Sunday night’s the big stroll down the red carpet for Hollywood’s elite — for the 85th time. But no need to wait until then to have some fun with old Oscar.

Some services with semantics and sentiment analytics in their genes have already begun. Here are a few examples:

Jinni, the semantic movie and TV Taste engine, has created a detail-filled graphic, based on analysis and cross-referencing it did according to its own Jinni Entertainment Genome (see its blog post here for a look at the entire graphic and more info on its creation):

Read more

Michael Grotticelli of Broadcast Engineering reports, “Jinni, the maker of a new kind of ‘semantic’ video guide that spans television, tablets, smart phones and the Web, has signed content distributors Time Warner Cable and Vudu among seven new licensees on four continents. It replaces old grid-style video guides with a new intuitive, personalized user experience. The company’s new “natural language understanding” (NLU) discovery engine supports voice-activated video guides that understand natural human language. The Jinni NLU engine leverages the company’s ‘Entertainment Genome’ to interpret natural human speech and derives the underlying meaning to enable intuitive interaction between users and their TVs.” Read more

According to an article out of the company, Jinni launched a “radically new NLU (natural language understanding) discovery engine to power the first voice-activated video guides that understand natural human language. Until now, the voice-activated TV experience was limited to basic commands because that was all the guide could process. The Jinni NLU engine leverages the company’s unique Entertainment Genome™ to interpret natural human speech and derive the underlying meaning to enable rich, intuitive interaction between users and their TVs.  Now users will be able to simply tell their TV what they are in the mood to watch and Jinni will find the most fitting content from live TV, VOD and any other available video catalog.” Read more

Photo credit: Flickr/Erwiss, peace&love

It’s that spooky time of year again. With a happy Halloween to all, we present a selection of Halloween entertainment to dive into between answering the door for trick-or-treaters, or whenever you might like to have a little scarefest. They all come courtesy of searches done on some of the web’s semantically-enabled platforms.

Movies, from Jinni.com:

A search on Jinni, the semantic movie and TV “taste engine” that we first covered here, for “serial killer” theme, set in the 20^th century in small towns, brings up some classics in the list of 41 that’s displayed, as well as some you may have missed when originally shown in theatres. Some in the list:

Halloween (of course): The 1978 John Carpenter-directed classic that started Jamie Lee Curtis on her fright-girl career (long before the yogurt days).  As a line in the summary says, the film “turned the slasher movie into a viable, successful genre. Halloween has been copied, parodied and even turned into a franchise of its own, but the original is still considered the best of the bunch.”

Read more

Prisa TV, a leading Spanish pay-TV operator, has partnered with Jinni. According to the article, “Prisa TV, the company behind CANAL+ SPAIN, is the third major European television network to offer its subscribers this unique semantic-based user experience powered by Jinni for TV viewing within the household. Pablo Romero Sulla, Director of Content at CANAL+ YOMVI (the CANAL+ online environment, providing live broadcast and VOD streaming), stated ‘Our goal is to offer our subscribers the best possible experience available. When we decided to further enhance our service by adding new discovery and recommendation capabilities, we decided to offer a whole new entertainment experience, as provided by Jinni’.” Read more

Jinni, the semantic television discovery engine, recently teamed up with Swisscom “for integration into On Demand and live TV. The Swisscom service will offer its customers an intuitive, user-centric guide to seamlessly integrate discovery, content recommendations and viewing. ‘The shift to on demand TV is fueling innovation in delivery and discovery solutions,’ said Jinni CEO and Co-founder Yosi Glick. ‘Swisscom continues to lead at the forefront of this rapidly developing market and Jinni is proud to partner with Swisscom to deliver semantic video discovery solutions across the impressive Swisscom content catalogs’.” Read more

Jinni, a company that we have covered here, has released its first set-top-box for personalization of real-time television. The article states, “Introduced progressively by European IPTV operator (Belgacom), starting June 19th, this enables the subscribers to benefit from a complete cross-platform content consumption experience. Belgacom partnered with Jinni in September 2010 and took part in the startup’s second round of funding, in early 2011. The already available platforms include an online service, mobile app and Connected TV app, all powered by the Jinni engine. The Jinni cross-platform experience is part of Belgacom’s hard-hitting strategy, aimed at maintaining competitive advantage by offering a superior service to its customers.” Read more

A new article reports, “Microsoft has announced a deal with Israeli movie startup Jinni, licensing its semantic discovery technology to bring personalised recommendations for films and television shows to its varying array of desktop, mobile and gaming devices. The Redmond-based software giant is quiet on the details but it is likely it will use Jinni’s Discovery Engine and Entertainment Genome to help classify databases of television shows and films, sorting them into mood, plot and style to allow for easy discovery on a variety of Windows devices.” Read more

A recent article reports, “mgMEDIA, developers of multi-device digital content distribution platform Open4Content and Jinni, innovators of the only taste-and-mood based discovery engine for movies and TV shows, today announced a new strategic partnership to deliver a fun, intuitive and highly accurate Jinni semantic discovery experience. The Jinni discovery engine will be built in to the core of mgMEDIA’s over-the-top platform, Open4Content. Users will enjoy finding and viewing high-quality entertainment that suits their personal tastes and moods anytime, anywhere.” Read more

2010 ended on a down note for VC funds. Word came this week that 2010 represented the fourth consecutive year of declines and the slowest annual period for venture capital fundraising since 2003, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

The silver lining, the NVCA said, is that downsizing of the venture industry has positive implications for investors and entrepreneurs.  “An agile venture capital model likely translates into more capital efficient and fewer duplicative deals in the IT arena,” said its president, Mark Heesen in a release, adding, “The most innovative and efficient companies will continue to be funded by the venture community.”

That must be happy news for semantic web movie and TV “taste engine” Jinni. 2011 started out on a good note for the site, with its announcement that it closed a series B funding round for $5 million. The round was led by two strategic investors: Belgacom – Belgium’s leading telco – and an undisclosed Tier-1 connected-TV manufacturer. Jinni’s service enables Belgacom to offer its customers personalized movie recommendations and discovery, on TV, mobile and web platforms. Venture capital firm DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures (which previously led Jinni’s Round A funding) also participated.

Read more