Smart Web Blog

Top 10 Semantic Web Companies for 2008

ReadWriteWeb today announced it's list of top semantic web companies for 2008. Semantic technology has manifested in mainstream apps in different forms during the past year and the folks at RWW have been at the forefront of discovering, analyzing and bringing it to the broader audience. So big kudos to them for such a great job.

Both Yahoo's introduction of SearchMonkey product and Microsoft's acquisition of Powerset demonstrate that the big search engines value semantic technology platforms and are continuing to pursue initiatives in that direction.

I'm excited that, BooRah has been recognized as one of the top companies in the semantic web area. Having spent nearly 3 years building a platform for sentiment extraction and meta data generation, we are now at a stage where we can accelerate deployment into other areas in a much more aggressive fashion.  I'm also very happy for other companies on that list ( many of them are good friends), congratulations!

2009 and future holds great promise for consumers and businesses who will see great improvement in their interactions with the products that will be powered by semantic technology.

SES San Jose - Semantic Search Session

The 10th Annual SES event will be at San Jose from Aug 18-22, 2008. The conference boasts attendance and participation from top Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.. and many early stage companies demonstrating start of the art search technologies. I'll be there for BooRah on a "Semantic Search" panel along with other industry big wigs such as Yahoo, Ask.com, Powerset, Hakia etc.. Join our session on 18th Aug 2008 at 11:15AM.

Here's some details on the session:
As search dominates our Internet use, this session will explore the new generation of semantic technologies that look to radically change the future. Different companies have taken different approaches to increasing relevance and improving quality of search results. From true natural language search being pursued by companies like Powerset/Hakia, to vertical-focused semantic companies such as BooRah and Uptake, this session will discuss how consumers will benefit directly from these new sets of Internet destinations or enhance experience on existing search engines.

You can see the detailed agenda at Search Engine Strategies Agenda

See you there.

Community Manager - Do you need one?

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb has a great post about the role of community managers and how they influence startups.

A community manager is someone who communicates with a company's users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

See the rest of this great post and comments at Do Startups need community managers?