CEOs Hunsinger and Spivack Talk About Evri's Acquisition of TwineThe Semantic Web Blog had a chance to speak with Evri CEO Will Hunsinger and Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack, in separate interviews, right after the news of Evri’s acquisition of Twine broke. They provide some insight into the deal, and what it portends for T2, the next version of Twine that Radar Networks has been working on over the last few months. Hunsinger says the two companies are a good fit because, though each was looking at different types of content, each also was trying to solve the same problem: “Enabling the end consumer to filter through the noise and get the precise, relevant results set,” as he explains it. “Twine was going after verticals and content areas that were more semi-structured or even structured data, like recipes, where we are going after temporal trending data, like news and tweets. But you put the two together and you have the ability to address the problem for consumers of getting the most interesting, relevant information. …We were never focused on evergreen content like recipes, and so on, but with T2 we can bring these together and can apply these technologies for a much richer, deeper and broader consumer experience.” Twine Bought By EvriThere have been rumors afoot for some time that Radar Networks’ Twine was being acquired, possibly by Microsoft. Turns out the acquisition is by Evri. The Microsoft connection? Maybe it’s that Evri and Twine have had backing by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Wave Hits B2B Media Part 2, Current Innovators
Boy, that last post on B2B Media sure was gloomy! How about some root canal for light relief? Seriously, lets look forward to the bright future. In this post we will look at 12 firms that are doing very well as intermediaries between buyers and sellers in a B2B market. We call these the "12 straws in the wind of change." From these successes we will draw 10 general lessons about the future of B2B Media. We call these the "10 themes songs from the future." What's The Inspiration for Semantic Web Innovation? (Part 2)
You might say NetBase was inspired by a young engineer’s disappointment: Some time ago, Osofsky was a passionate employee of Ariba in its earlier days as a B-to-B marketplace, and saw a project he’d worked on for a year get the axe. Looking back, he understands that that kind of thing happens all the time in the business world, but at the time it fueled his determination “to not see that happen to any work I did or any other engineer did.” So he headed for MIT’s Sloan School of Management to learn how to do innovation the right way. There he learned that innovation is a successful combination of understanding the needs of consumers and customers, and understanding what new technologies and inventions are available that might be applied in interesting ways to address those needs. Wave Hits B2B Media Part 1, Current Cash Cows
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. What's The Inspiration for Semantic Web Innovation? (Part 1)
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. Get More Out of User-Generated Content With Bueda Tag Transformation API
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. Wave Hits Financial Services Part 3: The Semantic Web Future
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." True Knowledge Builds Up Its Beta
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. Wave Hits Financial Services Part 2: Disruptive innovation
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. Publishers Take Seat at Metadata Table With GiantChair
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. The MultiLingual Semantic Web Matters For Businesses And EveryDay Web UsersSAP, 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. |
The Voice of Semantic Web Business
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For our next look at the inspirations for semantic web innovation, we spoke with Michael Osofsky, co-founder and chief innovation officer of NetBase. (See the first in the series 
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.
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.
Last week U.K.-based 
In the last post we looked at the 3 main sources of cash flow in the financial services industry:
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. 
