Last week speculation reigned about whether Google had set its sites on computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha, with the announcement that the search engine now is using WebGL technology for enhancing users’ ability to interact with complex, compound math functions. The search giant in December added 2-D graphing to its delivery of computed answers for calculations typed into its search box, and the most recent update means users now can plot and manipulate 3D graphs.

In addition to Google just wanting to own as much of search as possible – and increasingly to want to be a more semantically-enabled answer engine for user queries – discussion pointed to the fact that Wolfram Alpha is integrated with Apple’s Siri technology to help deliver factual answers to iPhone  user queries. And Google itself reportedly is working on a Siri rival in a project code-named Majel that potentially could one-up Siri when it comes to delivering answers to requested information. Not to mention the recently publicized – and both lauded and lampooned – Project Glass, which has been described here as Google’s Siri for your eyes. (See the video here.) As of February, according to the NY Times, Siri accounted for 25 percent of all searches made on WolframAlpha.

WolframAlpha decided to make some more news of its own yesterday, following an already busy first quarter that saw, among other things, the launch of Wolfram Alpha Pro, a fee-based service that lets users compute with their own data, get dynamic versions of existing Wolfram|Alpha output, and download what WolframAlpha computes as data.

Now it’s added to its repertoire a feature that provides some computational insights into the work of the immortal Bard.

Read more

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 !

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.

iAlbums Alpha has launched utilizing a proprietary semantic curation engine. The article states, “iAlbums is the first major development in on-device music players since the launch of the iPod. A free application in the iPhone app store, iAlbums’ patent pending semantic engine analyzes the music already existing on one’s iPhone or iPod touch and gathers the most relevant and exciting information from over 20 different sources across the web. This content (videos, artwork, photos, artist quotes, lyrics, tweets and more) streams seamlessly into an easy to use feed on the user’s player, providing an all encompassing music experience in an interactive app that enhances the existing music files in their mobile libraries.” Read more

The Open Graph protocol continues to progress: Earlier this week Facebook’s Director of Developer Relations Douglas Purdy talked about its intersection with the mobile web.

According to Purdy, more people are accessing Facebook on the mobile web than from its top native apps combined, and the game is on to help developers conquer the challenges of building for that community. One of those challenges is app discovery. At the Mobile World Congress on Monday, the company announced that it’s continuing to address the first issue with plans to extend to native Android apps the ability for Facebook’s 425 million mobile app users to discover them through Open Graph connections.

Read more

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.

Read more

Zite, the personalized news magazine app for the iPad, adds an iPhone version of its application to the lineup today. The company, which we wrote about here and which was acquired this summer by CNN, has focused on making the semantically-intelligent app fit the smaller-size format of the smartphone, with one-thumb navigation, vertical story and left-to-right category view flow, and a focus on the facts of story name, title and source , rather than snippets, as starter views.

CEO Mark Johnson says a prerequisite for the iPhone app was its release of Sybil technology in late October, which allowed Zite to have multiple profiles that adapt to the reader’s preference. This made it possible to share the Zite app on a family’s sole iPad without messing up individuals’ preferences. It comes in handy for the new smartphone app because, “if you did all this work on your iPad training this very intelligent AI, you don’t want to lose that when you go to the iPhone,” Johnson says.

Johnson expects the iPhone app to appeal to existing iPad users. “Personalization is really addictive. Once you have it one place, you want it everywhere,” he says

Read more

The popular news app, News360 has released a new version for iPhone and Android smartphones. The version 2.0 release “introduces News360′s sophisticated content personalization technology to the smartphone experience. With permission, News360 analyzes a user’s activity across social and Web services like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Evernote and Google Reader to build a unique interest graph and uncover persistent reading interests and underlying topic areas.” Read more

After a very, very long appetizer course, Apple got down to the main entrée with today’s long-expected announcement of the Siri assistant  Well over an hour into an event that trod over some well-covered ground from the Mac to the iPod Touch, the audience got its look at Siri on the new iPhone 4S.

By now you’ve heard the rumors and the reality: Apple’s acquisition of Siri a couple of years ago has worked itself into the latest iPhone as a voice-activated “humble personal assistant” which can do everything at your voice request, from pulling up the article on Wikipedia about Neil Armstrong to calculating the number of days until Christmas to telling you what time it is in Paris to reminding you to call your spouse before you leave work to text-messaging a lunch appointment request to the person you’ve defined in the message, without having to confirm the recipient before transmission.

Its natural language expertise and other semantic underpinnings, and some help from functionality like GPS, also mean that it knows to provide you with a map and route when you ask how to get home, or know that you want to see things like the NASDAQ composite when you ask how NASDAQ is doing today.

Read more

A new article reports, “Perhaps the biggest announcement at Apple’s iPhone event (about one hour from this posting) will be Assistant, Apple’s evolution of the Siri Personal Assistant Software. Siri, you’ll remember, is the company Apple picked up for a rumored $200 million in April of last year for, in Steve Jobs’ words, its “Artificial Intelligence”, not search or speech recognition.”

Before Apple bought the company, Siri described itself as a Virtual Personal Assistant Read more

A few short years ago, a group of semantic technology companies rode a wave of venture capital and inflated expectation. They were going to change the world. They were going to bring semantic technologies to the mainstream. They were going to make people very rich. They were the must-have keynotes of the conference circuit. And then, one by one, they disappeared. Powerset vanished inside Microsoft, to do something for Bing. Twine vanished inside Evri, amid rumours of a fire sale and investors covering their backs. Freebase vanished inside Google, and bits of Freebase DNA routinely pop up across Google’s sprawling empire. And Siri vanished inside Apple, as we scrambled to understand whether the Cupertino money machine was after semantic smarts or ‘just’ speech recognition technology. Now, though, the rumours suggest that Siri may be back, and that it’s going to be the thing that makes the next iPhone a compelling buy. Read more