TORONTO, May 31, 2013 /CNW/ - Sprylogics International, the international provider of innovative mobile search and messaging monetization services announces that it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire Poynt Inc. (“Poynt”).

Under the terms of the deal, Sprylogics will provide the following consideration to the owners of Poynt: (i) issue a two (2) year note in the amount of $2.5 Million (CDN) with an annual interest rate of 6.5% payable quarterly in cash and / or stock, which will be secured against the assets of Poynt; and (ii) issue up to $500,000 in Sprylogics shares.  Additionally, the current owners of Poynt will retain a 10% interest in the exploitation of Poynt patents. Sprylogics will assume liabilities and fees associated with the purchase transaction as well as costs associated with management of the assets.  The parties have further agreed that under certain circumstances within the deal structure, payment of the$2.5 Million (CDN) may be accelerated. continued…

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Edamam

Originally, the web site app mirrored the mobile versions. But, says co-founder and CEO Victor Penev, “We realized that people wanted to be able to access recipes and search on the desktop, and they should have a holistic experience from anywhere.” While the company had been more focused on the mobile arena, Penev says building traffic for the website is going to be a priority too. Among the capabilities users should see in the near future are functions like one that will let people save recipes on their iPhone or Android mobile devices and then access them on their iPads or desktops, or vice verse.

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Ken Yeung of The Next Web writes, “Kickvox, a company that dedicates itself to ‘reengineering’ mobile search, has launched its iOS and Android applications in an attempt to show smartphone users what it thinks mobile search should look and act like. Alan Nowogrodski, the company’s co-founder and CEO says that it’s a broken feature: ‘the search industry is conceivably the only industry that looks virtually the same as it did a decade ago, yet the platforms that we use to search the web have changed significantly.’ To that end, what Kickvox is offering is an app that has a ‘visually stunning’ interface that was created specifically for the mobile device. Through its development, the company says that results will be displayed faster allowing for easier browsing and better navigation.” continued…

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Semantic technology is helping the company reach its goal. “A big problem is that data about food is very messy,” says Penev. “It’s hard to find something, what you find often contradicts other information of what is good for you and what the calories are. So we set out to solve that problem. We played around with different approaches but settled on using semantic technology.”

The confusion arises in part from the fact that recipe sites themselves usually just hire services to calculate nutritional data. But that may lead to mistakes when calculations aren’t undertaken with exactitude — substituting white cream for heavy cream nutritional details changes the whole profile of the recipe, he says.

So, what is that right semantic stuff? One piece of it is that, in conjunction with Ontotext, Edamam built a food ontology. An ontology can be the foundation for a lot of things, such as extracting the knowledge of the chemical composition of a particular recipe and thus inferring its flavor and texture. And Edamam means to grow its own to include various datasets such as chemical data (for flavor and texture), geolocation (for local and seasonal recipes), product data (for e-commerce). and more.

But initially, it’s taken the simple approach, with the core of the ontology focused around classifying ingredients, nutrients and food. “We have started with the simplest ontology and focused on the most common use case — mobile recipe search,” he says.

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A couple of weeks ago Yahoo debuted a beta version of its Search Direct technology, which was seen as a competitor to Google Instant in that it shows search options as users begin typing in a query. There were also questions raised among those in the industry about how this relates to Yahoo’s search deal with Microsoft.  There was less chatter about its semantic footprint, but that’s a question worth addressing as well.

So the Semantic Web Blog took these questions to Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist for Yahoo Search, whose background includes expertise in data management and mining, the cloud, and, of course, the semantic aspects of search. As Ramakrishnan sees it, Search Direct exemplifies Yahoo’s search slogan of providing answers, not links. Meaningful answers, whatever form they take, are the new direction in search, he says, and Yahoo wants compete “at the next level where technology is young and there is room for differentiation and market opportunities in being the best.”

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