Martin White of CMS Wire recently predicted that search, semantic and otherwise, will be a business critical application in 2013. He writes, “Looking back, 2012 has been quite a year for search. From a business perspective Lexmark acquired Isys-Search, Lucid Imagination changed its name, Attivio gained a US$ 37 million investment, Coveo followed with an US$ 18 million investment, Apache Lucene and Solr moved to Release 4, ElasticSearch set up a commercial arm and Microsoft announced a seriously well-featured SharePoint 2013 search application. Gradually a picture of search implementation is beginning to emerge, thanks to surveys from Findwise, MarkLogic, Oracle and AIIM. The picture is not a pretty one. All agree that information is a business-critical asset but companies have failed to understand the urgent need to provide technology and support for search.” Read more

Carsten Kraus, CEO of FACT-Finder reports, “Technology continues to push the travel, tourism and hospitality industry forward and make it more dynamic than ever before. But the next phase is where it gets REALLY exciting… In the UK alone, 78% of people still search via their desktop, but a growing number now also search via their mobile and tablet devices (13% and 9% respectively). But we are beginning to see some frustration among those who search for their holidays online, because search engine technology cannot match up to the imagination and sophistication of the human mind.” Read more

David Siegel, author of Pull and a former SemTechBiz keynote speaker, recently shared his thoughts regarding the future of Apple, the cloud, and data in general. Siegel states, “The consumer’s electronic world as we know it today is shared between Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of other popular brands. Most offerings must ride on these platforms and play by their rules. Yet I believe our current interest in—and use of—this ecosystem will peak in 3-6 years, and what awaits each of these companies on the other side must be a completely different business.”

He continues, “We have spent the last twenty years making everything digital, and now that transformation is 99 percent complete. Read more