News360 recently launched a “reimagined edition of its popular free newsreading app to iPhones everywhere. First unveiled for iPads and Android tablets in July, the new edition of News360 boasts a completely redesigned interface that’s as beautiful as it is smart, revamped personalization technology that learns from your every move online and in the app, and deeper customization options that empower you to make the newsreading experience your own. These overhauls have earned high marks from users, reviewers and publishers alike and have delivered on the promise of keeping you well-informed about the most important, personally relevant news of the day.” Read more

Early in the summer, The Semantic Web Blog introduced readers to Nara, an advanced neural networking service to automate, personalize and curate web dining experiences for users. (See that story here.)

The service is moving ahead with the launch today of its mobile version, as well as in other respects. “We’re now doing a full-on consumer launch of a polished product on both the web and mobile [platforms],” says CTO Nathan Wilson. “People really are clamoring for the mobile component, especially for this [dining] use case.” Versions for both the iPhone’s iOS and Android operating systems are available.

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What do you get when you mix two parts natural language processing with a little personalization, and add in a dash of the cloud? The answer is Whisk, a U.K. company building a service that lets users purchase the ingredients for any recipe they find on the Internet.

“The crux of it is that you can take any recipe on the ‘Net and turn it into a transaction in on online market,” says co-founder Craig Edmunds. “There’s a machine translation problem from the recipe up through to our internal language, which is one NLP problem, and then another is from our internal language into online markets.” Another leg of the work is that the service seeks to not match to just one item at a market but as many as possible, and consider user preferences as to which is the optimal product, too.

At the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in the U.K., Edmunds will be considering how the issues of machine translation, manual intervention, personalization and the cloud intersect in creating a service that adds all the ingredients they need for dishes they find online straight into their online shopping basket.

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Many semantic start-ups hoping to bring their platforms and APIs to wider public notice among the development community do so by crafting the first applications to leverage their technologies themselves. That’s the case with Kudos Knowledge, which has created Enliten, a personal newspaper using its Semantic Social Intelligence (SSI) technology to deliver news and information from hundreds of sources filtered according to user interests.

“The important thing for us was to show we had capacity,” explains Lee Sinclair, product director of the Australian-based company, which also has developed CelebTweety Social to connect users to information about their favorite celebrities, and Chat Search for Skype for mining conversation histories on that platform, based on its SSI technology. The basic concept behind Semantic Social Intelligence is something that the company internally calls the “.Me” to filter the world for the individual user.

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Bottlenose is entering its next phase of helping people discover trends in the social networking world in real-time, and in a smarter way. As co-founder Nova Spivack describes it, “Bottlenose shows what is important on social networks, the next generation of the Internet. It’s not about the web anymore but about messages and change happening in social networks.” With its real-time discovery engine, Bottlenose “curates the collective consciousness,” he says.

The social media dashboard for surfing the social stream in a unified way remains in place, with the Sonar technology for detecting talk around topics personalized to users’ interests and letting people track topics over time. On average, Spivack says, users are spending 90 minutes a day with that part of the service. The second step in the app’s strategy hones in on measuring the crowd in real-time, and what is getting attention on the global network (as compared to the personal one) to pinpoint trending news, pictures and links.

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News360 today launches a redesigned version of its semantically-enabled news discovery application for the iPad. In the works for some eight months, the company’s goal has been to further its vision of building an AI assistant that understands what someone is interested in and how he consumes different types of news, to make ever-more solid personalized recommendations of content.

Personalization capabilities in the update last August of the service (which we first discussed here) followed an approach that worked best for people who knew what they wanted, according to Roman Karachinsky, CEO, News360. “Most people don’t want to spend time switching between categories and configuring things,” he says. “They wanted something more simple, so we focused on that.”

Before personalizing things further with Facebook and Twitter analysis of profiles, likes, demographics and social graph activity for more suggestions, there now are a host of sections from which users can easily select their interests – more than 1 million different things they can follow, from companies to topics to people to brands. There’s a new Good News section for getting your optimism on, and one on zombies, too.

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Jinni, a company that we have covered here, has released its first set-top-box for personalization of real-time television. The article states, “Introduced progressively by European IPTV operator (Belgacom), starting June 19th, this enables the subscribers to benefit from a complete cross-platform content consumption experience. Belgacom partnered with Jinni in September 2010 and took part in the startup’s second round of funding, in early 2011. The already available platforms include an online service, mobile app and Connected TV app, all powered by the Jinni engine. The Jinni cross-platform experience is part of Belgacom’s hard-hitting strategy, aimed at maintaining competitive advantage by offering a superior service to its customers.” Read more

Dollars to donuts most folks haven’t ever found a place to eat courtesy of neural networking technology before. Generally, Internet searches for spots to have a bite come courtesy of friends’ Facebook recommendations, services like Yelp, and even some semantically-powered offerings such as BooRah, now an Intuit company.

But the collection of neuroscientists, computer scientists, astrophysicists, and creative artists behind Nara, launching into public beta today, have taken the advanced neural networking route to automate, personalize and curate web dining experiences for users – though there’s more to come on the future menu. President and CEO Tom Copeman says of the company, which in April secured $3.6 million of a $4.5 million equity offering, that its cutting-edge neural network and proprietary and patented algorithms and process for analyzing tons of web data, and personalizing it, including considering user feedback on the suggestions it offers, is creating a whole new category.

That is the pure-play digital lifestyle brand that “creates an emotional connection between us and the Web. We’re trying to change how people think about the web, and from sense of what it means to me, and makes sense to me, and how personal it is to me.”

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Once upon a time there was a semantic web startup dubbed Knewco, touting a knowledge discovery/ contextual advertising system for health care and life sciences content providers and advertisers (see this story). After a long journey toiling in the land of targeted health sites, it realized these prospects didn’t provide the best opportunity for its micro-targeted ad strategy. So, with a restructured management team and some fresh capital in place, in the latter half of 2011 it began a new quest: To become the semantic platform for premium publishers to help deliver personalized content recommendations and ads to readers and get more revenue, traffic and stickiness in the process.

Renamed Personalized Media, and now headed by CEO Rajiv Salimath, principal back in the Knewco days, the company’s technology now is in an advanced testing stage with premium publishers who will be white-labeling the system. Salimath can’t disclose their names, but suffice it to say that you’ve seen some of them prominently mentioned in these virtual pages before. So, what does Personalized Media bring to the party that’s attractive to some of these sites that already have taken steps – sometimes big ones – to bring semantic intelligence to their web presence?

From There to Here

When The Semantic Web Blog spoke with Salimath in late 2009, he discussed the technology’s prowess at understanding concepts and inter-relating them to other ideas. In its current incarnation, Personalized Media’s semantic search algorithms make it possible to find and suggest to readers other content – text, video, even apps, from the source itself, its associate properties or elsewhere on the web, depending on publisher preferences – that’s relevant to any word or term they highlight, or to the page at large. The content appears in a bubble at the user’s click.

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Just a little over a year ago The Semantic Web Blog introduced our readers to Gravity in this article. The project, spearheaded by former MySpace execs, is focused on building the Interest Graph. The team’s been pretty quiet about development efforts since that time — until just this month, when it announced Gravity Labs to let the public in on a little more about its underlying Interest Graph infrastructure and to showcase the platform. It also announced that it was open-sourcing some of the “plumbing” code it came up with during development, while understandably keeping its core IT, ontology and algorithms under wraps.

The announcement noted that the internally-named Gravity Interest Service for personalizing content at scale, in real-time, went live at production-scale 6 months ago. So far the technology has created over 400 million user interest graphs; served over 13 million pieces of personalized content per day; personalized the daily Internet experience of tens of millions of users per month; and processed over 25 million inbound interest signals per day, the company says. It expects that at this rate, that in under six months it will be handling 10X all of these numbers.

The Semantic Web Blog once again caught up with Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto to talk some more about the Interest Graph, a term he acknowledges gets thrown around quite a bit these days, with a lot of web sites claiming they’ve got the goods. But, he says, “what they effectively are saying is that buried deep within the data of our logs or deep in the data of how our users interact with our site, we know there are interest indicators there. But a lot of them are not doing much with their data.” Interest Graphs, he says, aren’t owned, but interest data resides in individual places and across the web at large — and they need the Gravity platform to help unlock that to create dynamic and personalized experiences for users, Benedetto says.

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