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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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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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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Semantic discovery engine Evri continues is about to put another stake in the mobile arena. It began its major push into the mobile space last year, focusing particularly on connecting consumers to vertical topic content such as tech news, baseball, football and celebrity gossip on the iPhone and Android platforms. The next big launch? Evri for the iPad.

By month’s end Evri expects to have available a private beta version, primarily for journalists and bloggers to try, with an App Store entry to follow shortly thereafter. It will be a content discovery app that, like its web site, finds trending and popular news stories on the web, distills that into topical content streams that users can browse through, and also follow favorite streams based on personalized interests.

“We’ll proactively push all new content we find around the topics you are interested in to your iPad,” says CEO Will Hunsinger. “Much like our current platform we are able to understand each individual piece of content and structured data associated with it and make recommendations of additional content, topics, news streams, or people, places and things you might be interested in based on the entities you extract in the context of articles. We become the discovery and recommendation engine in this format.”

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Startup SemantiStar sees a place in the world of InfoApps for semantic technologies. InfoApps, as SemantiStar CEO Bill McDaniel explains them, present information to the user as needed, when, and in the manner in which they want it. They’re generally are associated with the world of mobile devices – think of many of the goodies you download from sources like Apple’s App Store or Amazon’s Appstore (trademark disputes aside) or the Android Market.

Add semantic technologies to the mix, and these apps can become more context-aware — recall the Siri virtual assistant, which was acquired by Apple last spring. More opportunities exist around the idea of mobile information presentation, leveraging the devices’ geographical coordinates, the user’s historical behavior, and other knowledge that might be pertinent to an initial information quest, McDaniel thinks.

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