" Semantic analysis service Inform.com announced today that the company has received a $15 million investment from Spark Capital. Inform analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher's own content archives, affiliated sites or the web at large to augment content being published. The company says it already has more than 100 clients, including CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com and the Economist. Those who would contend that semantic web technology has not arrived can stick that in their pipes and smoke it.

Inform says its technology determines the semantic meaning of key words in millions of news stories around the web every day in order to recommend related content. The theory is that by automating the process of relevant link discovery and inclusion, Inform can easily add substantial value to a publisher's content. Inform also builds out automatic topic pages, something you can see around WashingtonPost and CNN.com. It sounds like a solid value proposition to me. This is the kind of thing that semantic technology is best at providing: making content machine readable allows the human mind to focus on genuinely creative work instead of determining things like what constitutes related content. "

Via Blogjunkies

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.

"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.

The future of the Web?In this video from MIT/Stanford Venture lab,some of the best emerging companies in the semantic web space present their different approaches to realizing the vision. Questions that get asked include:

How can we best implement the vision of the semantic web? What will we do with the web once it is structured with semantic information? What new applications will appear? Where is the consumer value and how should it be marketed? What new businesses can be built on top of the semantic web that are not possible today? Will the semantic web ultimately bring about a new intelligence that surpasses that of humanity, sparking a new era of non-biological evolution?

Its free to register.

Via Minding the planet.

Video found here.

"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.

"The Orderly Semantic Web (roughly analogous to what Spivack calls The Intelligent Web) is never going to happen. Universally agreed upon upper ontologies? Not likely. …. The totality of human intelligence expressed using nothing more than syllogisms and first order logic? Set your mind at ease, Clay Shirky, this won’t be necessary."

Jim Hendler on Shirkyng his responsibility.

"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.