B2B Media is the unglamorous sibling in the media family.

Historically what we used to call trade publishing was as unexciting as the actuarial business; and equally profitable, consistently profitable, consistently for decades. The kind of rock solid cash flow that you could take to the bank. Which is precisely what a lot of folks did during the Great Leverage. These old trade-publishing businesses were bought and sold like pork bellies. Just when the Internet was kicking into it's next cycle, just before the smelly leverage stuff hit the fan and precipitated the Great Recession and about the time when a generation was coming into the workforce saying "what is a print magazine Daddy?" So, B2B Media is right now in the really scary Act 4 of The Creative Destruction 7 Act Play.

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The semantic web is an innovation upon an innovation. As this blog regularly covers, innovations are being built upon its broad shoulders all the time. But what is the inspiration for the innovators who see the potential in using semantic technologies in new and creative ways? And how do they continue to drive that innovation as their services gain traction and their start-ups begin growing?

The SemanticWeb Blog thought this was a topic worth exploring. So this week, we are, having raised the question with a few minds behind some recent semantic web start-ups, and we hope to continue bringing such perspectives as part of our regular coverage going forward.

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The game of tag in the web world isn’t as clear-cut as it is in the schoolyard. On the playground, when you tag someone, you know that person is “It.” Everyone else does too, and they take appropriate action based on that knowledge – that is, run. On the web, when you tag a photo, a video, or other rich or high-density content you create, you know what you’re talking about, but your meaning isn’t always as clear to others who also could take appropriate action if they had a better understanding of what you’ve posted.

Bueda is a hosted services startup that’s trying to help publishers of this user-generated content increase its value by improving their understanding of it. The basic idea is that an outfit – a YouTube or Flickr, for instance – could send Bueda the tags users attach to their content, and in return receive clean metadata and categories to add to that content to better match it to advertising opportunities, enhance additional content recommendations, and increase search accuracy. “It’s the usual things you can do with the semantic web but in a low friction and easy way,” says Bueda CEO and co-founder Vasco Pedro.

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In this science fiction exercise I make some assumptions of what technologies will become mainstream in the medium term and what this will do to the current financial services landscape.

I am being deliberately vague on time lines as it is impossible to predict when change will happen. By "medium term" I am thinking in the 3 to 10 year time horizon that venture capitalists and start-up entrepreneurs need to build substantial value. This is the start-up timing horizon.

We use the start-up timing horizon, as this is not just science fiction fun, this enables scenario planning. Or, to put it in more popular terms, this enables you to "skate to where the puck is going."

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Last week U.K.-based True Knowledge entered the next beta stage for its AI question-answering platform. The grand mission for True Knowledge is to use its semantic technology to build the first Internet-scale platform for directly answering the world’s questions.

It aims to be able to answer more questions as it understands more, thanks to pulling facts from Wikipedia, Freebase, and other online sources but also through the input of users who add people, businesses, or facts to its knowledge base. New in this beta, in fact, is the ability for users to contribute unstructured, or non-semantic, answers.

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In the last post we looked at the 3 main sources of cash flow in the financial services industry:

1. Fees for loaning money to consumers & small biz

2. Fees for connecting providers and consumers of capital for large companies.

3. Fees for managing individual's (aka "consumer's") money.

In this post we will look at some of the modes and ventures that are attacking these markets.

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The book publishing industry – like the newspaper and magazine sectors – is in a state of becoming. Becoming what is the question. The digitization of book content is changing more than book form – it’s changing the entire channel-driven supply chain.

The middleman bookstore, real-world and virtual, is still kicking, but, asks Joseph Esposito, CEO of GiantChair, “with electronic books do you need all that?” And if publishers don’t need all that – or at least if they don’t any longer need to see that as their exclusive portal to sales – how do they get visitors to their sites to build a direct relationship with readers? One answer: Have good metadata, get more search engine traffic, sell more books.

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SAP, the international enterprise software vendor, is just one of the many large companies whose core needs in a globally connected business environment can be addressed in part by the development of a multi-lingual semantic web.

Web services are the heart of SAP’s software, and its requirements to make those services searchable in different languages is one of the use cases for the new European project Monnet (Multilingual Ontologies for Networked Knowledge), whose goal is to provide a semantics-based solution for integrated information access across language barriers. As the Germany-based company’s development work expands further into other parts of the world where the European country’s native language isn’t widely known—India now and probably China in the future—it’s important for programmers there to be able to access the description of SAP’s web services in their native languages, or perhaps English. Making it possible to deal with information at the semantic level will help solve this challenge, allowing for more advanced and uniform integration, aggregation, querying and presentation of information across languages.

The need to deal with such global business issues is just one reason the tech industry is soon to have its First Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web, set for April. But it’s not the only one. International non-profit organizations such as the United Nations are seeing the benefits of transforming their systems to semantic web technologies, and it’s very important to them that the semantic web be able to manage multi-lingual information so that they can communicate with users all over the world who have very different levels of comfort with the English language. “We have the special enterprise, and business intelligence, and certain international organizations that need not only to manage information in many different languages, but also need to customize the information for those different linguistic communities,” says Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Ontology Engineering Group, Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain. She is one of the members of the workshop’s organizing committee.

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During September and October 2008, the financial markets had their meltdown moment. It was scary as hell for anybody who was even remotely close to the action. As a precipitator of the Great Recession, it has impacted us all. But that is all history, right? The stock market is up and everything is back to normal? Wrong. Politicians will regulate the markets so we can get back to normal? Wrong. What is happening under the surface is a much bigger wave, driven by the Internet that is fundamentally shifting the economics and power structures of the financial services business.

This is the first of ten markets in our Semantic Wave series (click here for the introductory posts that set the scene).

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NetBase – the company behind the Insight Discovery next-generation semantic search technology – is looking forward to an interesting spring. The company is working with one of the largest publishers of medical information, and by April about 60 percent of nurses around the world will be looking up information in its resources with the help of NetBase’s HealthBase Insight Discovery tool and lenses.

But also in the April timeframe, the next sibling in the NetBase toolbelt, ConsumerBase, will become generally available. It rounds out a line that so far also features ScienceBase; that product's APIs are used in NetBase partner’s Reed Elsevier’s Illuminat8 web-based research tool for the scientific and R&D knowledge worker communities, to help them find and make connections among data to accelerate discoveries and fast-forward commercial opportunities.

CEO and co-founder Jonathan Spier says he’s “super-excited about” the latest addition. Why? Five of the top ten CPG companies in the world are working with NetBase to adapt the vendor’s text analytics, natural-language processing and search and semantic indexing technologies to their own ends. To wit, that is gaining consumer insight both through their internal data as well as through other sources including, as one priority, social media.

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If you are in a market that is going through wild, disruptive change where nobody knows how it will play out, you might be thinking:

"We have seen this movie before."

You have.

Markets go through fundamental disruptive change in fairly predictable phases, albeit with subtle variations that make it interesting. Understanding what act your industry is currently in will help you figure out your own role, whether as employee, entrepreneur or investor.

Here are the 7 acts in the Creative Destruction play:

Act 1. The Old Guard Dominate

This is when a few big companies dominate a market that has not fundamentally changed for decades. Mergers, debt leveraged acquisitions and "roll-ups" have locked the old guard into behemoth structures. No entrepreneur would think of competing against these companies and, if they did, no investor would back them.

Act 2. Straws In The Wind

This is when a few visionary/crazy entrepreneurs see opportunity. Occasionally VCs get active at this stage, but all too often VCs are part of the established order and do not see enough reason to believe that the times are changing. It takes guts to see a few straws blowing about and theorize that this is caused by an invisible wind. The signs of change are far from obvious but "the answer my friend is blowing in the wind".

Act 3. Denial

The changes are now real and the old guard management can see it. But they don't know how to react, so they reach for creative accounting tricks to smooth out earnings and make it look as if nothing has changed. So, when the new numbers do finally appear, it emerges as a crisis, often with a restatement of earnings and a change of CEO. Short-heavy hedge funds do well here.

Act 4. Wild creativity

The crazy entrepreneurs who started at Act 2 are now gaining real traction and major amounts of capital. They are experimenting frenetically to find what is really sustainable/scalable. There are lots of stories in the media about them but, as the old guard numbers still appear to be OK, the accepted wisdom is still that nothing will fundamentally change.

Act 5. Blow up

At this stage the reality can no longer be denied and we see bankruptcies, Chapter 11 restructuring and fire sales.

Act 6. Reconstruction

This is when a new power structure emerges clearly. This is when we see IPOs from the visionary entrepreneurs who started in Act 2.

Act 7.The new old guard dominates

Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of seeing how quickly the new guard arose and think that they can also be deposed quickly. The entrepreneurs who made to this stage will be tenacious, paranoid and really hard to beat - until the next wave comes along.

Which Act Is Your Industry In?

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Mark Johnson of Microsoft Bing, talked with me at the Web3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA this January. Mark talks about his transition from Powerset to Bing, and how semantics is at the root of developing innovative features that power the Bing decision engine, without being intrusive, or even noticeable to users. Watch the interview to understand how Mark sees the progression from search to decisions via Bing.