South by Southwest Interactive gets underway today in Austin, Texas, and a broad swath of the technology community will be headed there to check out the bands, barbecue, and, oh yeah, the startups. Ever since Twitter had its breakout moment at the 2007 festival, SXSW has been considered a king-maker of sorts. Yet no startup has [...]
Judging bytrending topics on Twitter, I was not alone in reserving an iPad today as pre-orders began for the April 3 launch. The experience was un-Apple-like in the bugs I encountered. Ordering did not work at all on the Apple site in Google’s Chrome browser, but was possible with the odd error page in Internet Explorer. In Chrome, it [...]
As the FTC lays the groundwork for a possible challenge to Google’s purchase of AdMob, it is instructive to look at something else Google has already done to gain a strong foothold in the mobile ad business. Any advertiser that bids through the AdWords system gives Google complete authority over which devices its messages are seen [...]
In another validation of the suddenly hot collective buying trend, LivingSocial has landed $25m in Series B funding from a group of investors including US Venture Partners and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC. But even with new money backing several similar companies, it is still unclear if the latest thing in e-commerce will last for long. LivingSocial [...]
Sony has every right to feel sore that Nintendo and Microsoft have stolen the limelight from it in adding motion-sensing to games. Sony had the EyeToy camera for sensing motion and putting players inside games on the PlayStation 2, long before Microsoft’s forthcoming Project Natal . Its six-axis controller has always had more motion capabilities than the [...]
With this emerging interest in all things Semantic, I think it’s probably a good time-point to reflect a wee bit personally.
It may be relatively novel for the Internet masses to now read about software that can differentiate that Paris is a person as well as a place and how that shows information is being structured semantically. However, it’s not novel to me.
Back in 1999 when I worked in a dotcom JV with the ‘Financial Times’ our third-party software developers had already created a Javascript tool that could crawl through a document and extract keywords. Plus there was a wiki tool that allowed users to highlight, bookmark and categorize other terms according to structured classifications like: Date of Announcement, Date of Completion, Place, Person, Company, Terms of Deal, Deal Value, Legal Firm, etc.
This all went into a sortable database which was searchable online.
This prior direct knowledge and experience may explain why I don’t buy into any marketing hype that every new “Semantic” play that pops up must be some paradigm-shifter or Google killer or even that it’s so innovative it’s “never been done before”. Some media commentators may think that and write that, but that’s because they haven’t been exposed to, worked in or with the dotcoms I have.
My fingers are still crossed for my dynamic Utopian semanticsearch-browse-collectivecollab-wiki-visual3D-synchronousIM-haptic interface and I’m patiently waiting for the likes of Google / Apple / MS / genius start-up to gift it.
I just read some interesting commentary from some friends which compares what they’ve seen of Wolfram Alpha with True Knowledge so I re-visited the True Knowledge site. Clearly, TK has had a redesign as these two screenshots from 2008 and 2009 will show:
The soon-to-be-live-computation WA engine is launching with the same color scheme as the old TK site as well as Primal Fusion’s choice: faded orange.
In our WA compared with TK analysis, we should be aware of and note that systems are built in the mould of their creators and their pre-orientations / pre-dispositions / accumulated pasts. This helps us to contextualize the systems, what each can do and why they’re constructed in the way they have been and are being.
The background of founders can provide us with clues on likely development and strategy of the platform.
From what I can make out from WA’s video presentation, Wolfram’s solution takes its lead from Mathematica and other natural sciences databases. In essence, it’s like taking an online calculator that can generate visuals of trigonometric function graphs (like my Casio 5100FX did when I was a teenager) crossed with elements of:
* Bloomberg + MS Excel + SAS (Statistical Analysis Software) to generate economic charts
* some biochem modeling software
That’s why ‘Der Spiegel’ (http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,624065,00.html) can identify WA’s limitations in information availability/accuracy on politics, popular culture, sports etc. It’s not the natural or default orientation of Wolfram’s team, who spend more time thinking about Fibonnaci and Feynman than Britney or Barack which is what Tunstall-Pedoe’s team does. William Tunstall-Pedoe, the founder of TK, is from a journalistic background so his natural information orientation would be towards what’s published in most papers (politics, popular culture, business, sport, etc.) and that’s the direction he would most likely direct his team efforts towards.
In the greater schema of the Web, my observation is that WA’s launch reflects the trend of commercializing and hybridizing previously closed niche academia sources like Mathematica for the masses. We also see this when, for example, Google takes software that was in architectural niches (e.g., Autocad) and creates free tools like Sketch-up and now Google Draw.
Personally, I’m in favor of this trend. The question will still arise for WA, “How do we make money from our platform?” but they seem to have some cost per embed of a WA-generated search / graph in their business model.
With TK, another important distinction is that its wiki capabilities allow for collective correction. We read the definitions / links provided and we can apply our naturally accumulated knowledge to orientate and refine the definitions / links provided, according to our semantic (aka linguistic) interpretations.
With WA, there may be less scope for collective correction. How many people are going to use pen and paper to check that the integrals and statistics generated by WA are accurate?
In due course, Google will probably release something which is a 3rd way of both: wiki, visual knowledge representation and semantically-linked facts+figures. In fact, it already does in some form with Google Finance:
and now its recently announced Public Data Search capabilities:
Moreover, contrary to misconceptions (or rather lack of proper investigation by some quarters of the Semantic and journalistic space) Google is interested in and has been actively building teams with semantic knowhow for several years.
I wrote a lengthy, objective and well-researched article on this topic last year. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of posting this article on a certain SemWeb platform which I’d entrusted with the safekeeping / stewardship of my and my friends’ content on its public platform. Instead of reciprocally honoring that act of trust, said SemWeb platform’s coding was so awry and poorly architected that they deleted 8 months worth of our collaborative content, including that particular post examining Google’s interests in the semantic space.
Therefore, my hard work on the issue is lost indefinitely — despite the CEO’s non-performance of his own promise to restore our content.
This is personally annoying since my article cast a contextual light on whether any of these Semantic offerings springing up are genuinely paradigm-shifters and “Google killers”. They cannot be Google killers if the basic assumptions about Google not being actively involved in utilizing Semantic knowhow and tools is either fundamentally wrong or flawed.
Alas, I cannot now reproduce that article and the links which I found about Google hiring teams from known Semantic Web-related techco’s like CYC. However, I can point to some articles from Read/Write/Web this January 2009 and from eweek.com in the same month which point towards Google having and progressively incorporating semantic search features:
As I note, I wrote my article last year — May 2008 — several months before R/R/W or eweek did. That SemWeb platform, in their inconsiderate and wholesale deletion of users’ content, is responsible for my article not being available for others to use as a public and democratizing information source that would put into perspective whether any SemWeb offering is a paradigm-shifter or “Google killer”.
From what I’ve road-tested in the SemWeb space to-date, none of them are.
Google remains ahead of the curve both technically as well as the way in which they service and market to users. Certainly some of the businesses and their tools could be better integrated but, nonetheless, the key components remain technically more interesting than those offered by wannabe “Google killers” to-date.
Specifically wrt Wolfram Alpha, I’m sticking with my position as stated previously: I reserve proper assessment of it until I can plug+play it myself, objectively.
This is because all kinds of people have hyped WA or tried to make me believe that “Google doesn’t do semantic search” (their words) — despite me providing analysis which contradicts their convictions and competitive intelligence insights.
If I have a positive / negative perspective on Wolfram Alpha it will be based on my own independent and objective analysis (ok also humorous), and informed with previously accumulated, distilled and connected observations of the Semantic space rather than anyone else’s spin / misinformation / ignorance.
PERSONAL NOTE
I would never trust that SemWeb platform with my content again. At least on my own blog I know my information isn’t suddenly going to be deleted because of some irrational / small-minded / inconsistent / undemocratic whim of someone else.
Most importantly, I am not giving any licensing rights to the SemWeb platform over my content (original articles, images, comments, business models etc.) and their associated copyright for the SemWebco’s use or commercial exploitation. Frankly, their actions showed themselves to be unworthy of my trust and underlined how important it is to have ownership of your content and credit assignation for it.
Their Big Brother policies and breaches of user privacy were also not very appealing as a user-member.
All-in-all, I’m glad I don’t buy into that CEO (words and actions). He’s the same guy who insisted Google isn’t into semantic search, searching with Google is like “looking for a needle in a haystack” and who hypes up supposed “Google killers”. His radar’s way off.
Clearly, mine’s more perceptive, calibrated and spot on.
