Alitora Systems

DEMO

Recently, we had an opportunity to go to DEMO, which is a showcase of new up and coming technology companies. It was a spectacular event for companies to present new products to the media and investment community. Unfortunately, we first launched the newest version of our software a few months ago and could not launch at DEMO. Nonetheless, Alitora was invited as a non-presenting attendee to participate in the conference and evaluate it for a future product launch.

The technologies varied but there was very good buzz around semantic technologies. Primal Fusion launched their Alpha consumer product to very positive reviews and we hope to see great things from them in the future.

The general feedback from investors and corporations is that semantic technology is extremely valuable in business and is going to grow this year, despite the economy. We met with several people involved with semantic companies including Metatomics, Siri, Semantic Universe and Radar Networks who are all seeing a serious uptick in business in the last few months. Also, there are numbers of semantic mobile applications that will be coming out for both the iPhone and Blackberry in the next few months. Look forward to smart phone becoming smarter.

All in all it was a very successful trip and we are looking forward to going back.

16 Tons

Working in a start-up is much like working in a coal mine.  I’m not saying there are the constant threats of cave-ins, gas explosions or an inevitable case of black lung, at least not literally.  The two are similar in that you can feel underground and isolated until you take the long elevator to the surface and see a little sunshine. The sunshine I speak of . . . conferences, such as the Web 3.0 Conference that will be held in Santa Clara October 16 and 17. 

I am looking forward to seeing friends whom I have not seen for months, friends who will be showing off their newest version of the coolest things, sharing war stories from sales calls, software bugs, user feedback and venture capital meetings.  I’m looking forward to getting to sit back and remember that start-ups are fun because of the challenges, and not in spite of them.

As part of the Web 3.0 conference Marc and I are sitting on a few panels.  Marc leads off with “From Web 2.0 to 3.0 - Tales from the Trenches” on Thursday morning.  I follow up with a panel entitled “Semantic Startup 101 - Successes, challenges, strategic decisions” in the afternoon.  Marc bats clean up on Friday with “Infrastructure and scalability issues (computing in the cloud etc)” which should be one of the lynch pin panels.  The scalability panel is immediately before lunch and I suspect it will spill over.

The conference should not be all work and no play. The Meetup that I organize, the Palo Alto Semantic Web Group (PAWS) is having a mixer at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, which is after the conference.  The mixer will be blended with a round table discussion about early semantic success stories.  Andraz Tori of Zemanta will be the speaker and lead the discussion about both technical and business success strategies.

I am looking forward to seeing you all at the Web 3.0.

Princeton Entrepreneurs’ Network

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The Princeton Entrepreneurs’ Network (PrincetonEN) is a group created to support young entrepreneurs by bringing them together with successful entrepreneurs and business leaders. As part of this support, they annually hold a business plan competition to help young companies get exposure, make connections ... oh, and there is a nice cash prize! The competition includes companies founded by Princeton alumni, undergraduates, friends, and family, in addition to those who were invited to participate from MBA and entrepreneurship programs across the globe. Entrants submit executive summaries and business plans. Finalists get to make presentations in front of an audience of few hundred including a panel of business people and venture capitalists.

I’m delighted to announce that Alitora was the recipient of this year’s award. I want to give my personal thanks to James Gomez and Sabrina Parsons of Palo Alto Software for hosting the event, and for heading PrincetonEN. I encourage Princeton alumni to join PrincetonEN and help it grow to support other entrepreneurs.

"Life After... Search" Orange Mixr

I recently attended “Life After... Search", an Orange Labs networking and discussion meeting.  The event was intended to get a disparate group of people in a room, provide some food and libation/creative lubrication and get us talking about the future evolution of search.  In attendance were people from Yahoo!, Powerset, Radar Networks, Fujitsu, SRI and Aggregate Knowledge, all of whom had interesting and conflicting perspectives.  While the discussion did not seem to reflect these results, the general breakdown of the group opinion in a written poll breaks down as follows:

 

These poll options may appear a bit cryptic, so allow me to explain. The “Tweets v. Clicks” choice focuses on the way the user inputs the search.  A Tweet on Twitter creates a micro-blog entry, which can be scraped.  The click is a non-lingual acknowledgment that the item clicked is relevant to the user.  Both are just ways that a search provider gets information about a user’s interests.  “Tyranny of Crowds”, “Objectivity is Dead”, “Open Index”, and “Anticipation” focus on how the search industry will manage to give relevant results, or what they perceive as relevant.

I fall into this “I am what I search” camp.  “I am what I search” is a straightforward statement that implies that the sum total of a person is what they seek. It is intellectually honest about how the search industry works and acknowledges the user as the source of information and revenue. The other choices in the poll look at the problem from the search provider standpoint.  I assert the search industry and the several thousand coders who write algorithms and create ontologies cannot know what is relevant to over 5 billion people.  I maintain that relevance must be generated by not just the interface, but also the data about the specific user.  This must be done in a way tailored specifically for each consenting user.

Admit it, pretty much all of us, whether we think about it or not, compose our queries (and by extension our questions, and eventually our worldview) with some consciousness of Google’s limitations. We know that typing in words is probably not the best way to find concepts. One of the main goals of semantic technology in the consumer space is to have the search mechanism understand the general topic of the question, possibly from user-associated data, before the question is even stated.

    Along those lines there must be a large distinction between the desires and needs of the consumer, and the business-to-business market.  For a business user semantic technology will eliminate a huge amount of noise and be a godsend, however in the consumer market this very good anticipatory search can seem disconcerting or invasive.  Information is and will continue to be scraped for use in creating better queries but for the consumer there must be explicit consent.  There must be an acknowledgment that you are giving up a right to your information for the benefit of a better search.  If not, our “Life After . . . Search” will seem Orwellian and perhaps result in a backlash, taking the power of information aggregation away from the search industry and return that burden to users.

Photos of the event were posted by our gracious host Diaine Pascale.

Falken's Maze Podcast

Recently I was flattered to be asked to participate in an interview on the podcast series Falken's Maze, produced by Carla Thompson (Guidewire Group), Mark Johnson (Powerset) and Josh Dilworth (Porter Novelli). The blog cast highlights companies and people that are innovating in semantic technologies. The interview was a lot of fun.

Each podcast tries to focus on different aspects of the semantic technology industry. Our discussion focused on the use of semantic technologies by enterprise.  Overall I felt that I was able to answer many of their questions fully but I wanted to add a few points to the conversation here.

In the interview we mostly discussed which market verticals are ripe for the use of semantic technologies.  The common wisdom currently delineates the biotech, finance, and legal verticals.  Alitora, on first blush, appears to focus on the biotech/pharmaceutical vertical.  However, these seemingly disparate verticals have points of intersection. Alitora semantically integrates scientific, patent, clinical trial, and other data into a single environment.  This makes novel data accessible to the scientist working on drug discovery, attorneys working on patents, and investors examining the health of a drug company's pipeline. These points of intersection give Alitora a true larger market than may appear in the discussion of specific verticals.

In general the market verticals mentioned, and others such as manufacturing, are all open to disruption by semantic technologies because of the fundamental innovation in the way that data is treated.  Integration of data based on real meaning, instead of structure, enables a huge amount of interconnectivity and growth. By integrating data semantically any industry will realize significant improvements in the understanding of their business which will be directly reflected in their productivity and profitability.

Marc Hadfield to speak at Semantic Technology Conference

Marc Hadfield, President and CTO of Alitora Systems, will speak at the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference. His talk is entitled: "Embedding Semantic Data in Life Science Applications -- Challenges and Successes".  A full description of the talk is: here.

Yahoo and the Semantic Web Ecosystem

As reported on the Yahoo blog here and Techcrunch here, Yahoo has declared it's commitment to open semantic web standards, such as RDF and microformats.

Although this announcement may be related to Yahoo's chess game with Microsoft, such as Yahoo's announcement to join OpenSocial (see here), Yahoo has been quite willing to accept open standards over past few years, and has an interesting set of open API's for developers to use.

This new announcement may kick off a race to create new and interesting search applications enabled by semantic technologies.  Yahoo may become an indispensable resource of semantic information, essentially a utility, in the same way Amazon's S3 is attempting to be a storage utility.

For the uninitiated, semantic technologies cover a wide range of software and data standards, all designed to provide structure and meaning to data.

The vast majority of data is unstructured, such as the text in this blog entry.

Search technologies are often limited to skimming the surface of unstructured data to find key words.

The semantic web or data web, as it is sometimes called, is the application of semantic technologies on the current internet.

Using metadata in the form of Ontologies, Taxonomies, Microformats, or others, developers and end users can incorporate semantic structure into applications and data.

This provides a much deeper, richer informational environment and thereby promotes ease of search, social networking, data access and many other applications.

The semantic formats supported by Yahoo’s planned semantic platform opens up opportunities for a number of semantic software companies and developers to create applications that leverage this new resource of semantic data.

Alitora's ASAPI service is a perfect compliment to semantic resources such as Yahoo's planned semantic APIs.  With ASAPI, applications can be composed that merge semantic information from multiple sources.  We call these applications "Semantic Mashups".

At Alitora, we look forward to connecting ASAPI to Yahoo's APIs, enabling rich semantic application development.

The semantic web ecosystem will have many resources and many species.   Sources of data, such as that supplied by Yahoo's planned APIs, will be the raw resource material to be incorporated into the many species of applications now evolving.

 

An early release of ASAPI will be shortly available to interested developers.  Please check back here for an announcement and download information, or send us an e-mail at: info@alitora.com

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