Bing, a division of Microsoft, is looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer in Bellevue, WA. The post states, “We are looking for a Senior SDE to join us in developing a structured data repository that will enable Bing teams to quickly experiment and manage structured data in a multitude of formats and schemas. Write, validate and deploy distributed software and tools that will scale to multiple partners and process large amounts of data. Example challenges include: managing storage of large numbers of structured data entities, enable incremental updates for a connected graph of entities, managing the set of entities and their relationships while being able to efficiently extract a group of entities from a repository. Injesting structured data defined in a variety of formats and schemas and making it usable for publishing to the web index, and developing a rich meta-data repository of structured data feeds and schemas.” Read more

In a move to improve their social analytics capabilities, Microsoft has acquired Netbreeze, a company we have highlighted in the past. Bob Stutz of Microsoft reports, “If you have a brand to protect, a product or a service to sell, then you cannot afford to overlook the wealth of information that is now available to you via social media… That’s why, fast on the heels of our MarketingPilot announcement, I am happy to share the news with you about another acquisition—this time in the social listening and analytics space.  When Microsoft considers an acquisition, we look for leading edge technology companies with innovative IP that aligns with our technology and can scale for the enterprise; this is what we were fortunate enough to find with Netbreeze.  A dynamic Swiss company started by some incredibly talented analytics scientists that we enthusiastically welcome to the Microsoft family.” Read more

According to Charles Arthur of the Guardian, Microsoft has obtained a patent for augmented reality glasses, and the possibilities for semantic technology to be incorporated are endless. Arthur writes, “Microsoft has been given a patent on ‘augmented reality’ (AR) glasses that would enhance sports and other live events with streams of information beamed directly in front of the user – even including action replays and lyrics of songs. The move means that it could soon join Google in offering AR systems for widespread use, after the search giant unveiled its own Google Glass project earlier this year, intended to be used all the time as the user goes about their daily life.” Read more

Mark Sullivan of PC World recently posed the question, why doesn’t Microsoft have an answer to Siri built into Windows 8? He writes, “Windows 8 is supposed to be Microsoft’s majestic OS reseta dramatic overhaul designed to usher the Windows platform into the age of mobility. And Windows 8 is also Microsoft’s bid to achieve feature parity with iOS and Android, the other two OS powerhouses in the mobile universe. But one key feature–one hot, relevant, rock-star-caliber feature–is conspicuously absent from the Windows 8 repertoire: Intelligent, semantically aware voice control is nowhere to be found in the new OS.” Read more

Text and sentiment analytics for the masses. That could be a tagline for Semantria, which lets users put the technology to work in a pay-as-you-go cloud model. Not only that, but it lets customers deploy a plug-in to run analytics of unstructured content, extracting entities, themes, sentiment, categories, summaries, facets, and relationships, in one of the world’s most common user environments: Microsoft Excel.

More is on the way, too. This December should see the unveiling of a partnership with an as-yet-unnamed vendor to expand the applications with which its platform is compatible. That partner already offers data integrations with 300 applications; when Semantria becomes the 301^st, users will be able to universally and bi-directionally talk to the hundreds of other applications without having to do any integration work on their own.

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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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Schema.org has announced that GoodRelations is now fully integrated into the markup vocabulary backed by Google, Yahoo!, Bing/Microsoft, and Yandex (read our past schema.org coverage). GoodRelations is the e-commerce vocabulary that has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 (previous coverage).

In the official announcement, R.V. Guha (Google) says, “Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features.”

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Image Courtesy; Flickr/Sean MacEntee

When it comes to social CRM, it’s a world of semantics, and text and sentiment analytics.

Recently Gartner released its Magic Quadrant report on the space, and a reading of it makes it pretty clear that the category, which the research group defines as “a business strategy that generates opportunities for sales, marketing and customer service, while also benefiting online communities,” demands such intelligence.

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What do you get when you mix two parts natural language processing with a little personalization, and add in a dash of the cloud? The answer is Whisk, a U.K. company building a service that lets users purchase the ingredients for any recipe they find on the Internet.

“The crux of it is that you can take any recipe on the ‘Net and turn it into a transaction in on online market,” says co-founder Craig Edmunds. “There’s a machine translation problem from the recipe up through to our internal language, which is one NLP problem, and then another is from our internal language into online markets.” Another leg of the work is that the service seeks to not match to just one item at a market but as many as possible, and consider user preferences as to which is the optimal product, too.

At the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in the U.K., Edmunds will be considering how the issues of machine translation, manual intervention, personalization and the cloud intersect in creating a service that adds all the ingredients they need for dishes they find online straight into their online shopping basket.

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What are employees really feeling? For the business that dares to find out, the Yammer enterprise social network is offering a way to gain some insight into their sentiment. But the bigger question may be whether potential business customers really do care to know.

Yammer, recently acquired by Microsoft, is hooking up with Kanjoya to bring to enterprise social networks data on employee attitudes and perceptions based on their online conversations. An enterprise social network aims to bring to the corporate sphere what Facebook does to the consumer space: It creates community.

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