Seen anything good on TV lately? If the answer is ‘No,’ then maybe the problem is that you and your TV just aren’t communicating as well as you could be. The same may be said of your experience across other viewing mediums, like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

Veveo wants to change the picture, so to speak. “We want the TV to be as friendly as possible so you and the TV can have a really productive relationship,” says CMO Sam Vasisht. The company, which earlier this month exhibited its Conversational Interface Technology at TV Connect 2013 in London, says there’s a need for a universal interface based on natural language capability, so that people more intuitively can grasp what is available from where in a world of fragmented content sources, including how to better search for that content and manage their viewing experiences with greater speed and ease.

“Voice is probably the most natural way for us to deliver this experience,” says Vasisht. Veveo wants to be the platform that enables service providers and OEMs and video programmers to give their audiences the power of speech. Read more

Zemanta, a semantic service that extracts entities within the text of a publisher’s content and suggests related media, links and tags to add to a work as it’s being written, has launched a content discovery network to complement its suggested recommendations for which authors create original content.

The focus here is on providing editorial control. Publishers can feature content recommendations from their site, other web sites (Zemanta has 300,000 publishers in its network), and advertisers, taking advantage of the option to let Zemanta’s semantic algorithms automatically make those selections for them or to take the manual content selection route. Another option is to blacklist sites that they don’t consider appropriate content sources.

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Did you ever take a survey and wonder if anyone actually was paying attention to your input? Here’s a tip: If it’s more than 20 questions, ignore it, advises Sam Keninger, director of product marketing at customer experience vendor Medallia.

“That’s the old market research way of doing things, and [the resulting big report compiled by market researchers] ends up in a binder on someone’s desk and no one will read it,” he says. A shorter survey – about a page long, and generally with a question about whether you’d recommend the product or service – signifies that attention will be paid.

Why? “The survey is an extension of the customer experience itself, so the shorter it can be the better,” Keninger says. And surveys can be shorter – and more effective at telling the company what it needs to know in real-time – when they can depend more on free-form text responses. They can do that when they can leverage both text and sentiment analytic engines to understand which topics are trending and to identify emerging issues, and ideally route those in real time to the front-lines where workers understand and can take action to fix the underlying problems.

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There’s a new term in town: Participatory mHealth. As defined by Deborah Estrin, Professor of Computer Science at CornellNYC Tech and co-founder of Open mHealth, it “is taking what was previously unmeasured and uncaptured behavior – [things] that were previously ephemeral — and turn that into data.” Such information can be as valuable to treating conditions as is data collected by the instruments and diagnostics tools in formal health care settings, and perhaps can be a more reliable indicator of how a person’s health really is faring than their response to a doctor’s question at exam time. Those answers, after all, can be influenced by so many things – how they’re feeling that morning, for instance, vs. how they’ve generally felt since the last time they spoke to their healthcare provider.

With so many people today in possession of a smart phone with built-in GPS capabilities, there’s a new opportunity to capture so much data about what individuals do – especially those with chronic conditions – as well as the distance parameters related to where they’re doing it, the times they set out for an activity, how they’re feeling at various times during the day, and a whole lot more. “Chronic disease in some ways is the killer app for this kind of mobile health technology,” Estrin noted, since most of the care for dealing with chronic conditions occurs outside the clinical setting.

The capture is the easy part, says Estrin – much of it can be automated or be entered via a simple click, for instance. “The heavy lifting is in the analysis, in fusing and pulling out what is interesting from those data streams,” Estrin told an audience at the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York City on Wednesday.

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What’s on the markup menu for the restaurant industry?

Among the schema.org tags for marking up web pages is one for restaurants, which includes item properties for priceRange, servesCuisine, place, and menu, among others. Restaurants that use the markup language to structure their data are promised search engine optimization (SEO) benefits when hungry consumers want to see what’s on the menu at moderately-priced nearby Italian eateries, for example. They might also or alternately use the GoodRelations ontology for e-commerce to better accommodate search engines, as well as mobile and desktop apps, with service details of hours, payment options, and daily menus that are accessible in up to 50 languages.

OpenMenu has a value proposition around structured data for restaurant owners, too: Providing increased exposure to Internet, mobile and web apps, via what it aims to be a global and open standard for storing, sharing and using their menus over the Internet. The technical details are described at its OpenMenu.org site. Initially launched in 2010, it recently updated the format to Version 1.6 and currently counts about 75,000 menus as part of its landscape – 5,000 of them actively maintained and growing at a couple of thousand a week, according to CEO and founder Chris Hanscom.

Third-party developers can harness the data too, to build applications that interact with menus, like OpenMenu Search, a way for a search engine to drill down through a restaurant’s information to the menu and menu items.

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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.

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The mobile ad space gets more and more interesting. Reports indicate that LinkedIn will be launching mobile advertisements as early as March, based on a statement by CEO Jeff Weiner during its quarterly earnings call that there are plans to monetize page views in “the mobile environment.” How much, if any, of that will be semantic-influenced is unknown, though it’s worth noting that LinkedIn has discussed its use of microformats in the past, such as hCard and hResume, and offered that it would be experimenting with RDF and FoaF.

And Facebook is hip to being in the mobile ad mix, too, acknowledging amid the IPO flurry that a weakness it had was monetizing its mobile user base. The Financial Times reported that it’s been in discussion with ad agencies about displaying sponsored “featured stories” in mobile users’ news feeds as well as to desktop users (see more about that and its intersection with the Open Graph protocol here).

Clearly, mobility matters to online advertising, and to semantically-minded players in the market. NetSeer has been on that bandwagon, for example, mobilizing its concept-based advertising through its relationship with Mobile Theory. Our friends in the Nordic region also have the semantic targeting capabilities that come along with ad serving technology from Emediate, an independent company that’s owned by ad pepper media International and provides web publishers with a system for managing, targeting and forecasting digital ads, including in the mobile space.

Now there’s news today from Twelvefold Media (formerly BuzzLogic) about the launch of Spectrum for Mobile, which takes its online targeting capabilities to the iOS and Android platforms. Spectrum is the company’s system for providing in real-time emotive-based ads by analyzing and understanding the content on individual pages (for further insight into how it works, see this story).

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Got a few things you’re looking to offload on Craigs’ List for some last-minute holiday cash, or perhaps you’re still combing the online ads in search of that special Christmas gift? The EggDrop mobile app accommodates that by making it easy to sell a product online, real-time message questions about it and do price haggling over it, and check buyer and seller reputations. But its leveraging of geotagging and open data also can promote a smarter and someday, perhaps, more discovery-oriented and meaning-rich neighborhood marketplaces.

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What does it mean for a tablet to have a Semantic Web inspired user interface (UI)? Following the launch of the Grid 10 from Fusion Garage – erstwhile known as Tabco in the lead-up campaign to its debut – we’re still not sure.

Brought to you by the same company that tried to make a splash with the JooJoo tablet a couple of years back, the Grid 10 aims to address complaints that were leveled around that failed product, such as being unintuitive and lacking apps. And to show good faith with those who bought the first device, Fusion Garage CEO and founder Chandrashekar Rathakrishnan said those folks can expect emails offering them the Grid 10 for free.

Fusion Garage is making its play not to conquer Apple but to be a real competitor to it, which Rathakrishnan said has been lacking given the me-too sameness of every other player in the mobile device market. He talked about the tablet’s operating system being built to leverage the Android kernel – while emphasizing that “this isn’t Android, though – it is Grid.”

Here’s where one might have thought to hear more about its having semantic technology behind it as a distinguishing characteristic, but the word semantic wasn’t uttered once by Rathakrishnan in his introduction or demo of the Grid 10 today, nor in regard to the Grid for SmartPhone that he introduced as well.

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If the future of web content is mobile, so too then goes the future of advertising. Mobile ad network Mobile Theory and ad technology company NetSeer want to be there for that future.

The two have teamed up with the goal of mobilizing NetSeer’s concept-based advertising, which uses algorithms to pinpoint relevant and related concepts based on the subject matter in a particular article, in the service of contextual ad delivery. On a mobile site for investing, NetSeer’s ConceptLinks might display related topics like “Exchange Traded Funds” and “Portfolio Management,” which are monetized links for the publisher, the company says. NetSeer says it already has several hundred publishers using its platform on the web.

Mobile Theory does the work of making an ad unit appear and function properly in a mobile environment. CEO Scott Swanson says that takes some work. On mobile platforms smaller, screen sizes, different screen ratios, ability for users to change orientations, and those users’ desire not to click on an ad and land somewhere else all must be considered. “We had to develop an ad unit that works completely different in mobile, to be faster, more simple, and more immediate than we do in online,” he says.

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