Ken Yeung of The Next Web reports, “Persado, a data-driven marketing service, believes that its ‘Marketing Persuasion Technology’ can help advertisers compose better messaging that it believes will return greater value. Today, it has received $15 million in a round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Along with Bain Capital, Persado has also received funding from TLcom Capital. The company tells us that it will use the service to further its investment in research and development, and increase its staff with the hiring of more engineers, data scientists, and building its sales and marketing teams.” Read more

Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar recently shared eight business models created by Deloitte UK to promote open data and insight. Howard writes, “When I asked whether the push to free up government data was resulting in economic activity and startup creation, I started to receive emails from people around the United States and Europe. I’ll be publishing more of what I learned in our ongoing series of open data interviews and profiles over the next month, but two responses are worth sharing now. The first response concerned Deloitte’s ongoing research into open data in the United Kingdom, conducted in collaboration with the Open Data Institute.” Read more

Jane Wakefield of the BBC reports that Glasgow has been awarded a £24 million grant by the British government to make it one of the UK’s first smart cities. She writes, “[Glasgow] will use the money on projects to demonstrate how a city of the future might work. They will include better services for Glaswegians, with real-time information about traffic and apps to check that buses and trains are on time. The council will also create an app for reporting issues such as potholes and missing bin collections. Other services promised by the council include linking up the CCTV cameras across the city with its traffic management unit in order to identify traffic incidents faster.” Read more

A new article out of the company reports that “EasyAsk, the natural language technology and solutions leader, [has] announced the opening of EasyAsk’s first European office at Thames Valley Park, Reading, UK. In 2012, EasyAsk grew revenues by 40% and increased its customer base by 22% with new names including The North Face, Anna’s Linens and Cigars International. In addition, EasyAsk teamed up with Global leader SAP. Gartner listed EasyAsk as Cool Vendor for BI and Analytics and cited the company as ‘one of the premier ecommerce search and merchandizing software providers’ in its research: Best Practices in Strategically Combining Search, Content Analytics and E-Commerce.” Read more

Pearson is looking for an Information Architect in Harlow, England. According to the post, “An opportunity has arisen for an information architect to join the Content and Digital Management team responsible for this very busy and rapidly developing area. Reporting to the Director of Content Architecture, this individual will play a key role in the strategic architecture initiatives currently under way in PI. These include: Developing, documenting and helping to guide the appliance of information architecture standards in all Pearson International businesses, including descriptive metadata, structural metadata, taxonomy and ontology standards. Working on new initiatives that use semantic technologies to increase the findability and reuse of content. Designing and building taxonomies, ontologies, metadata schema and other information architecture products.” Read more

Pearson is looking for a Content Discovery and Metadata Technical Lead in Harlow, Oxford, England. The post states, “As Technical Lead, you will lead the delivery of services and solutions around content discovery and metadata management. You will bring a delivery focus and expertise, specific to product and platform development. This is a unique opportunity to be involved from the very beginning of the Content-as-a-Service platform giving plenty of opportunity for the right Technical Lead to shape , deliver and evangelize it. You will be responsible for working as part of a larger platform team to deliver a set of common, open, shareable technology capabilities that will enable the discovery, retrieval, and management of content within and across Pearson Operating Companies, as well as within and across a diverse technology applications landscape.” Read more

The Guardian reports, “The [British] government has launched an open consultation on the guidance that public authorities will use to enhance the right to data in the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. These provisions, covering the re-use of data and the form in which it is made available, are expected to come into force in April 2013, and – delivering on a commitment in the open data white paper – we are opening up the process of developing the guidance to the public. The white paper presented clear actions to strengthen people’s access to data, improve its usability and ensure that its full potential for economic and social growth is unleashed.” Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for a Python Developer in London, England. According to the post, “The OKFN is recruiting junior and senior Python web developers, primarily to work on CKAN, our open source, open data catalogue. There will also be further responsibilities to develop data visualisation and other data-driven services. CKAN is an open source web-based product written in Python. It allows users to submit, search for and find open data. As well as powering thedatahub.org, CKAN is the catalogue behind the UK government’s data.gov.uk website. It also powers over 30 other catalogues around the world. If you are an outstanding Python web developer, with a keen interest in open data and enjoy working on open-source products, we’d love to hear from you.” Read more

The Open Data Institute has Multiple Openings in Shoreditch, UK. According to the institute, “The UK is the first country in the world to create a body solely dedicated to the business of utilising Open Data. The world’s first Open Data Institute (ODI) is being established and will incubate, nurture and mentor new businesses exploiting Open Data for economic growth. Read more

OpenSpending.org has posted an article about improving the quality of government financial reporting in the UK. The article states, “Spending data is juicy for journalists – why does it get neglected? Many reasons. One key one is that the shelf-life of a spending dataset is pretty short from a journalist’s point of view, if they have to wait 6 months or even a year for spending data they need for a story to be released, then chances are – the sniff of the story they were wanting to write will probably have gone stale.” Read more