The coolest thing at the 109^th International American Toy Fair in New York City this week might have been the Lazer Tag Blaster or the World of Warcraft version of Monopoly. Or, for semantic tech aficionados, it would have been Uma’s semantic Skin multitouch display installation. Even the Power Rangers were getting into it (see photo).

Here is the marriage of semantic technology with interactive signage and multi-touch displays, RFID technology, Intel’s Audience Impression Metrics suite, and social media integration. It is, as Christian Doegl, founder and CEO of uma, an example “where semantics gets tangible.”  And touchable by everyone.

For the Toy Fair, Uma got access to the exhibitor database, itself complete with structured metadata such as company name, location on the floor, and Twitter handle. “From this we can build up a semantic database connecting all different databases to the system,” says Doegl.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

The 2009 Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) took place June 14-18, 2009 in San Jose, California. SemTech is produced by Semantic Universe and brings together the entire marketplace of semantic technology vendors, developers, researchers, start-ups, investors and customers. Here is a small sample of the hundreds of companies who signed up to attend:

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MODERATOR:
Steve Bastasini, Cerebra

PANELISTS:
Eghosa Omoigui, Intel Capital
Peter Rip, Crosslink Capital
Michael S. Dunn, Hearst Interactive Media
Shawn Carolan, Menlo Ventures

After a period of caution about the viability of semantic technologies, investors seem more willing to fund semantic start-ups right now. And even with the economy in distress, semantics is managing to create excitement amongst the VCs. Semantic search has been hot for a couple of years – the possibility of finding the next Google being just too enticing – but the focus seems now to be shifting to enterprise and consumer apps where as Jim Hendler famously said "a little semantics goes a long way." Money is going into enterprise software, such as business intelligence tools, and innovative consumer apps based around social networks, smarter information filtering and productivity enhancement.

So what do the VCs want to see in the business plans for semantic start-ups now? Are there still plenty of good opportunities out there for entrepreneurs or have the best ideas already claimed their share of available capital?

Panel: Venture Capital Outlook from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

Executive Summary

We have used a sophisticated array of AI/Machine Learning systems in combination with statistical methods, background knowledge and expert defined rules engines, to create, entirely automatically, a structured database with high quality information. The example we have produced contains structured company records and fields for over 2 million IT and telecoms companies using data taken from their websites.

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