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Siri formally launched itself into the eager hands of iPhone 3GS users late last week, as a free download in the Apple iTunes Store. On the Siri blog CEO Dag Kittlaus catalogued the stats behind the much-awaited virtual personal assistant: 5 years of work, 42 integrated services, 6,540 issues resolved, and UI redesigns once a day, among them – along with other figures such as number of soft drinks consumed in the process (12,090), pizza slices eaten (3,375) and average weight gain per person since the first day of employment (14 pounds).

Siri doesn’t yet have covered “Best Gyms/Diet Centers” near its offices, but the first version of the application can help you find (within range of your location) and book restaurants serving the cuisine you fancy, movies and events that meet your time and taste criteria, and taxi services to get you from where you are at point A to where you want to be at Point B – all through natural language voice or text queries. Siri, according to the company, now also is learning how to handle reminders, flights stats and reference questions to take it beyond its V1 self-described status as “Out and About Mobile Entertainment Assistant.”

The daily UI redesign comment in Kittlaus' blog is likely literal. Tom Gruber, Siri’s co-founder, talked about Siri’s delivering on the “big think small screen” concept with the Semanticweb Blog back in December, discussing its goal of harnessing the powerful trends of cloud computing, 3G networks, and semantic technologies to help “make people smart at the interface.” There aren't many early comments on the iTunes blog but the few there indicate it is succeeding (e.g. "You don't even need to think of which app to pull up to find information about shows or restaurants or just about any other life situation."

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The nation’s youth is thinking about a semantic web. At least some of them are. On the 2010 list of Intel Science Talent Search 2010’s 40 Finalists is an entry dubbed “Semantic Image Retrieval and Interactive Exploration of Large Image Collections,” the brainchild of 18-year old David Chienyun Liu, a student at San Jose’s Lynbrook High School.

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Semantic social search engine TipTop Search has plans in the works to build up its shopping product. Launched at the end of last year, the shopping portal on the site directs queries to Amazon, much as its health, movies and other social search products plumb Twitter’s depths. It brings back specific products in the category of interest (handbags, perfumes, etc.) that pulls together ratings for key attributes such as overall quality and value for the money based on its extraction and analysis of the unstructured data for that entity culled from user reviews about it.

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The recent Linked Data Product Development Lab at MIT, billed as an opportunity to create the next killer app, was born out of its organizers’ desire to create both a highly adoptable, viral and compelling case for what sets semantic technology apart from the other kinds of technologies that people are playing with on the web -- and also to create something that would be sustainable as either a business or open source project. The winner, LocalFocus, seems to have legs on both fronts, and its competitors present some interesting potential, as well.

The Lab’s co-chairs – K. Krasnow Waterman, who came to MIT as a Sloan Fellow and is a visiting fellow, DIG, CSAIL, MIT, and technology entrepreneur Reed Sturtevant — say they picked a cross-section of judges to ensure that both the technology and business viewpoints were accounted for in picking a winner. They included luminaries ranging from world wide web inventor and MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee and MIT Media Lab professor Alex Pentland, who’s also a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science, to serial entrepreneur Brian Shin, to VCs Alex Finkelstein from Spark Capital and Austin Westerling of Charles River Ventures, among others.

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As the round of depressing job statistics continues, those in job search mode may want to take advantage of the new cloud-sourcing feature from Zoom Information, which maintains a comprehensive and daily-updated database of more than 45 million people at more than five million companies. The feature is called FreshContacts, and the idea is basically this: Trade your business contacts (anonymously) from your Outlook database for a free two-month subscription to the wealth of contacts in its PowerSell database.

The service formally launched this month but it’s been running in beta mode since October and so far it’s been downloaded by 13,000 people and has led to the addition of 1 million unique email addresses to ZoomInfo's business roll call. At the current rate the company expects to have more than 10 million newer or updated contacts from this source. “We have a history in the recruiting industry that 9 of the top 10 search firms use us, so in terms of being found by a recruiter it’s important to be up there, “ says Chip Terry, VP and GM of Enterprise Products.

ZoomInfo’s history marrying semantic search to deliver up-to-date business intelligence about where the potential contacts you want to reach in your employment hunt really are now, along with user community profile input, is what the company touts as a core value-add in the job finder space today, where proactive networking matters.

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Interest in the Semantic Web and its possibilities for business is building every day. Many tech-savvy business leaders and IT execs are eager to explore the area in greater depth. The Executive’s Quick Start Guide to Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, a new report from Semantic Web Research, a division of WebMediaBrands (which publishers this blog), aims to help them get up to speed.

The SemanticWeb Blog spoke to the author of the report, Mills Davis, founder and managing director of Project10X, a research consultancy specializing in next wave semantic technologies, solutions, and business models, about the research. (The report is the first in a series, and you can find out more about that here )

SemanticWeb Blog: You talk in the new report, Executive’s Quick Start Guide to Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, about the massive shift the next wave of the Internet represents in the coming decade. You paint a future world of ubiquitous computing, connected things, agents and services, and talk about the changes that will shape this -- continuous and autonomous communication, massive scale processing, and a dramatic decentralization of control from the more centralized models that have defined everything from enterprise coordination to security. Do you believe most businesses understand how the Semantic Web and semantic technologies are critical for meeting the challenges this future creates, and seizing its opportunities?

Davis: It depends on your time horizon. Some businesses, government agencies, and non-profits are already quite engaged. There are plenty of companies that don’t get it yet, too. New companies aren't waiting. At Project 10X we’ve been working with some startups—and not necessarily technology plays—that are semantic from the ground up. For example, there’s one group in the health and wellness space whose whole business approach is heavily semantic, but not in a way that places demands on customers or suppliers to learn new technology.

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How can greater exposure of social data in semantic web formats be a game-changer? Peter Mika, researcher, search at Yahoo!, has a lot of ideas on the subject. Mika, the author of Social Networks and the Semantic Web, will be speaking at a panel at next week’s Web 3.0 conference on the Semantic Web for Social Media, and he took some time to explore some of the issues around the topic with us. Read on:

SemanticWeb Blog: Is more social data being exposed on the web in semantic web formats, and how can this be leveraged/analyzed to create new value for businesses/other organizations/consumers?

Mika: Most social data is unfortunately still either walled off completely, available in HTML only or exposed through proprietary APIs returning non-semantic formats.

There has been some consolidation both in technology and market terms, which makes the integration of particular services easier and more efficient. For example, technological "glues" such as the Yahoo Query Language are enabling the average developer to integrate four or five of his/her favorite APIs within an hour. However, providing services that integrate information on a global scale would still run into the problems of insufficient data and incompatible APIs. As an example, major search engines still cannot perform the kind of high precision people search that semantic technologies should enable. (A search for Peter Mika still intermixes results related to the computer scientist and the ballet dancer.)

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We haven’t yet worked out all the issues that will enable the Semantic Web to gain traction on a mass scale across applications, processes and industries. But enough of them have been addressed so that we can begin to understand what portion of the Semantic Web can support real commercial opportunities. That’s how Mark Greaves, director of knowledge systems at Paul Allen’s asset management firm Vulcan Inc. sees it – and that has positive implications in particular for three market areas.

These areas include enterprise BI, and more broadly strategic enterprise IT; web marketing; and newer web 3.0 businesses, says Greaves, who will be speaking on the Semantic Web’s evolution at next week’s Web 3.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Greaves has been a key part of that evolution, both with the work he currently has underway at Vulcan’s Project Halo, and in his past life as program manager in DARPA’s Information Exploitation Office for the DAML program. DAML developed many of the initial languages and tools that lie at the foundation of the Semantic Web. Here’s Greaves’ take on both the opportunities – and the challenges – that surround the Semantic Web today.

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Thomson Reuters has made its first round of 2010 updates to its OpenCalais tools.

In June the company upgraded its service with social tags, which are story descriptors in simple language aimed at helping editors filter news by human interest rather than the standard news categories, such as sports or politics. Now it’s enhancing them in Version 4.3 with more generalized, aggregate tags and with a new feature dubbed News Names. This one hits at the person disambiguation challenge. As it’s described, now when both partial or extended names appear in content, the service will also suggest the most commonly used form of those names.

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Search engines are on board with the slow but steady march to leverage structured data in delivering query results. Are marketing departments across industries marshalling their resources to take advantage of all the opportunities that are enabled by structuring data?

Yes, and no, says Scott Brinker, the president and CTO of marketing technology company Ion Interactive. The people within companies who have the Semantic Web technology expertise are starting to realize the importance of “co-opting the marketing department and those with business objectives with this technology, and doing a better job of advocating what those benefits can be,” says Brinker, who will be participating in a session on the Semantic Web in marketing at the Web 3.0 conference later this month. “For marketers and the business side, it’s hard for them to conceptualize the value of data as a marketing tool to the outside world. Everyone is on board with having that data internally, but having the mechanisms to share that data with the outside world to get new customers and strengthen relationships, that is still a new concept.”

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