Photo Courtesy: Flickr/katerha

Among the topics covered at this week’s Sentiment Analysis’ Symposium was an exploration of just how much the negative or positive expression of sentiment about a company or a product really matters – and in what context it does. (Another one, which The Semantic Web Blog covered yesterday here, looked at the expected transition from sentiment to emotions analytics.)

Augie Ray, director of social media at Prudential Financial, and formerly a social media leader at USAA and Forrester, recounted some of the bigger blow-ups online in recent years: The passenger whose guitar was broken by United Airlines and made a Youtube video that went viral; NBC’s 2012 London Olympics coverage that was criticized for dissing a tribute to the victims of terrorist bombings, among other things; and Bank of America’s being castigated for its announced plan to institute debit card fees.

“We live and die by the concept that negative sentiment matters,” he said.

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PayPal, an eBay company, is looking for a Senior Software Engineer in San Jose, CA. The post states, “We are seeking an expert Java developer with experience in developing web application using Spring MVC and Spring web flow. In this role, you will be part of the team that is working on the next generation of Mobile products that will provide seamless onboarding experience on Mobile devices. Work closely with business partners and internal product management to acquire a deep understanding of the onboarding products through Mobile web. Own and is accountable for the design and development of a product feature or sub-system of a complex multi-tiered onboarding products based on high-level requirements. Primary technologies will be Java, Spring MVC, Spring web flow.” Read more

PaySwarm advocate Manu Sporny recently spoke to Tom Simonite about a web standard for online payment. Simonite writes, “Over the past few decades, a handful of open standards for rendering and sharing text and imagery between computers—better known as the World Wide Web—have helped upend businesses worldwide. But these Web standards do not cover ways of transferring money or selling content, leaving us to fumble for credit cards and PayPal account details when it’s time to cough up. That could be set to change. A group affiliated with the body that maintains Web standards hopes to establish an open standard for transferring money online. If the plan is successful, Web browsers could come with features that make it much easier to buy and sell things or transfer funds over the Internet.” Read more

PayPal, a division of eBay, is looking for a Software Engineer in San Jose, CA. The post states, “We are looking for a lead developer in the Mobile Consumer team. In this role you will be working on next generation of Consumer Mobile solutions on iPhone/Android and Mobile web. You have expert experience in developing web applications using Spring MVC. You have good understanding of latest Mobile web technologies. You will be involved in all aspects of the project life cycle, from the initial kickoff through the requirements analysis, design and implementation.” Read more

PayPal is looking for a Software Engineer in San Jose, CA. The post states, “We are seeking an expert Java developer with experience in developing web application using front end UI tools such as jQuery. This role will require candidate to work on rapid paced development with weekly deliveries in Agile type of environment. Candidate needs to work closely with business analysts and development lead. Candidate should be able to grasp requirements and develop working product for review. Responsible for frontend as well as backend part. Coding style should be well-designed and appropriate to the needs of the business. Developer to implement automated unit testing, automated builds, and documentation.” Read more

Former Paypal and Intuit CEO Bill Harris these days is heading up financial advisory service Personal Capital, which now is adding an independent media property to its portfolio to aggregate and deliver financial news to individuals. That new property, Daily Capital, launches today and is powered by Eqentia’s semantic technology. Eqentia offers a content discovery and knowledge management portal for consumers, and also has other enterprises using its technology for their backbone portal infrastructures. But Eqentia CEO William Mougayar thinks this deal is likely the biggest one so far in terms of how much visibility it’s going to get and its potential to grow.

As Harris explains to The Semantic Web Blog in an email interview, Personal Capital provides clients with a holistic view of their complex financial lives, “and the mission of Daily Capital is the same: to cut through the clutter and highlight the best financial content from around the Web.”

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Yesterday, we ran Part I of our conversation with Manu Sporny, CEO of Digital Bazaar, about Payswarm, a new type of micropayment standard for the web. Today, we dive a bit deeper into the process of how Payswarm is being developed as a Semantic Web based standard rather than a proprietary technology.

SW: Tell us a bit about the choice to create PaySwarm as a standards project.
MS: The answer lies somewhere in a lack of open, patent- and royalty-free standards for online payments. Filling out your credit card information on every site you want to support is not the answer. Neither is signing up to a proprietary payment service. What we need are open standards for payment on the Web – once that is in place, we can look forward to an explosion in innovative start-ups centered around finance and crowd-sourced funding. We can also look forward to more individuals being enabled to make a living via the Web which, given this incredibly deep recession, will have a very positive impact on a number of people’s lives.

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Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO of Digital Bazaar, Inc., sat down with SemanticWeb.com to discuss Payswarm, a new standard that he is working on through a W3C Community Group. This article is Part 1 of 2.

SemanticWeb.com: What is PaySwarm?
Manu Sporny: It is a universal payment standard designed specifically for the Web. Think “an open source PayPal on steroids” – an open, patent and royalty free specification for Web Payments. The goal of PaySwarm is to make crowd-funding, world-changing ideas, buying and selling online as easy as sending an e-mail or an instant message. We want payment to be baked into the core of the Web so that exciting new companies can be launched on top of this truly open payment platform.

We want to enable anybody in the world to launch a PayPal, KickStarter, or Kiva. Think of what the Web did for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo. We think PaySwarm can do that for the next generation of start-ups that want to transform the way we reward each other on the Web. Improving the way we organize financial resources to enhance our personal lives and pursue endeavors that improve upon the human condition is at the core of what we’re doing.
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