David Amerland of Imassera recently wrote, “It seems that $1 billion plus change these days is what’s required to buy a photo-sharing app (if you’re Facebook), a global phone manufacturer (if you’re Google) or a microblogging site (if you happen to be Yahoo). Beyond the jaw-dropping numbers that are casually bandied around for these acquisitions lies a game plan that has every major player struggling to position themselves for relevance and longevity in the semantic web. This ‘new’ web is characterized by two related things: data and connectivity and these happen to be the exact same building blocks out of which web verticals are created.” Read more

Instagram. Tumblr. Pinterest. The web in 2012 is a tremendously visual place, and yet, “visual media still as dumb today as it was 20 years ago,” says Todd Carter, founder and CEO of Tagasauris.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and Tagasauris has put its money on changing the state of things.

Why is dumb visual media a problem, especially at the enterprise-level? Visual media, in its highly un-optimized state, hasn’t been thought of in the same way that companies think about how making other forms of data more meaningful and reasonable can impact their business processes. A computer’s ability to assess image color, pattern and texture isn’t highly useful in the marketplace, and as a result visual media has “just been outside the realm of normal publishing processes, normal workflow processes,” Carter says. Therefore, what so many organizations – big media companies, photo agencies, and so on –  would rightly acknowledge to be their treasure troves of images don’t yield anywhere near the economic value that they can.

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NYC Open Data has created a new Tumblr blog to showcase datasets and visualizations that the organization makes available to developers. According to the blog’s About Us page, “As part of Mayor Bloomberg’s commitment to transparency and innovation, over 800 (and counting!) city datasets are now online for anyone in New York or around the world to explore and access via an API for deeper, real-time integration into apps and websites.” Read more

According to a recent article, “Online influence determiner Klout has doubled the number of its services adding Blogger, Flickr, Instagram, Last.fm and Tumblr to its scoring system, reported TechCrunch. Joe Fernandez, Klout CEO told Mashable, ‘The networks we launched today were chosen to give the Klout score a more holistic view of influence. By adding blogging, photos and music to the interactions that we are already measuring we are moving closer to our goal of providing a complete picture of your influence.’ On the basis of the ways you drive actions among your online friends, followers or subscribers Klout will calculate your influence on these newly included networks.” Read more