Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land reports, “Yahoo and Jybe announced that the latter was being acquired by the former. Jybe, which I had not heard of previously, is described by Yahoo as ‘a personalized recommendation company founded with the vision to help people find the things they love to do based on what’s trending in their social circles.’ It sounds like a ‘social search’ or ‘social discovery’ app. Indeed, all five Jybe team members are former search people — and former Yahoo employees: ‘As part of this acquisition, we’re welcoming an extremely talented group of engineers and data scientists who will join Yahoo!’s platform organization, focused on targeting and personalization. This will be a ‘coming home’ for the team — all five are former Yahoos. Arnab Bhattacharjee was the VP of Yahoo!’” Read more

In a move to improve their social analytics capabilities, Microsoft has acquired Netbreeze, a company we have highlighted in the past. Bob Stutz of Microsoft reports, “If you have a brand to protect, a product or a service to sell, then you cannot afford to overlook the wealth of information that is now available to you via social media… That’s why, fast on the heels of our MarketingPilot announcement, I am happy to share the news with you about another acquisition—this time in the social listening and analytics space.  When Microsoft considers an acquisition, we look for leading edge technology companies with innovative IP that aligns with our technology and can scale for the enterprise; this is what we were fortunate enough to find with Netbreeze.  A dynamic Swiss company started by some incredibly talented analytics scientists that we enthusiastically welcome to the Microsoft family.” Read more

Joab Jackson of Network World reports, “IBM has started a new practice to help organizations interact more effectively with their customers through the use of social media and other emerging technologies. ‘Today, businesses have a completely different way of engaging customers,’ said Mahmoud Naghshineh, IBM vice president of services research, noting that social media and mobile technologies have provided organizations new forms of feedback from their customers. ‘There are all these new ways of reaching out to people [but] you need to know when the right time is to engage.’ The IBM Customer Experience Lab will provide clients with access to both IBM researchers and IBM business analysis consultants, who will generate new ways for clients to communicate with customers and employees.” Read more

According to a new release out of the company, “Expert System, the semantic technology company, performed a semantic analysis on a sample of tweets in English for a variety of hashtags related to the 2013 Italian election and all of its candidates and campaigning parties. The infographic Italy: Election 2013 highlights the context and sentiment expressed in tweets around Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti, Beppe Grillo and Pier Luigi Bersani.” Read more

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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It’s probably safe to say that people want their firefighters, EMT, law enforcement and other emergency responders to be as best-equipped for their jobs as possible, so that they can be successful and well-protected, too.

Semantic technology can have a hand in making sure that happens. Deborah McGuinness, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor and Director of Web Science Operations John Erickson. both of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) , are spearheading an effort, thanks to some funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST) under program manager William G. Billotte, to use semantic technology and social media to help that organization better understand what requirements should be for these heroes.

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Phys.org reports on a hackathon event held at Aston University, “Emergency experts and software developers from across Europe attended the two day event, which was designed to investigate the use of social media and web technologies in disaster responses. Recent disasters such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan have highlighted how social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Ushahidi) and Web 2.0 technologies as well as the increasing availability of publicly available structured data are beginning to affect all aspects of disaster management. The Conference explored a range of areas, including how to best make relevant data easily accessible to key personnel and the use of online street maps in emergencies.” Read more

As the opening ceremony for the London Olympics gets underway tonight, sentiment on the event can be gauged nightly in a big way: The EDF Energy London Eye Ferris Wheel, the largest in Europe, will turn colors depending on the sentiment analysis of tweets coming out of the U.K. mentioning the Olympics.

Sosolimited, an art and technology studio helmed by three MIT grads, has written software to capture these tweets and then uses sentiment analysis algorithms to assess their emotional content. SentiStength, a program that itself hails from the U.K., is reportedly the source of the algorithms. During the day, that will be charted on a large LED next to the London Eye, and each night the data will guide the sequence of a visual lightshow around the Eye.  “That data is played back out across full color architectural lighting fixtures around the Eye and with large ground based search beams,” according to a blog posting from founder Justin Manor. It’s been reported that yellow will be the dominant color to express positive sentiment, while purple will showcase negative sentiment.

Expectations: Early on, at least, probably a lot of yellow, even if traffic is a nightmare, from a lot of outraged Brits who want to have their say over Mitt Romney’s comment about how well-prepared the city is for the Games.

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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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For-profit businesses clearly are tuned into the social media-sentiment analysis trend, to stay abreast of how their brand, services or products are perceived. But are non-profits equally as concerned? The answer seems to be yes, and not just when it comes to social media but across all paths of constituent engagement.

At this week’s Sentiment Analysis symposium in New York City, Banafsheh Ghassemi, the American Red Cross vice president of marketing, e-CRM, and customer experience, pointed out some reasons why. “It’s a brave new world for those of us in the non-profit world,” she said. While charitable organizations don’t like to use the word competition, because they’re all working for the greater good, the number of non-profits angling for contributors’ dollars, time, or other resources, has grown by 60 percent in recent times. And there are even for-profit organizations doing some of the same things the Red Cross itself does, such as blood collection. “We still have to attract your attention for your dollar, time, and even the physical part of you that is blood,” she says.

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