Semantic Technologies are gaining momentum and month after month we have reiterative evidence of that. The number of companies that are getting funding for new Semantic projects, and the number of services that use semantics continued during this 2010 first month the pace of the last months.

Other thing that we observe is that the areas where Semantics are strong (search, ad, health…) continue betting on these technologies. Among these areas undoubtedly “Search is king”. During an interview and a preceding presentation, Scott Prevost, principal development manager for Bing search technology at Microsoft, touted developments in search, as well as possibilities during the Web 3.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Microsoft confidence on those technologies moved this company to acquire Powerset two years ago. Now they think that Semantics will be paramount in the evolution of search and that Social Networks will be the key driver:
“When the revolution is happening in Iran and people are using Twitter as the only form of communication, ideally, the search engine should understand what that is, understand from the social network what are the important communications and help to organize that”, said Scott Prevost, principal development manager for Bing.

The other big players in this field have very similar ideas to Microsoft ones. This is the case of Google, and other little engines like T2 that have seen Semantic Technologies as an opportunity to enter in this competitive market, as it is reported by Techcrunch.

This vision of Microsoft about Social networks as a big driver of semantic technologies is widely echoed by lots of articles on technology. Catching the meaning of unstructured information from conversations can enhance many applications, for instance FunnelScope’s hotel search engine takes this, quantifying user hotel reviews into ratings that can be quickly and easily understood. FunnelScope’s unique semantic technology was used in scoring the reviews.

Other little companies are struggling to offer innovative solutions to tap the network, I-nable Solutions (one of the hottest Indian companies) has launched a consumer web offering www.kreeo.com to provide contextual access to right information and people in real time while addressing the issues of information overload, redundancy, reducing attention span, irrelevance and spam.

Very related to this feature of extracting the sense of one text, some companies are trying to improve the rates of advertisement performance. As in previous months this trend is getting consolidated as it offers a clear funding source.  In this area Peer39, one leading online semantic advertising company,announced the general availability of SemanticProtect, a solution that leverages semantic targeting to protect brands in real time. It is based on an analysis of the sites text to detect when the sense is not adequate to insert one brand ads. A good post diving in this business niche is this.

Other similar service has been launched by PinPoint, that is based on the semantic web platform OpenAmplify, and identifies the most pertinent keywords on a web page via semantic analysis.

Though SaaS model can take advantage of Semantic Technologies too, usually we are scarce of news about movements related to semantic technologies in this area. Nevertheless, this month we find that Ohio-based Rescentris has just announced that it is releasing its Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) for the life sciences and pharmaceutical research industries as a SaaS. This is a Collaborative Electronic Research Framework (CERF), available immediately, providing researchers with a means to securely share information across the web, as well as secure record keeping. This tool uses semantic technologies to maximize access to data.

Perhaps this is the final idea in Salesforce.com movement, company which has declared the adquisition of GroupSwim, a provider of on-demand social software for businesses. GroupSwim was developing a Web 2.0-based user interface that captures collaborative work in multiple formats using semantic technology

The synergies between of speech recognition and semantic technologies have been considered by Resolvity, Inc, that has declared its On-Demand Speech Application Platform. This platform incorporates many advanced features like intelligent dialog management, semantic understanding, knowledge modeling, and problem solving.

Very similar is Attensity Announcement of New Mobile Features for Attensity Analyze for Voice of the Customer V5.2. “This new release of mobile functionality for our text analytics application provides a great leap forward in our ability to enable business users, customer analysts and marketers to harness massive amounts of customer information found inside and outside the firewall, even when they are on the road”, said Ian Hersey, CTO of Attensity Group

About applications of semantics to news area, it is interesting  to mention the  Semantic  News Robots used by LaInformacion to list thousands of news stories in real time, cutting resources costs. The concept of linked data value to journalism is considered in this article from the Guardian.

The UK Government announcement to free vast quantities of data has been one of the hottest news of the month.  Users will able to take the data, re-use it, mash it up, create apps, weave it in with other data and in general, engender semantic web practices.

We can also measure the success of semantic technologies by funding obtained, for example Modus Operandi, a Melbourne software and information technology company, won a $1.2 million Small Business Innovation Research project from the U.S. Marine Corps Systems Command to develop a system to help analysts rapidly sort through large amounts of information and find critical patterns using semantic intelligence technologies, investments in systems related to semantic technologies, and personnel expansions.