Blackberry president and CEO Thorsten Heins with new global creative director Alicia Keys.

The new and long-awaited Blackberry 10 line from Research In Motion (RIM) makes its debut today. The company that once defined the smart phone market has a lot riding on it, and it remains to be seen if the new models debuting today will revive its fortunes. It’s already revived its name: Thorsten Heins, President and CEO, revealed at the launch today that “from this day forward, RIM becomes Blackberry.”

The two models that kick off its re-engineered approach to mobile computing are the Blackberry Q10 with a hybrid touch-screen/keyboard and the Z10 with a full touch-screen and onscreen keyboard, powered by the Blackberry 10 platform. Of the Q10, Heins said, “We built this for all those people who told us, ‘we just have to have a physical keyboard typing experience’.” Given Blackberry users’ well-known attachment to traditional keyboards, getting the onscreen keyboard right is going to be a big concern for tried-and-true Blackberry users.

As on the Blackberry Playbook before it, SwiftKey – the best-selling Android app of 2012— is reportedly behind the virtual keyboard technology on the new models. Though that vendor wasn’t named in the launch presentation during the demo of the touch-screen keyboard capabilities, the features Blackberry demonstrated pointed to the company’s leveraging the cross-platform SwiftKey software development kit for at least some of the new devices’ capabilities.

And what’s behind SwiftKey is natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technology to speed up touch-screen typing.

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Singly, which has as its mission connecting people more closely with their data everywhere it lives, now is opening up the beta of its development platform to help developers create the apps that can make that happen.

As co-founder and CEO Jason Cavnar describes Singly’s work, “it is an app fabric product” that gives developers a way to build applications without having to worry about making all the different connection points into the other applications they want their products to talk to. “That’s handled as a service for them. Like Amazon Web Services is for the infrastructure layer, we would like to be a trusted partner in the data layer,” he says.

“It’s really about a person’s life and experiences – sharing that wherever it is in other applications into a new one and that new one generating things to share back out,” says fellow co-founder and CTO Jeremie Miller, who invented Jabber/XMPP technologies and was the primary developer of jabberd 1.0, the first XMPP server. APIs are prominent in Singly’s approach to unlocking that data, but Miller sees some parallels between its own mission and that of the semantic web – a concept whose potential he’s always been excited about, he says, but which he doesn’t think has caught on as he’d hoped.

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Heading into the Labor Day weekend, Wolfram|Alpha released a new feature that lets users perform personal analytics with Facebook data, for free. Users can head here and type in “Facebook Report” for an analysis of their Facebook data.

Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the computational knowledge engine, alerted the world to the news in this blog post. “When you type “facebook report,” Wolfram|Alpha generates a pretty seriously long report—almost a small book about you, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc.,” he writes.

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Daniel Tunkelang, principal data scientist at LinkedIn has shared the slides from his SemTechBiz SF presentation: Scale, Structure, and Semantics. He prefaces the presentation, “[Friday] morning I had the pleasure to present a keynote address at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz). I’ve had a long and warm relationship with the semantic technology community — especially with Marco Neumann and the New York Semantic Web Meetup. But I’m not exactly a fanboy of the semantic web, and I wasn’t sure how the audience would respond to some of my more provocative assertions. Fortunately the reception was very positive. Several people approached me afterwards to thank me for presenting a balanced argument for combining big data with structured representations and for raising HCIR issues.” Read more

Daniel Tunkelang, Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn, delivered the final keynote at SemTechBiz in San Francisco this morning, exploring the way in which “semantics emerge when we apply the right analytical techniques to a sufficient quality and quantity of data.”

Daniel began by offering his key takeaways for the presentation;

• Communication trumps knowledge representation.
• Communication is the problem and the solution. Read more

On Friday, April 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about various approaches to building semantic systems, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Daniel Tunkelang, Principal Data Scientist, LinkedIn. Daniel — who will deliver a keynote address at the June Semantic Technology & Business Conference — shared insights gained over many years working at LinkedIn, Endeca, and Google, and IBM among others.
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In a recent interview Daniel Tunkelang, the principal data scientist at LinkedIn shared his thoughts on what a data scientist is. Tunkelang said, “I’m a big fan of Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bit.ly, so I’ll cite her definition: a data scientist is someone who can obtain, scrub, explore, model and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics and machine learning. Data scientists not only are adept at working with data, but appreciate data itself as a first-class product. At LinkedIn, products pioneered by data scientists, such as People You May Know, harness the power of data to create value for users.” Read more

Dan Verhaeghe recently gave a less than glowing review to Google+’s social media aggregation feature, Sparks: “While Techvibes’ Knowlton Thomas reported that Google + reached 10 million users in 16 days, let’s not jump the gun and call Google’s latest foray into social media a smashing success yet. I wasn’t impressed by Google Sparks, a feature released in Google+, which shows results based on keywords that you search, but the depth of the results are terrible, and not remotely comparable to Google News. Matthew Ingram, beat writer at Gigaom says that one part of the future of media certainly is aggregation, but realistically, it’s already here and has been for quite some time.” Read more

We recently reported on a growing start-up known as Klout, a service that uses ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of social media content to determine a user’s level of influence on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. A new article reports that the social marketing platform Involver is partnering with Klout “allow brands to interact with and reward their fans on Facebook based on their Klout score. Basically, Involver allows brands to create a Klout widget on their Facebook page that engages users to measure their Klout score. Brands can then see which of their users have the most influence on Facebook and the social web, and reward users for signing-up and/or interacting with the brand. And brands can see which fans have Klout in their particular product area.” Read more

According to a recent article, “Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter and Facebook, is expanding its product today with the addition of LinkedIn. With the launch of Klout scoring for LinkedIn, you’ll be able to add your LinkedIn account to your Klout score and see your influence on the professional social network network itself… Klout evaluates users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks. On Twitter, Klout’s influence score is based on a user’s ability to drive action through Tweets, Retweets and more. On Facebook, Klout will examine how conversations and content generate interest and engagement, via likes, comments, and more, from the network’s nearly 700 million users.” Read more