Dusten Carlson of SocialNewsDaily reports, “Gamer social startup gamesGRABR has been selected as an alternate finalist in the Entertainment and Gaming Technologies category of this year’s SXSW Accelerator competition… gamesGRABR is a social network created for both casual and hardcore gamers, and is dedicated to gaming culture. The network is built around direct links to retail goods as well. Think of it as Pinterest-meets-Amazon for gamers… Over 500 companies submitted to present at the marquee event for SXSW Interactive Festival’s Startup Village, which hosts 56 finalists showcasing some of the best new tech innovations to a panel of hand-picked judges and a live audience.” Read more

Photo courtesy: Flickr/Katsuma

There’s more than one issue in getting organizational buy-in for semantic web technologies. In addition to convincing the business of the technical merits, it’s also important to address the social challenges. Speaking about the topic this week at the Semantic Tech and Business Conference in London is Dr. Elena Simperl, Assistant Professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology at the Institute AIFG.

“When IT people think of semantic technologies, when developers or researchers think about them, we think about how to do things in an automated way,” says Simperl. “But there are certain types of tasks where you can achieve only that much using automatic techniques.” That includes those having to do with modeling and structuring knowledge in a certain way, for instance, or describing the aboutness or content of pictures.

So, how about appealing to something that they probably like a lot more than simply being asked to, say, annotate some documents? How about coaxing them to do so by appealing to their sense of play and even their ego?

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