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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Professor Deborah McGuinness of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has tinkered for years with applications designed to help people pair the right wine with the right food. McGuinness has used her applications, which she has been toying with since the mid 80s, to help her classes understand the basics of web ontologies. Her latest app is “an exceptional example of what the future of the World Wide Web, often called Web 3.0, might in fact look like.” Read more