Over here at SemanticWeb.com, we’re big fans of what co-founder Nick Holzherr and his team are doing at Whisk, a UK-based startup that allows users to create a complete online grocery shopping list built out of their chosen recipes. Nick gave his second keynote address in front of a SemTechBiz audience this morning–the first came at SemTechBiz UK in London last year. If you haven’t had a chance to read our past coverage of Whisk, here’s a quick overview of what the innovative startup offers today:

Whisk is using natural language processing (NLP) and other semantic solutions to bring together online recipe content with online grocery retailers. Currently only available in the United Kingdom, users can turn to Whisk’s phone app or browser widget to pull together recipes that they want to attempt that week. The Whisk platform then analyzes the recipes to create shopping lists of all the ingredients that the user will need in order to complete the recipes. The system has the sense to figure out appropriate quantities of each ingredient and eliminate staples like salt and sugar that the user probably already has at home. (Users can re-add these items to the list if they don’t, in fact, have these ingredients in their pantries.) The user then has the option to take that list to their local grocery store or, even better, purchase the groceries automatically from an online grocery retailer. Read more

Whisk, the U.K.-based service for matching online recipes with online ingredients-shopping, went live in a big way at year’s end, with a partnership with TV channel and recipe publisher Food Network. As its iOS and Android apps rolled out to accompany its browser plug-in, Food Network in the U.K. featured a button on its recipe search engine for a widget that taps into the service, which is underpinned by semantic technology and a cloud infrastructure. A recent second round of angel funding also has taken the service’s total investment to more than £500,000.

Whisk co-founder Craig Edmunds reports about 12,000 app downloads so far, and about a 1.5 percent steady click-through from the button on the publisher’s site – right where it expected to be at this point, he says. Getting the big-name Food Network signed on actually changed plans a bit for the service, which The Semantic Web Blog covered earlier here, and whose co-founder Nick Holzherr was a keynote speaker at the London SemTech event.

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The Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK took place in London last week at the Millennium Goucester Hotel, and a number of themes emerged from the two-day event. A few of the sessions are highlighted below, but first, let us turn to some of the attendees to share some of their favorite insights and takeaways:

Public Sector Semantics

There was a lot of interest in the Public Sector work. One of the presentations that highlighted the Open Data movement was Nigel Shadbolt‘s Keynote presentation about the recently launched Open Data Institute. We have covered the ODI here, and Professor Shadbolt shared some exciting insights and perspectives on the Open Data economy. In his presentation, he referred to a report on which he collaborated that was published by Deloitte Analytics. This free white paper is available for download.

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InternetRetailing features a new article discussing Whisk.co.uk, the brainchild of Nick Holzherr, keynote speaker of next month’s SemTechBiz UK conference. The article states, “A new website that promises to turn online recipes into supermarket shopping lists and online food orders is set to launch this autmn. Nick Holzherr, a former runner-up in BBC television series The Apprentice, is behind Whisk.co.uk. He aims to have all the UK supermarkets that trade online – Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Ocado and Waitrose – operational on the site by the end of the year. At soft launch, set to be in about two months time, the site will feature two or three supermarkets.” Read more

On Friday, July 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 with Nick Holzherr, finalist on the BBC One Television Series, “The Apprentice,” and founder of Whisk, a recipe planning idea based on big data and semantic analysis. He was named ‘emerging entrepreneur of the year’ by Insider Magazine in 2010, and Birmingham Young Personality of the Year (Entrepreneurship) in 2011.
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The Semantic Technology and Business Conference is coming back to London in just a few short months. With the conference quickly approaching, we’re happy to announce that the ever-growing event will be opened with a keynote by Nick Holzherr, star of the BBC’s Apprentice. Holzherr’s keynote, How Does it Know That? Customizing the Consumer Shopping Experience will focus on his post-Apprentice company, Whisk.

According to a release about the event, “Whisk is a new service that will allow customers to convert recipes automatically into shopping lists within online supermarkets. In his opening keynote presentation, Holzherr will explain from a business and functionality point of view what Whisk offers to the user, the data it will analyse and how the company will extract commercial value from this information. Read more