Over here at SemanticWeb.com, we’re big fans of what co-founder Nick Holzherr and his team are doing at Whisk, a UK-based startup that allows users to create a complete online grocery shopping list built out of their chosen recipes. Nick gave his second keynote address in front of a SemTechBiz audience this morning–the first came at SemTechBiz UK in London last year. If you haven’t had a chance to read our past coverage of Whisk, here’s a quick overview of what the innovative startup offers today:

Whisk is using natural language processing (NLP) and other semantic solutions to bring together online recipe content with online grocery retailers. Currently only available in the United Kingdom, users can turn to Whisk’s phone app or browser widget to pull together recipes that they want to attempt that week. The Whisk platform then analyzes the recipes to create shopping lists of all the ingredients that the user will need in order to complete the recipes. The system has the sense to figure out appropriate quantities of each ingredient and eliminate staples like salt and sugar that the user probably already has at home. (Users can re-add these items to the list if they don’t, in fact, have these ingredients in their pantries.) The user then has the option to take that list to their local grocery store or, even better, purchase the groceries automatically from an online grocery retailer. continued…

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The upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco (June 2-5) will feature a number of sessions, panels, and keynotes focused on semantic web start-ups. The Start-Up Competition will highlight some of the most promising new companies in the world of semantic technology today, and other events will expound the strengths and successes of companies that have made it past the term “start-up” to full-fledged “competitors.” continued…

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Whisk, the U.K.-based service for matching online recipes with online ingredients-shopping, went live in a big way at year’s end, with a partnership with TV channel and recipe publisher Food Network. As its iOS and Android apps rolled out to accompany its browser plug-in, Food Network in the U.K. featured a button on its recipe search engine for a widget that taps into the service, which is underpinned by semantic technology and a cloud infrastructure. A recent second round of angel funding also has taken the service’s total investment to more than £500,000.

Whisk co-founder Craig Edmunds reports about 12,000 app downloads so far, and about a 1.5 percent steady click-through from the button on the publisher’s site – right where it expected to be at this point, he says. Getting the big-name Food Network signed on actually changed plans a bit for the service, which The Semantic Web Blog covered earlier here, and whose co-founder Nick Holzherr was a keynote speaker at the London SemTech event.

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Public Sector Semantics

There was a lot of interest in the Public Sector work. One of the presentations that highlighted the Open Data movement was Nigel Shadbolt‘s Keynote presentation about the recently launched Open Data Institute. We have covered the ODI here, and Professor Shadbolt shared some exciting insights and perspectives on the Open Data economy. In his presentation, he referred to a report on which he collaborated that was published by Deloitte Analytics. This free white paper is available for download.

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“The crux of it is that you can take any recipe on the ‘Net and turn it into a transaction in on online market,” says co-founder Craig Edmunds. “There’s a machine translation problem from the recipe up through to our internal language, which is one NLP problem, and then another is from our internal language into online markets.” Another leg of the work is that the service seeks to not match to just one item at a market but as many as possible, and consider user preferences as to which is the optimal product, too.

At the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in the U.K., Edmunds will be considering how the issues of machine translation, manual intervention, personalization and the cloud intersect in creating a service that adds all the ingredients they need for dishes they find online straight into their online shopping basket.

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Courtesy: Flickr/Images of Money

Where is semantic technology better poised to be better commercialized – the U.S. or Europe? With The Semantic Business and Technology conference heading across the ocean to the U.K. next month, it seems a good time to provide some perspective on the question.

At the last SemTech conference in San Francisco, 3RoundStones took first place in the Startup competition with Callimachus Enterprise. During a discussion of some of the product’s winning features, talk turned to some of the differences between how semantic technology has progressed in the States and overseas.

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On Friday, July 13, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

This episode includes a discussion with Nick Holzherr, finalist on the BBC One Television Series, “The Apprentice,” and founder of Whisk, a recipe planning idea based on big data and semantic analysis. He was named ‘emerging entrepreneur of the year’ by Insider Magazine in 2010, and Birmingham Young Personality of the Year (Entrepreneurship) in 2011.
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According to a release about the event, “Whisk is a new service that will allow customers to convert recipes automatically into shopping lists within online supermarkets. In his opening keynote presentation, Holzherr will explain from a business and functionality point of view what Whisk offers to the user, the data it will analyse and how the company will extract commercial value from this information. continued…

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