Swipp, which in January launched its social intelligence platform and consumer social networking app (see our story here), today follows through on the plans it alluded to then of letting businesses leverage its technology for merging social and knowledge streams. Structured data is at the heart of the Swipp platform, with the Freebase entity graph providing reference knowledge and context for topics; its value propositions are that comments are tied to a specific, exact topic and that it creates a real-time Index for users’ social data sentiment scores for each topic that can be combined and sorted by geography, time, gender, and age.

The new Swipp Plus tool suite, the company says, draws on its social intelligence platform to prepare businesses – from consumer brands to content providers – to better connect with customers on today’s social web. Swipp Plus now enables them to leverage capabilities in its platform to add a Swipp widget to their web sites, blogs, maps, QR codes, and various online arenas around pieces of content, particular products, or concepts, and it also is working to build out mobile capabilities for direct feedback.

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Chris Kanaracus of InfoWorld reports, “Salesforce.com continues to build out its Chatter social networking and collaboration software, with upcoming ‘social intelligence’ capabilities that will allow users to find information through new Topics and Expertise categories. Chatter is built into Salesforce.com’s underlying Force.com technology platform, allowing users of its CRM (customer relationship management) and other software to use social collaboration tools within a business context. Salesforce.com already gave Chatter users the ability to create profiles, and to follow users and system objects, such as a particular record. Chatter also has a recommendation engine, provides users with an ‘influence’ rating and has a Similar Files feature.” Read more

Image Courtesy Flickr/ Sean MacEntee

It’s April Fool’s Day on the Web, and we’re sensing some semantic allusions and downright sentiment analytics assertions in today’s pranks. Have a look:

• Head over to your Google search engine and you’ll be teased to find out what that smell is with Google Nose. or, as they describe it, the new scentsation in search.  Go beyond type, talk, and touch for a new notation of sensation, it promises. The Internet sommelier, Google explains, comes with an expertly curated Knowledge Panels to pair images, descriptions, and aromas. While it credits new technologies such as StreetSense (responsible for Google inhaling and indexing millions of atmospheric miles), and Android Ambient Odor Detection (which collects smells via the mobile OS), it seems to me that the Knowledge Graph had to have a hand in this one.

When Don Thorson and Charlie Constantini looked at the social graph – some 1 billlion connected people all sharing information at an incredibly fast pace – they saw a problem, and an opportunity. Data extraction wasn’t playing as big a role in the picture as it could, so the possibility that all those connected users out there could actually be gaining knowledge proportional to the size of the social network wasn’t being realized. How to return more value to end users? Thorson, whose career has spanned the video game, computer, Internet and communications industries and companies including Atari, Apple, Netscape, and Ribbit, says there had to be a way to “unlock what the world thinks about everything with the optimistic view that all of us are smarter than any of us.”

So was Swipp born. The startup – co-founded by CEO Thorson, Chief Swipp officer Constantini, and CTO Ramani “Nara” Narayan (both also Ribbit veterans) – and its new social intelligence platform launched yesterday. Its aim is to extract the wisdom of the crowd in a global, aggregated way with a solid data structure foundation as its starting point. Swipp’s effort to merge the worlds of social tools and knowledge tools is based on organizing data around terms or topics in what Thorson calls a “pure data” approach – not an interpreted or extracted one – allowing for data to be aggregated, displayed, and archived around a specific person, place, or thing.

So, when a consumer “swipps” – enters a topic via the web or a mobile device, adds a comment about it, and scores it so that their rating becomes part of the Swipp Index (its stock index of social intelligence) – he or she gets what Constantini calls a “one-two punch of what the world is saying and the truth.” That is, you get to see what people are saying socially about that exact topic, and the Index, which is the combined social data for each topic that can be sorted by geography, time, gender, and age. For the reference knowledge and the context behind millions of topics, Swipp leverages Freebase and its entity graph of people, places and things.

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At this week’s SAP Sapphire conference. NetBase will be taking its relationship with the enterprise vendor to the next level. Last December the two paired up to bring NetBase’s social intelligence (SI) to SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence (BI).

Coming up now is a complete integration of the NetBase technology into SAP’s Social On Demand customer relationship management (CRM) console. “Having access to social data is becoming critical to every part of the organization,” says NetBase chief marketing officer Lisa Joy Rosner. So, “social media [becomes] just one more data point” for which the enterprise must account.

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