Content. Users will enjoy finding and viewing high-quality entertainment that suits their personal tastes and moods anytime, anywhere.” Read more