Today sees the launch of Meritora, the first commercial implementation of the universal payment standard PaySwarm (initially discussed in this blog here and here). The creation of Digital Bazaar, the company founded and CEO’d by Manu Sporny – whose W3C credentials include being founder of both the Web Payments Community Group and JSON-LD Community Group, as well as chair of the RDF Web Applications Working Group – Meritora is designed to ease what is still a surprisingly arduous task of buying and selling on the web. The service is starting with a simple asset hosting feature for helping vendors sell digital content on WordPress-powered sites, and support for decentralized web app stores so that app creators can put their work on their web sites, set a price for them, and let them be bought there, at a web app store, or anywhere on the web.

The name Meritora points to the service’s underlying purpose of rewarding greatness, coming from the bases ‘merit’ and ‘ora,’ the latter of which has been used across a number of cultures to express a unit of value, Sporny says (noting that it means ‘golden’ in Esperanto, and was also used as a unit of currency among Anglo-Saxons). That’s a big name to live up to, but the service hopes to do so by making Web payments work simply, securely, quickly, with low fees and no vendor lock-in for buyers and sellers on the digital content scene.

There’s Linked Data to thank for what Meritora, and PaySwarm, can do, with Sporny describing the system as “the world’s first payment solution where the core of the technology is powered by Linked Data.”

Read more

Arkami™, Inc. today announced new members to the Advisory Board (list below) to provide valuable perspective on the introduction of myIDkey™, the industry’s first biometric fingerprint, Bluetooth wireless / USB key. Building off the successful Kickstarter launch, the board brings strategic counsel to the executive team in the areas of business development, market trends and technology leadership as the product gets set to launch later this year. Read more

This week saw a tweet from @bottlenoseapp that the petition to keep the Twitter ecosystem open has moved past the 500-signature goal. Bottlenose, the service co-founded by Nova Spivack, who created the petition and tweeted the same, uses natural language processing, semantic classification, sentiment analytics and trend detection to give users insight into the social stream in real-time (see this story for news on its most recent update).

Bottlenose integrates with Twitter via its API, just as do many other services and apps that need to post data to and get data from Twitter – whether they are semantic in nature or not. So, Twitter’s move earlier this summer that appeared to be imposing restrictions on how third party developers use its API, in the name of delivering a more consistent Twitter consumption experience, is an understandable concern.

Read more

Facebook IPO not panning out for you? Well, there are other opportunities out there where you can get in on the ground floor for a lot less.

Take a Kickstarter project dubbed Gooey Search – it’s trying to get funding of at least $125,000 by June 8 for its consumer-facing technology, based on latent semantic analysis (LSA). It has as its goal delivering the best and most accurate Google search results in what it calls a Gooey Graph real-time diagram of discovered network concepts, while keeping user privacy intact.

With the recent announcement of Google’s Knowledge Graph, do we need another way to probe the leading search engine? Ed Heinbockel, founder, president and CEO of Visual Purple, is betting we do. “To me [what Google’s done] validates the approach we’ve gone down in terms of visualizing and letting you navigate search. It’s the same direction. The question is can we provide value to that equation,” he says.

Where he sees the opportunity: “What drives us a lot is that we’re very concerned about the direction that privacy and the Internet are going,” he says. “And we think the quality of the results they give back to users isn’t in the order it should be.”

Read more

If there’s one thing the Semantic Web arena is full of, it is start-ups. In fact, the slew of creative and innovative ideas out there coming from young companies is one of the reasons for the first Start-Up Competition to be held at the Semantic Tech & Business conference in San Francisco this June.

If you fit the bill and haven’t checked out this opportunity, you should, right this way. Are more opportunities waiting in the wings for entrepreneurs? Yesterday Congress sent the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business) Act bill to President Obama for his signature. Once he signs it – and the White House has said that is the intention – entrepreneurs no longer will be prohibited from advertising their intentions to raise funds for their companies to investors, because the Act abolishes the general solicitation ban. As reported by The Washington Post, “the bill also establishes a framework for crowdfunding — which enables small companies to solicit equity capital from myriad small-dollar investors.”

What’s the reaction from some members of the Semantic Web community?

Read more

Are you starting to feel like there’s no real winning investment strategies these days, at least for the average investor? Make some gains one month, only to lose them all the next.

Well, maybe it’s time to invest a little something in efforts that might not pay you back in dollars, but in online badges, acknowledgement of your contributions or donations, maybe even in a chance to provide input into a solution that can advance semantic web, Linked Data, or discovery technologies? Or maybe the ROI is just about feeling that you did something good.

Recently we wrote about Sebastian Trüg’s fundraiser to keep the Nepomuk semantic desktop alive, for example, which this month reached its 9000€ initial goal (though he’s still in search of long-term funding). Turns out there are – or recently have been – other opportunities to put some of your pocket change to work for a smarter and more meaningful web of data. Projects on Kickstarter.com, for instance, run the gamut from fashion ($1 to fund chic 3D glasses), to theatre (you can help launch the LA production of Spring Awakening for $10 or more), to technology.

Kickstarter builds itself as the world’s largest funding platform for great projects, and whiling away the late-night hours wandering through the crowd-funding forum, it surprised me to learn that among its successfully funded projects were efforts including hypothes.is, the brainchild of online travel industry pioneer Dan Whaley. This is described as “a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.”

Read more

Yesterday, we ran Part I of our conversation with Manu Sporny, CEO of Digital Bazaar, about Payswarm, a new type of micropayment standard for the web. Today, we dive a bit deeper into the process of how Payswarm is being developed as a Semantic Web based standard rather than a proprietary technology.

SW: Tell us a bit about the choice to create PaySwarm as a standards project.
MS: The answer lies somewhere in a lack of open, patent- and royalty-free standards for online payments. Filling out your credit card information on every site you want to support is not the answer. Neither is signing up to a proprietary payment service. What we need are open standards for payment on the Web – once that is in place, we can look forward to an explosion in innovative start-ups centered around finance and crowd-sourced funding. We can also look forward to more individuals being enabled to make a living via the Web which, given this incredibly deep recession, will have a very positive impact on a number of people’s lives.

Read more

Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO of Digital Bazaar, Inc., sat down with SemanticWeb.com to discuss Payswarm, a new standard that he is working on through a W3C Community Group. This article is Part 1 of 2.

SemanticWeb.com: What is PaySwarm?
Manu Sporny: It is a universal payment standard designed specifically for the Web. Think “an open source PayPal on steroids” – an open, patent and royalty free specification for Web Payments. The goal of PaySwarm is to make crowd-funding, world-changing ideas, buying and selling online as easy as sending an e-mail or an instant message. We want payment to be baked into the core of the Web so that exciting new companies can be launched on top of this truly open payment platform.

We want to enable anybody in the world to launch a PayPal, KickStarter, or Kiva. Think of what the Web did for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo. We think PaySwarm can do that for the next generation of start-ups that want to transform the way we reward each other on the Web. Improving the way we organize financial resources to enhance our personal lives and pursue endeavors that improve upon the human condition is at the core of what we’re doing.
Read more