Megan Geuss of Ars Technica reports, “On Friday evening, a jury ruled that Cisco owes patent licenser XpertUniverse Inc $70 million in damages for obtaining patented technology in a fraudulent manner, Reuters reported. The jury ruled that Cisco owed an additional $34,000 for violating two XpertUniverse patents, as well. XpertUniverse, a New York-based company, brought the case in the US District Court of Delaware. The company said that Cisco violated non-disclosure terms agreed upon when the two organizations started working together in 2004. The agreement stated “Cisco would distribute technology XpertUniverse had developed to efficiently match customers with call center experts,” wrote Reuters.” Read more

Following successful runs in London and New York City, the Semantic Technology & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) is returning to San Francisco June 2-5, 2013. Today, we are pleased to announce that the Call For Presentations is open for submissions.

The deadline to enter is January 18, 2013, and we are currently seeking proposals for:

• Conference Sessions – 45 minutes
• Panel Sessions – 45 minutes (must propose moderator and panelists, even if not finalized)
• Tutorials – 3 hours
• Lightning Talks – 5 minutes

What are we looking for?

We are interested in a wide variety of presentations, from business and consumer applications through to fundamental technology discussions.  Over the years, the emphasis of the program has gradually shifted more towards practical experience as Semantic Technologies have matured and gained adoption both on the web and in enterprise systems, so we’re very much looking for semantic case studies and project experience. If you are developing a tool, or using semantics to create an exciting new start-up company, we want to hear from you as well.  Keep in mind that precedence will be given to sessions that offer an interactive element and are designed to provide actionable ideas (get to the heart of the matter!). And having said all that, we still keep time-slots available for cutting edge research and thought-leadership.  So SemTechBiz really is an all-inclusive program for the community.

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Ecosystem image via Shutterstock

As the Semantic Web Blog recently noted, 3RoundStones’ Callimachus Enterprise emerged as the winner of the Top Semantic Technology Start-up competition that was held at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) in San Francisco a few weeks ago. The commercially supported Linked Data Management system, now being piloted by eight companies, will this summer be released to the general public as Version 1.0.

Callimachus Enterprise is distinguished not only by its technology, but by CTO David Wood’s presentation that spoke to the real business needs of the enterprise today – including rapidly demonstrating value, in its case around exposing, connecting and visualizing disparate enterprise content – and also in that it provides a way for organizations to deal with their enterprise information in an entirely cloud-based solution. It leverages the Amazon cloud.

“A lot of companies are using cloud-based solutions for travel and expense tracking,” says CEO Bernadette Hyland. “But this is the beginning of a new wave.”

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Enterprises using semantic technology often come up against a problem: Not being able to scale their approaches across domains.

“We hear a lot about semantic approaches that work great when targeted to a domain – for example, you can train up an NLP engine for the hotel industry domain that knows ‘thin’ is a bad word when applied to it,” explained YY Lee, chief operating officer at customer intelligence vendor FirstRain at the recent SemTech conference in San Francisco. “But the amount of the business world to be potentially covered by semantic techniques – that limitation to train for specific domains cannot scale.”

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Yesterday The Semantic Web Blog discussed how personalized mobile assistance came up on the lists of a bright future in the eyes of semantic web experts (see here). Sharing that vision is the team at Vital.AI, the NYC-startup founded by Marc Hadfield.  Its Thrive.AI app, also a contender at SemTech’s Startup Competition, is a personalized semantic shopping agent for the iPad, but the underlying Vital.AI platform on which it is built provides an integrated suite of components for a variety of knowledge-centric, intelligence-rich, Big Data-driven applications.

The e-commerce agent, Hadfield told attendees at SemTech in San Francisco last week, was the company’s own foray into figuring out what it needed to add to the platform to make it easier to build apps that bring semantic technologies and Big Data together.

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The business side of the Semantic Tech and Business Conference was on display at the closing session today. Panelists shared their own takeaways, pointers, advice, observations and predictions about a number of semantic web issues about bringing semantic technology to the enterprise.

The panelists included  Craig D Hanson, Director, Innovation and Architecture Amdocs.; James Hendler, Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Arnaud Le Hors, software standards architect at IBM; Dave McComb, President, Semantic Arts Inc; Marie Wallace
Social Analytics Strategist, IBM; Joe Devon, web developer and consultant; Christine Connors, Principal TriviumRLG LLC; and David Booth, an independent contractor and senior software architect at PanGenX.

Here’s an overview of what they had to say to – and for — the enterprise community:

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Attend the upcoming SemTech session that’s dubbed Using Semantic Technologies to Deliver Industrial Strength Healthcare Benefits Administration, and you’ll hear about how semantics- and model-driven computing is the future – and how it’s a future that’s already gotten underway at The Central Administrative Agency of the Netherlands (CAK).

First, a little bit about the bigger picture.  “What can happen when you go all the way to semantic, model-driven, knowledge computing [is that] … it changes the game for development,” says Mills Davis, managing director of Project 10X and one of the session’s presenters. “It enables new categories of capabilities and levels of user experience (think SIRI for the rest of us). It brings about quantum changes in all stages of lifecycle value. It enables cost-effective strategy-driven approaches to enterprise transformation. This last sentence is worth some reflection.”

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The news of Facebook’s acquisition of mobile photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion this week may be fueling the dreams of tech start-ups of every stripe, including those in the semantic tech community. In fact, they may have even greater reason to be inspired: A recent  report has it that Instagram has been slowly rolling out an Open Graph integration for the app accomplished in collaboration with Facebook for seamlessly publishing photos to users’ Timelines in what may be the first of similar partner-deals down the road.

Other startups infused with semantic tech smarts may be on high lookout for funding opportunities as an important part of making those dreams come true. Thomson Reuters and The National Venture Capital Association this week released funding stats for the first quarter of 2012 that could put a bit of a damper on things: It found a 35 percent decrease by dollar commitments and a 9 percent decline by number of funds, compared to the first quarter of 2011. But, according to a statement by Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, venture firms “appear to be more optimistic about the fundraising environment in 2012.”

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This very cold day in Berlin finds me in the large glass emporium known as the Seminaris CampusHotel Berlin, built on the campus of the Freie Universität Berlin.  I am here with an expected 150 delegates, 50 plus speakers, and 6 exhibitors for the first Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin.  Hopefully I can over the next few paragraphs give you a feel for some of what I experienced on day one.  Obviously with a twin track program I could only experience part of the day, but here we go anyway….

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A wide array of products, applications, and other advances in the world of semantic technology were announced at last week’s Semantic Technology Conference. Announcements came from such industry heavy-hitters as Franz, Revelytix, and Expert System. Below are a collection of announcements from event sponsors who used the forum of SemTech to reveal their latest updates. Read more