Search engine Yandex, which like Google, Bing and Yahoo takes advantage of sites using schema.org markup to improve the display of search results, today released a search app for the iPad. The other major search providers have already accounted for the iPad in their search portfolios.

According to the release announcing the news, the Yandex Search App offers a tablet-optimized, intuitive interface marked by the ability for users to open pages as tabs in a browser – as many as they wish – so they can switch between tabs and search results within one screen.

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According to a new article out of the company, “Trapit, the AI-powered, personalized discovery engine, today announced the release of Trapit for iPad, version 1.3. Following the successful launch of Trapit for iPad in July, as well as the deployment of the Trapit Platform in late September, the company is continuing momentum with updates and improvements to their highly-personalized content discovery iPad app. The updated app offers a number of new features and integrations, including two significant partnerships that will provide an improved user experience.” Read more

It’s been a big week for news, especially on the East Coast, where Hurricane Sandy punched hard. Add to that the U.S. presidential elections, the fighting in Syria, and the World Series win by the San Francisco Giants.

For those fortunate enough to have a charged iPad, or access to a power outlet (easier said than done in some parts of the country in the wake of the hurricane), a semantically-enabled application aims to bring the news videos that matter to those devices.

Link TV, which had a role in the ViewChange.org project that The Semantic Web Blog covered here, already offers up Link News, a site for global news and documentaries, that also relies on semantic technology to offer a portal to news from around the world. This week, it unveiled the LinkTV World News App for iPad that pulls top world news selected by editors from more than 125 video news outlets worldwide.

Announcing the app, Paul Mason, who became the company’s president and CEO last year (see our coverage here), said,  ”The LinkTV World News app does the heavy lifting so users don’t have to. A team of seasoned journalists using the best semantic ‘smart search’ technology sifts through thousands of newscasts and raw videos to bring people the stories that matter most.”

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News360 today launches a redesigned version of its semantically-enabled news discovery application for the iPad. In the works for some eight months, the company’s goal has been to further its vision of building an AI assistant that understands what someone is interested in and how he consumes different types of news, to make ever-more solid personalized recommendations of content.

Personalization capabilities in the update last August of the service (which we first discussed here) followed an approach that worked best for people who knew what they wanted, according to Roman Karachinsky, CEO, News360. “Most people don’t want to spend time switching between categories and configuring things,” he says. “They wanted something more simple, so we focused on that.”

Before personalizing things further with Facebook and Twitter analysis of profiles, likes, demographics and social graph activity for more suggestions, there now are a host of sections from which users can easily select their interests – more than 1 million different things they can follow, from companies to topics to people to brands. There’s a new Good News section for getting your optimism on, and one on zombies, too.

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Siri’s got more company: LG Electronics Quick Voice is scheduled to make its appearance on the LG Optimus Vu Android smart phones at the end of the month. Now there are three voice-enabled mobile personal assistants, including the Samsung S Voice on the Galaxy SIII Android smartphones.

Or maybe make that four? Microsoft and Audible have teamed up: Microsoft demonstrated some of the results on the Windows Phone 8 platform at its Windows Phone Developer Summit yesterday. It showcased the capability for developers to integrate speech response and recognition directly into software programs through APIs, so that users can have interactive voice conversations with their applications.

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Yesterday The Semantic Web Blog discussed how personalized mobile assistance came up on the lists of a bright future in the eyes of semantic web experts (see here). Sharing that vision is the team at Vital.AI, the NYC-startup founded by Marc Hadfield.  Its Thrive.AI app, also a contender at SemTech’s Startup Competition, is a personalized semantic shopping agent for the iPad, but the underlying Vital.AI platform on which it is built provides an integrated suite of components for a variety of knowledge-centric, intelligence-rich, Big Data-driven applications.

The e-commerce agent, Hadfield told attendees at SemTech in San Francisco last week, was the company’s own foray into figuring out what it needed to add to the platform to make it easier to build apps that bring semantic technologies and Big Data together.

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Clark & Parsia’s Stardog lightweight RDF database is moving into release candidate 1.0 mode just in time for next week’s upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco next week. The product’s been stable and useable for awhile now, but a 1.0 nomenclature still carries weight with a good number of IT buyers.

The focus for the product, says cofounder and managing principal Kendall Clark, is to be optimized for what he says is the fat part of the market – and that’s not the part that is dealing with a trillion RDF triples. “Most people and organizations don’t need to scale to trillions of anything,” though scaling up, and up, and up, is where most of Clark & Parsia’s competitors have focused their attention, he says. “We’ve seen a significant percentage of what people are doing with semantic technology and most applications are not at a billion triples today.” Take as an example Clark & Parsia’s customer, NASA, which built an expertise location system based on semantic technology that today is still not more than 20 million triples. “You might say that’s a little toy but not if you are at NASA and need defined experts, it is a real, valuable thing and we see this all the time,” he says.

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The latest version of the StreamGlider iPad news reader app for providing consumers with topic-oriented streams of information debuted this week. It brought with it the capability to limit hashtag or keyword searches in a Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr frame to a local area and turn on geo-awareness at the user’s request. But the bigger and more semantic event will be StreamGlider’s upcoming move to the enterprise, with the consumer app serving as a showcase to those potential customers.

StreamGlider CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application that The Semantic Web Blog first covered here and here – says to expect in the enterprise edition a very interesting semantic search/semantic relations engine in the background for correlating up to three data sets of semi-structured, unstructured and structured data. The company already is working with one client on a specific application of the generic technology for its custom needs, and talking to a second customer about a pilot around the idea.

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Siri’s coming to Japan, but not to Apple TV. And, in a limited way, it may have made its way into the iPad, too.

Previous to the Apple event today, there had been speculation that an Apple iTV would be unveiled that reportedly would integrate Siri semantic-enabled voice technology into TV sets for viewers to use to speech-select their program choices. But the Apple TV accessory that was unveiled was, as noted here, an upgrade, not an overhaul, including support for video in 1080p.

Among the new iPad’s big features are its support for next-generation 4G LTE, HSPA+ and dual-channel HSDPA networks, and its retina display: 31 million pixels with resolution of 2048 by 1536 pixels. During the press conference Marketing chief Phil Schiller called it the best mobile display that ever shipped.

Less was made in the online coverage of the event of its inclusion of voice dictation, with a new built-in mike on the virtual keyboard. However, that may be coming courtesy of Siri. Over at 9to5Mac, a January story discussed the finding of an “About Dictation and Privacy” link in the keyboard menu for a beta of iOS 5.1 running on an iPad. When opened it provided the user with the standard legal literature and feature information for Siri Dictation, the report said, and considered that this might indicate that this will be an iPad 3 feature.

What iOS 5.1, which is available for download today, does for sure include is Siri in Japanese for iPhone 4S users. The big question is now, will it have to deal with the Siri brand issue for Japanese speakers that was first raised with the initial roll-out of the intelligent personal assistant? If you don’t recall, the talk then was that Siri in Japanese means buttocks.

Editor’s Note: Here at the Semantic Web Blog we’ve done a lot of coverage of the personalized news mag app space. That includes some in-depth looks into Zite, acquired by CNN in August, such as this article. Most recently, we brought you news of Zite’s iPhone app.

Today, over at Zite’s blog, the company today will run a piece entitled Zite: Under the Hood. It should be of interest to anyone who wants more details about how its technology operates. It goes like this:

Zite: Under the Hood

If you’re already a Zite user, you’ve experienced the delivery of personalized content that is updated every time you open the app. To make that transparent and easy for you, takes a lot of effort. The Zite team brings together decades of software development in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language technologies, and more than six years of product development, to blend and tune the experience for you. In short, Zite works by:

• mining content from your social web
• modeling that content
• modeling the community that interacts with it
• modeling your interests
• matching your interests to the content and your community, to help you discover content you’ll want to see.

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