David Meyer of GigaOM writes, “In the development of natural language processing, the semantic web and so on, e-commerce provides a rich breeding ground. Companies such as Amazon and Google always want to find better ways to learn what it is potential customers are looking for, so the technology follows the commercial imperative. A Berlin startup called Versus IO is trying to apply natural language algorithms in its product comparison service, and it’s just closed a $2.8 million Series A round to do so. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and also includes Dave McClure, who previously invested $100,000, and angels Lars Dittrich and Dario Suter.” Read more

Knowillage Systems recently announced “the availability of the Knowillage LEArning Path (LeaP), an integrated course tool that gives Canvas LMS users the power of personalization and adaptive learning. LeaP provides students with personalized learning paths – using existing course content, as well as open educational resources – and facilitates the rapid definition of custom courses, all in a way that’s intuitive and easy-to-use by teachers and students alike.” Read more

IT Web recently reported, “Nokusa EI has established a partnership with Firestring – one of the most significant new information management tools to arrive in the enterprise space. ‘The system has huge potential in using the principals of social media for business,’ says Kotze. ‘What we do as humans is collaborate. While an organisation may exist in the sense of bricks and mortar, it’s the interaction of people that actually constitutes the work of the company. Firestring allows people in large organisations to interact instinctively and organically, and in addition, it brings information and people together through its semantic engine. The engine, Serendipity, automatically tags information on behalf of users, which means manual indexing to bring structure to information is no longer necessary’.” Read more

At the Semantic Web Business and Technology Conference in San Francisco in 2011, a company called Pragmatech presented a prototype of its CTRL semantic engine. Now, a little more than a year later, it’s launching products and services, as well as an API, for business and general public use.

The Daily Star, an English language news publication in the Middle East, is one of the early adopters of CTRL for its web site. The semantic technology powers the news site’s surfacing of topically related stories, summaries of an article, and entities extracted from it. Soon, readers also will be able to follow topics related to articles as well.

“Many semantic technologies do entity extraction at a shallow level,” says Dr. Walid Saba, who leads the R&D team at Pragmatech. “We go deeper.” As an example, readers of The Daily Star wanting to explore stories by following a key topic – a particular world figure as a diplomat, rather than in his or her other past role as a businessperson, for instance – will be directed to stories specific to that. Within the first couple of weeks of deployment, the news site more than tripled user engagement, Saba says.

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