A new resource has been announced on Best Buy’s BBYOpen blog: Metis Alpha. Like Best Buy’s earlier forays into Semantic Web use, this one started with a business problem. As the announcement states: “These days, consumers have a rich variety of products available at their fingertips. A massive product landscape has evolved, but sadly products in this enormous and rich landscape often get flattened to just a price tag. Over time, it seems the product value proposition, variety, descriptions, specifics, and details that make up products have all but disappeared. This presents consumers with a ‘paradox of choice’ where misinformed decisions can lead to poor product selections, and ultimately product returns and customer remorse.”

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Users of Prestashop, the popular open source e-commerce package that powers over 100,ooo shops, now have easy access to semantic markup through the release of a free extension module from Makolab S.A. The extension adds markup from the GoodRelations vocabulary using RDFa syntax to the product item page templates. Read more

Photo courtesy: Flickr/masochrismtango

More vendors are making waves among the ranks of those that figure semantic technology has a role to play in the travel sector, from helping hospitality providers assess the quality of user experiences to serving as a B2B backbone for companies that want to help users book travel plans, whether they’re aiming to spend Thanksgiving with the family in Nebraska or Christmas shopping in Paris, and more.

* At the PhoCusWrite 2011 Travel Innovation Summit last week, ReviewPro won the QuickMobile Award for Travel Innovation: Emerging Category.

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Atosho has stepped onto the semantic advertising scene with a new ecommerce tool “which allows web users to buy products via a sophisticated web banner or widget, which the company refers to as a Microshop.” The article continues, “Imagine you are reading an article on a fashion blog and it mentions a certain pair of shoes from a designer. The Atosho tool would deliver those particular shoes or similar ones to the user on the same page. The user could then view the product, order it and pay for it without having to leave the page.” Read more

A recent article informs online retailers that “Starting now, you’re going to need good structured markup on your X/HTML in addition to your white hat tactics. I see structured markup as being equally important to authoritative inbound links as a ranking factor when optimizing content. Why? Because search robots are designed to serve search engine users by matching their search query expectations, known as user intent. These bots are machines, and they’re trying to discern the human mind’s evaluation of information in answer to human-entered keywords.” Read more

A recent article reports, “In April, Walmart dropped $300 million on social media startup Kosmix to compete against Amazon with @WalmartLabs. Specifically, the retailer was targeting Anand Rajaraman, 38, and Venky Harinarayan, 44, who founded Kosmix, the creator of TweetBeat. The Stanford grads also founded Junglee, an e-commerce company that Amazon bought back in 1998 for more than $250 million (where they then worked for two years, building its marketplace division).” Read more

A recent article reports, “A new product search engine dubbed Hidentify has launched with the ambition to help consumers make educated buying decisions sans the hassle of conducting complicated research on the Web. In essence, Hidentify lets people express their needs in natural language rather than by composing queries filled with technical details, and still find out what the right product is and where they can purchase it right away.” Read more

Paypal’s Praveen Alavilli presented at SemTech 2011, San Francisco, on Social Commerce and the Semantic Web. Alavilli explained that “ecommerce involves much more than just buying and selling.”  There are many aspects involved with ecommerce and many online retailers are focused only on the transactional part of an online sale. For example, the point where a consumer is on a website making a purchase within a shopping cart. And, as Alavilli explained, “the buying cycle of a consumer is much larger than the point at which a transaction occurs.”  In each step of the buying cycle, there is an opportunity to influence the consumer. Online consumers may go through one, or all, of the following steps in an ecommerce buying cycle:

• Inspiration: A consumer “wants to do something” like become a writer, for example.
• Investigation:  A consumer looks for products that help accomplish a task(s).
• Research:  A consumer does research on products and solutions.
• Search:  The consumer searches the web for product.
• Transaction: The experience the consumer has when they purchase online.
• Use: Determine how the product is used.
• End of Life: What happens when the consumer is finished using the product.

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According to a recent article, “Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix. The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms… Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs.” Read more

Rearden Commerce has just added some semantic know-how to their arsenal with the hiring of Adam Pease, a scientist with over a decade of experience in semantic technologies. Rearden, a “next-generation eCommerce platform company” brought on Pease as their Senior Applied Scientist with the responsibility of leading Rearden’s “semantic technology and formal reasoning practices and technologies.” Read more