The Semantic search technology start-up SemantiNet has completed an initial financing round of $1.7 million from Giza Venture Capital.

SemantiNet was founded in 2006 by CEO Tal Keinan, former head of Scenario Analysis at Morgan Stanley's Risk Management Department, and CTO Talk Muskal, formerly of Go Networks.

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a new report: Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency. This report examines our relationship with our online information, stuff like our Google results and the information we've presented online.

Via Fred from Unit Structures.

" Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks demonstrates its new Twine service which goes way beyond other Web bookmarking and collecting tools. It's hard to explain what this tool does because we haven't seen a tool that does a lot of what Twine does before. Once you try it, though, you'll want everything on the Web to behave like this "

Via Scoble

"Semantic search engine Hakia has raised $2 million of a planned $5 million round, according to VentureWire (via VentureBeat). The funding, from an unidentified investor, follows $16 million in funding that was announced last year, bringing its total raise to $18 million. Previous institutional backers include Noble Grossart Investments Ltd., Alexandra Investment Management, Prokom Investments and KVK. The NYC-based company is one of several startups claiming to be analyze content based on meaning. Others in the space include Powerset and Yedda, which was acquired by AOL. The site has also unveiled a social element."

Via  NYT Technology

Research as Business in Ireland

“The Irish economy needs to get away from its dependency on multinationals and start blazing its own trail,” says Jack Downey, an industry liaison officer with University of Limerick-based Lero, a Science Foundation Ireland-based Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET)."

Bridging the gap between the worlds of academia and business has long been called for but rarely achieved in Ireland. In the US, the story is different insofar as most companies look keenly to college research as portals to riches and it is understood that 60pc of the academic staff at Stanford University have commercial interests in business and tech start-ups.

SMEs across Ireland are being urged to invest more in research and development (R&D) in order to create new products that allow them to export more overseas and scale up in size. Enterprise Ireland (EI) is targeting that by 2010 at least 55 companies in Ireland will spend in excess of €2m a year on R&D.

The December issue of the Semantic Report is now out.

"Social networks don't get better as they get bigger. They get better based on their quality, a measure Plaxo believes it possesses and aims to exploit in its Pulse network.

For social networks, you have to throw out Metcalfe's law, which states that the value of a telecommunications network grows proportional to the number of its users—the more people using phones, the better that network is.

The value of a social network lies in the context of the social relationships and the ease with which one can organize and get access to others in the network, said Geoff Bock, an analyst at the Gilbane Group. For example, the fact that Plaxo or LinkedIn have millions of users is not as important to Bock as the ability to connect with people they know professionally and put them in context, he told eWEEK. "

Via eWeek

"Lots of people are doing research around the Web...and there are interesting results, but a lack of a core curriculum in the universities," Tim Berners-Lee told a gathering of scientists at HP Labs and other Silicon Valley executives here. "I've been told the Web has 10 to the 10 to the 11 (number of) Web sites. The brain we study as a complex system." So why not the Web?

What millions of Internet users take for granted every day--using the Web as a means to download movies, read the news, or check Facebook--will look drastically different five years from now, and that calls for study of it as a science, according to Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the Web Science Research Initiative . Launched a year ago, WSRI is a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Southampton in England, and is encouraging the study of both the social and technological implications of wide-scale use of the Web.

More found here.

" So-called data portability and data ownership is a hot topic of late, and with good reason: with all the talk of the opening of social networking sites and the loss of presumed privacy, there’s been a commensurate acknowledgment that the value is not in the portability of widgets (via OpenSocial et al)...

Now, Doc’s call for action is well timed, as we near the close of 2007 and set our sights on 2008. "

Data portability and thinking ahead to 2008

"Scott Deitzen, president and CTO of Zimbra, gave the third talk last Friday at Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo. Zimbra has been on the go for four years (so they are Web 2.0 pioneers), and embarrassingly I told Scott that I only found out about them very recently (sorry!). Scott’s aim for this talk was to share the experience of having one of the largest AJAX-based web applications (thousands of lines of JavaScript code). Since their status has changed since they originally signed up for the conference, he mentioned that Yahoo! are the new owners of Zimbra. But Scott affirmed that Zimbra will remain open source and committed to their partners and customers who have brought Zimbra to where it is."

John Breslin reports some more at the Web 2.0 conference in Tokyo.