The opening keynotes at this week’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference saw two industry giants pump up the volume about how, and why, to apply semantic technology in the enterprise.

At Viacom, the largest pure-play media company in the world, the sheer number of perspectives across an exhaustive portfolio that includes more than 160 networks and 500 digital media properties globally, as well as entertainment behemoth Paramount Pictures Corp., was a factor in giving semantic tech a start. Its pain point, chief architect Matthew Degel told attendees, involved dealing with issues like the creative variations that come with the territory – U.S. vs. international versions of digital assets, or the MPEG-2 take on a clip for broadcast in this country vs. H.264/MPEG-4 formats for streaming the same clip online. “How do you track all this and say that I have 23 files, they are all sort of different but they’re talking about the same thing,” Degel said. “We thought semantics could help address that.”

Multi-platform being the rule of the day, the company faced the challenge of making its material reuseable, findable, searchable and purposeable, Degel said. As it takes steps to its goal of providing a corporate-focused, general purpose application of the technology, Degel explained that the view he takes on semantic technology is to think of it as “helping you deal with a certain amount of uncertainty and chaos.”

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Michael Learmonth of Ad Age reports, “Twitter is attempting to deepen its links to TV — as well as skim TV ad budgets — with a series of new media deals and technology to target ads at TV viewers. Twitter’s ad pitch has been consistent over the past year: advertising on Twitter in conjunction with TV makes TV ads more effective. ‘Our perspective is everybody in digital has it wrong; they have ben going to market with an either-or proposition,” said Twitter global head of revenue Adam Bain. Twitter is a bridge to these different screens and experiences.’ Today, at an Internet Week event, the company unveiled a series of media deals and a targeting tool designed to bring TV advertisers on to Twitter.” Read more

Google Analytics gives web site owners good information about what’s clicking with visitors to their site, how those users got there, and more. But, attaining that insight can be somewhat laborious for those not well-versed in the tool and its interface, says Nick Cassimatis, associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He’s the founder of natural language processing technology startup SkyPhrase. His take: Apply SkyPhrase to the task, and things get a lot easier.

The startup in February began private beta testing of its NLP interface to Google Analytics. “Google Analytics lets you ask things like how many people from California visited the site last month, or which of your pages were most visited on mobile devices,” says Cassimatis. “Our system lets you ask these questions in natural language and get answers to them” more seamlessly than using Google Analytics alone.

Previous to bringing its NLP help to Google Analytics, SkyPhrase had a public site that let users run natural language searches of their Gmail or Twitter accounts, as well as flights and music.

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Seevl, the free music discovery service that leverages semantic technology to help users conduct searches across a world of facts-in-combination to find new musical experiences and artist information, has launched an app for Deezer that will formally go live Monday.  (See our in-depth look at Seevl here, and a screencast of how the service works here.) Deezer is a music streaming service available in more than 150 countries – not the U.S. yet, though – that claims more than 20 million users.

Seevl, which late last year updated its YouTube plug-in with more music discovery features and better integration with the YouTube user interface, models its data in RDF. In a blog post earlier this year, founder and CEO Alexandre Passant explained how the Seevl service uses Redis for simple key-value queries and SPARQL for some more complex operations, like recommendations or social network analysis, as well as provenance. As for the new Deezer app, it provides the same features as the YouTube app for easily navigating and discovering music among millions of tracks, Passant tells the Semantic Web Blog.

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Sunday night’s the big stroll down the red carpet for Hollywood’s elite — for the 85th time. But no need to wait until then to have some fun with old Oscar.

Some services with semantics and sentiment analytics in their genes have already begun. Here are a few examples:

Jinni, the semantic movie and TV Taste engine, has created a detail-filled graphic, based on analysis and cross-referencing it did according to its own Jinni Entertainment Genome (see its blog post here for a look at the entire graphic and more info on its creation):

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According to Tineka Smith of CBR Online, “New research links public sentiment on social media channels with the valuation of individual stocks. The study by Colt Technology services interviewed over 350 UK financial professionals. Over 60% said that public opinion on social media sites played a role in stock prices. While only 7% said that social media was a leading factor, 45% said it definitely had a role to play. Hedge funds and proprietary trading houses are now able to scan social media data and analyse messages into a range of public mood states. An algorithmic or trading strategy is then used to placed trade orders, giving them an edge over competitors who use traditional forms of data.” Read more

Devindra Hardawar of Venture Beat reports, “While I was impressed with Thirst’s gorgeous Twitter client when it launched over the summer, the app was ultimately just that — a very pretty Twitter client. Now Thirst has revamped its iOS app to create a social network for personalized news discovery, taking advantage of the language processing tools it previously developed along with the experience of building a client for a major social network. It’s also launching a web client to satisfy desktop news junkies. ‘Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,’ Thirst Labs chief executive Anuj Verma said in an interview with VentureBeat, hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse.” Read more

Rebecca Burn-Callander of Management Today reports that Twitter has acquired Bluefin Labs for $70 million. She writes, “Twitter and TV, a match made in heaven. In fact, the social network has even released its own report entitled ‘Tune in with Twitter’, all about the burgeoning love affair between the small screen and its new ‘second screen’.  ‘The relationship between Twitter and television is strongly symbiotic,’ it says. ‘Users love talking about what is happening on TV, TV viewers love using Twitter to see other viewers‘ opinions.’ And you just have to look at the volumes of tweets generated by the Superbowl on Sunday, and the amount of 140-character dialogue dedicated to each new episode of The Undateables or Girls or My Mad Fat Diary to confirm the theory.” Read more

Blackberry president and CEO Thorsten Heins with new global creative director Alicia Keys.

The new and long-awaited Blackberry 10 line from Research In Motion (RIM) makes its debut today. The company that once defined the smart phone market has a lot riding on it, and it remains to be seen if the new models debuting today will revive its fortunes. It’s already revived its name: Thorsten Heins, President and CEO, revealed at the launch today that “from this day forward, RIM becomes Blackberry.”

The two models that kick off its re-engineered approach to mobile computing are the Blackberry Q10 with a hybrid touch-screen/keyboard and the Z10 with a full touch-screen and onscreen keyboard, powered by the Blackberry 10 platform. Of the Q10, Heins said, “We built this for all those people who told us, ‘we just have to have a physical keyboard typing experience’.” Given Blackberry users’ well-known attachment to traditional keyboards, getting the onscreen keyboard right is going to be a big concern for tried-and-true Blackberry users.

As on the Blackberry Playbook before it, SwiftKey – the best-selling Android app of 2012— is reportedly behind the virtual keyboard technology on the new models. Though that vendor wasn’t named in the launch presentation during the demo of the touch-screen keyboard capabilities, the features Blackberry demonstrated pointed to the company’s leveraging the cross-platform SwiftKey software development kit for at least some of the new devices’ capabilities.

And what’s behind SwiftKey is natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technology to speed up touch-screen typing.

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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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