In the fall Google updated its Google TV platform to Version 3.0, touting features like its new Voice Search. This week, expect to hear about a slew of new products with the technology onboard launching at the CES show in Las Vegas.

Google recently reported on its Google TV blog that new partners added to its Google TV list include Asus, Hisense, and TCL.  LG, Sony, Vizio and others will have refreshes of their set-top boxes, integrated TVs, and IPTV boxes with the latest Google TV platform on board.

Consumers that buy into these offerings also will be increasing their exposure to Google’s Knowledge Graph. The Google TV platform’s advanced voice control for changing channels or finding content of personal interest to watch (live or via Internet streaming), its new programming guide app, and its other smarts deliver results with the help of the vendor’s own Knowledge Graph, according to GIGAOM. With the Knowledge Graph, search queries run against a database of entities and relationships — it’s the search engine’s way of, as Google says, understanding “things, not strings.”

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Two posts here on SemanticWeb.com over the past few days resonated with themes to which I seem to return with increasing frequency. First, Angela Guess pointed to a GigaOM interview with fellow Semantic Link podcaster Andraž Tori, then Jennifer Zaino picked up on the Global Futures Forecast‘s [PDF] enthusiasm for ‘the Semantic Web.’

Andraž is CTO of Zemanta, a company that began life in the small European country of Slovenia before spreading its wings to London and the US. Ever since I first met Andraž and became aware of Zemanta’s usefulness, it has been one of a very small number of tools that — to me — epitomise the real power and usefulness of semantic technologies. There are, of course, plenty of semantic technologies that are better at handling formal classification of data. There are plenty that cope an awful lot better at scale. There are plenty, even, that do a better job of seamlessly and flexibly knitting together facts and assertions from across the web. But Zemanta (and TripIt, my other perennial favourite) don’t make a big issue of their semantic smarts. They don’t — really —make you change your behaviour very much in order to derive benefit. They just help you get something done, quicker, easier, and better than you would have done it without them. TripIt, for example, gets travel arrangements into my calendar (where I need them), faster than I could type them in myself. But that’s just an ancillary benefit of all the other stuff that the site is doing to my travel details on my behalf.

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Earlier this month, I travelled to Silicon Valley to attend O’Reilly Media‘s new conference, Strata. The theme was data — especially ‘Big’ Data — and in amongst the Hadoops and the Cassandras and the BigTables and the Map/Reduces, I was searching for the companies making connections to the semantic technologies routinely discussed by readers of SemanticWeb.com. Disappointingly, direct correlations were hard to find, but there were some glimmers of recognition that may benefit from the community’s attention.

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