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."

Watch the interview for Scott's full take on how things are slowly evolving, and where ROI is starting to emerge.

Jeff Revesz is the founder of Adaptive Semantics, a company that uses semantic technologies to evaluate user comments to online postings. The company's largest customer, the Huffington Post, uses the company's product Julia, to evaluate 90,000 comments each day, and identify which may be abusive.

- Machine learning is based on the evaluation of editors, but normalizes the evaluations across the publication.

- A version of Julia (currently in testing) is available for use by bloggers to moderate comments on their own blogs.

- Semantic drift, the tendency of meaning and acceptance to change over time, is part of the ongoing update process to keep up with social norms.

Listen to my interview with Jeff.

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.

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.

Prevost will be giving the opening keynote at this week’s Web 3.0 conference, and he plans to focus on how the incremental inclusion of more and more semantic data in search is affecting everything from search quality, to relevancy of results, to even speed in the sense that people can complete their tasks or find the information they need faster.

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.

Jim Stanley, VP of Products for Technology and News for CBS Interactive. What that means is that Jim manages the Cnet web site. After 7 years working with semantics, the technology is thoroughly entrenched in the business and its properties.

- Semantics processes add secondary information from structured data provided by manufacturers.

- A variety of topic pages are generated by gathering content from a variety of content silos that house downloads, video, audio, and text. Semantic processes aggregate content from Cnet and external sources.

- The "More like this" feature on Cnet news leverages semantic analysis to present related articles to readers.

Listen to my interview with Jim to understand more about how CBS Interactive and Cnet put semantic technology to use in delivering content.

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.)

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.

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.

- Zemanta is available as a free plug-in for most blogging platforms and for Gmail.

- Zemanta's enterprise level product is configurable to direct its search to those content sources the enterprise, or publisher determines relevant.

- An API is available for developers, and Zemanta reports that there are some interesting developments being made, particularly for social media.

- Suggested content may include content from Wikipedia, Freebase, Facebook, and general online content.

- Developers using Zemanta's API are able to make use of the links and identifiers returned by Zemanta's process.

Listen to my interview with Andraz to understand more about how Zemanta intends to be loggers "best friend."

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.”