Waqar Hasan, who in a past life was vp for data platforms at Yahoo, hasn’t lost his fascination with the power a business can gain when it knows what to do with its data – make that its Big Data. Now CEO of InsightsOne, Hasan and his company are focused on making predictive analytics accessible to the general B2C marketing organization via the cloud.

Among its early customers is online review site Angie’s List, which in mid-January selected the cloud-based predictive analytics solution to deliver a 1-to-1 consumer marketing experience to its members.

“We’re targeting B2C marketers to increase the relevance and profitability of their consumer interactions, by applying micro-segmentation on Big Data to extract all sorts of signals from the data and turn it to a more powerful predictor for the future – who will buy what and who is likely to churn,” Hasan says.

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Courtesy: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC <3

Yesterday we began our look back at the year in semantic technology here. Today we continue with more expert commentary on the year in review:

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead:

I would mention two things (among many, of course).

•  Schema.org had an important effect on semantic technologies. Of course, it is controversial (role of one major vocabulary and its relations to others, the community discussions on the syntax, etc.), but I would rather concentrate on the positive aspects. A few years ago the topic of discussion was whether having ‘structured data’, as it is referred to (I would simply say having RDF in some syntax or other), as part of a Web page makes sense or not. There were fairly passionate discussions about this and many were convinced that doing that would not make any sense, there is no use case for it, authors would not use it and could not deal with it, etc. Well, this discussion is over. Structured data in Web sites is here to stay, it is important, and has become part of the Web landscape. Schema.org’s contribution in this respect is very important; the discussions and disagreements I referred to are minor and transient compared to the success. And 2012 was the year when this issue was finally closed.
•  On a very different aspect (and motivated by my own personal interest) I see exciting moves in the library and the digital publishing world. Many libraries recognize the power of linked data as adopted by libraries, of the value of standard cataloging techniques well adapted to linked data, of the role of metadata, in the form of linked data, adopted by journals and soon by electronic books… All these will have a profound influence bringing a huge amount of very valuable data onto the Web of Data, linking to sources of accumulated human knowledge. I have witnessed different aspects of this evolution coming to the fore in 2012, and I think this will become very important in the years to come.

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Yahoo! is looking for a Principal Software Development Engineer in Sunnyvale, CA. The post states, “Yahoo is looking for a experienced and motivated principal software engineer (in an applied scientist role) interested in solving real-world practical problems that have direct business impact. More precisely, you will be working to build and improve our Knowledge platform; solving problems related to knowledge acquisition, knowledge integration, knowledge management, and knowledge-based applications; working closely with other teams across the Engineering and Science organizations.” Read more

Search engine Yandex, which like Google, Bing and Yahoo takes advantage of sites using schema.org markup to improve the display of search results, today released a search app for the iPad. The other major search providers have already accounted for the iPad in their search portfolios.

According to the release announcing the news, the Yandex Search App offers a tablet-optimized, intuitive interface marked by the ability for users to open pages as tabs in a browser – as many as they wish – so they can switch between tabs and search results within one screen.

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Schema.org has announced that GoodRelations is now fully integrated into the markup vocabulary backed by Google, Yahoo!, Bing/Microsoft, and Yandex (read our past schema.org coverage). GoodRelations is the e-commerce vocabulary that has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 (previous coverage).

In the official announcement, R.V. Guha (Google) says, “Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features.”

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The recommendation problem is a machine-learning problem, says  startup Jybe, and one that it aims to address with its iPhone app that now is in beta. Coming soon (though not immediately) to the iPhone 5, which will require some redesigning to maximize real estate, the mobile app supports earlier iPhones, the iPod touch and iPads running iOS 4.3 or later.

Unlike services such as Yelp, that are more reviews than recommendations, Jybe takes the “serendipitous discovery” approach to real-world goods and services (movies, books, restaurants, and dishes). Founded by CEO Arnab Bhattacharjee, CTO Tim Converse, and chairman of the board Tuoc Vinh Luong, a team with a slate of experience in the search engine industry at names like Yahoo and Powerset, Jybe looks to provide implicit search, i.e. search without query. “The only way to figure out your interests is to figure out who you are, what you like and surface things interesting for you to consume,” says Bhattacharjee.

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On Friday, June 15, 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 about the recent SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco and where the world of Semantic Tech is today.
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I was toying with another title for this post – Yet Another Perfect Storm, but I think that particular metaphor (although appropriate here) has been somewhat over done.  So what sparked this one then?

I am on the long flight back from the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco to the good ol’ UK, to see how they got on with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee festivities.  I am reflecting on what my week at the conference has told me.  It has told me that things are a changing – I got that impression last year too, but more so this year.  Obviously, from the title of this post, it has something to do with Schema.org, Wikidata, and the Google Knowledge Graph….

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Panelists: Ivan Herman (Moderator), Dan Brickley, R.V. Guha, Peter Mika, Steve Macbeth, Jeffrey Preston, Alexandre Shubin, Evan Sandhaus

A packed room at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco played host to the much-anticipated Schema.org panel on Wednesday morning. As W3C semantic activity lead and moderator Ivan Herman had hoped (see this article), the discussion didn’t get bogged down in a duel between RDFa and microdata, but rather emphasized some important accomplishments of the last year and looked forward to future work.

As Herman put it, the only discussion he wanted to have around RDFa was to announce that the proposed RDFa 1.1 recommendations are expected to be published as official W3C standards Thursday, and that there had been a lot of interaction with the schema.org folks to make this useable for them as well.

Wednesday’s panel was composed of: Dan Brickley, of Schema.org at Google;  R.V. Guha of Google;  Steve Macbeth of Microsoft; Peter Mika ofYahoo!; Jeffrey W. Preston of Disney Interactive Media Group; Evan Sandhaus of The New York Times Company; and Alexander Shubin of Yandex.

Here are highlights of what took place:

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Perhaps one of the most anticipated panels at next week’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco is the Wednesday morning session on Schema.org. Since the announcement of Schema.org just prior to last year’s SemTech Business Conference on the west coast, using the Schema.org shared vocabularies along with the microdata format to mark up web pages has been much debated, and created questions in the minds of webmasters and web search marketers along the lines of, “Which way should we go? Microdata or RDFa?”

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