I think it’s really interesting to think about some of the numbers pointed out in this article. To know that 34% of US adults use social media to comment and share their opinions about companies, brands and products is really surprising: if they ever asked me to estimate this percentage, I would have never guessed more than 10% (and probably less). If they were talking about young people or teenagers it would be normal, but the survey says that this is diffused also for users between 34 and 54 years old.

It also surprised me that so many are posting positive comments. I would have expected that many people would use social media as a tool to vent their dissatisfactions and complaints about products and services that are not providing the expected result. Obviously the social side of internet is also bringing out people’s  good intentions (not just the bad :-), so it becomes a pleasure to recommend something we liked to others.

For those of us working in technology and information management, these numbers are really important. They demonstrate how necessary it is for companies to analyze the social content of the internet to know what users and consumers think about their products or services. To have access to this information is really easy (they are free and usually open source), but being able to process them in an efficient and useful way is extremely difficult: this is a perfect task for semantic technology–it cannot make miracles, but it allows you to target relevant information in a more efficient way than other technologies.

Today I reached out to my old Friend Dennis Tran. Dennis and I met around 1990 when we both worked for a company called Excalibur and we were selling fuzzy search.

Excalibur should have been Google, but like so many companies with great technology we lacked the vision and marketing to have taken the fore front of the search market. Excalibur shelved it’s cool technology, became a me-too product, changed it’s name to Convera, was disected by Fast and eventually consumed by Microsoft. Dennis and I parted ways and I lost track of my friend.

My next adventure was Autonomy. Better product and marketing, but like the overweight sun bather, roasting on the beach and slowly losing sight of thier toes; they will not see the tide change and miss the opportunity to move.

Well… back to my original point. A few days ago Microsoft announced that it is dropping support for FAST on all Unix platforms. This made me think of Dennis and the conversations we used to have about handling objections concerning the size of our company. It never occured to me to point out that we would never just drop support of our product, and that in perspective, every customer made a big difference and was extremely important to keep and care for. Maybe Dennis and I can help some of our original believers move from keyword to advanced semantics.

It’s funny how the smaller tech companies have become the safer bet in our ever changing market and economy. And how very interesting that dissapointing decisions made by industry giants cause us to re-connect with some truly wonderful people.

We’ll be releasing a more official announcement shortly, but we wanted to let our readers know firsthand that we have released the new version of COGITO Focus.

Focus is our semantic search engine for enterprises. Searching is really just the beginning with this engine because it also supports analysts and knowledge workers in the activities of strategic data analysis. It breaks through the barriers created by the majority of traditional search engines (e.g.: NO flexible faceted search; NO graphical representation of the semantic relations between words, concepts, entities; NO intelligent agents; NO semantic crawling… just few of the features that traditional enterprise search tools do not offer).

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank those of you who worked with Marco Varone on this new release of Focus. Great job, everyone!

Toyota is in hot water. The company recently announced recalls on seven U.S. and European models, due to faulty gas pedals and braking systems. Not only is this a tremendous blow for the world’s largest automaker’s image, but it could also have a serious impact on it’s sales.

A drop in sales has already been registered: in the US, sales have declined by 8.7%, due in part to the removal of some defective models from the market, in Jan 2010. For the first time in 10 years, Toyota’s sales sank below 100,000 units; and in the first few days of February, the stock was down 5.69% on the Tokyo Exchange.

Toyota is now focusing on winning back it’s customers and reassuring them of the quality and the safety of it’s vehicles. And what about the Voice of the Customers? Could Toyota have foreseen the imminent crisis just by analyzing the opinions expressed online? Could they have had a notion of which aspects were being discussed and criticized by users?

We used Cogito Monitor (our semantic software which automatically processes content in detail) to find out what users have said about Toyota. We examined the comments posted on the most popular U.S. automobile blogs and forums such as: caranddriver.com, carforum.com, autoblog.com etc.

And this is what we have found out.

In 1969 Arthur C. Clarke introduced us to his computer named HAL.  He had us believing all we needed to do was talk to HAL.  HAL would listen, understand and do what we wanted.  Until HAL, that is, developed an evil soul and did nasty things to humans.  The evil soul is pure fiction but HAL is not.

2010 is the year we get to meet the real HAL.  He may still be a child but he is growing up fast thanks to four trends in computing that have coalesced and are now ready to explode.  These trends are The Cloud, The Pipe, The UI and The API. A depiction is below.

The Cloud is elastic computing power.  It is more than renting a server from a service provider.  It means automatic, on-demand scalability onto as many servers as are needed to accomplish a task or take care of a sudden flood of customer needs.  The Cloud gives any size organization the appearance and performance of Google-sized computing.

The Pipe is everywhere, all the time, high speed internet connections. Typical wired internet speeds today are over 6MB per second and wireless connections are quickly catching up with that – 3G and soon 4G deployments are common.  The biggest trend in mobile devices is smart phones.  These are devices that do more than route phone calls, but also manage email, calendars, music, applications and the entire internet.  But of course the processing power to do these things is not all on the device.  Instead it’s up in the cloud.

The UI or User Interface is smart. Speech to text and semantic technologies combine to allow for the appearance of intelligence.  Computers or mobile phones spoken to in natural language understand and then locate, calculate, connect, tally, and display the answer to queries rather than simply list resources for you.  Try Nuance, Vlingo or Google Mobile for speech to text accuracy.  Try us at Expert System for semantic processing accuracy.

The API or Application Programming Interface means really useful applications. API’s package the first three trends so that creative types can make applications for specific tasks, domains or verticals quickly and make lots of them.  Look how many IPhone / ITouch applications have been built in the last 2 years alone.  Many have been built by individuals and not large corporations.

These four trends create a virtuous cycle.  They combine to bring a sudden higher platform of computing.  One that engages the imagination, has enormous productivity, improves processes and creates new value out of existing information resources.

No you can’t really see or touch HAL.  But be assured he is there, working in the background, growing, learning and getting smarter every day.  He is ready to serve you.  Just ask.

A few days ago, Microsoft announced it’s intent to abandon the development of a Linux/Unix version of FAST, the corporate search engine it purchased a couple years ago. The decision didn’t really take anyone by surprise, being that Linux is Windows’ only real rival in the world of servers. So, obviously,  Microsft would have no interest in developing solutions for the competition’s operating system; not to mention that FAST is increasingly integrated with SharePoint, which just further goes to prove my point.

From a strategic point of view, the choice is quite understandable. But from a sales standpoint, it seems to be an enormous sacrifice and a huge opportunity for the competition. From what I have read, at least half of FAST users have Linux/Unix (some actually say it’s close to 80%). This means that these users will have use another company’s search engine should they decide to change theirs. With this aspect in mind, I think Microsoft would have been better off if they continued development on systems which differ from Windows. However, if think about the fact that our search engine is compatible with Linux, thus giving us more sales opportunities, then I think they made the right decision

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I recently read quite a few interesting articles about Twitter. The most intriguing (and exciting) was about the first tweet from outer space.  At the moment, the concept of an intergalactic World Wide Web resides in the minds of few earthlings ;-), but there are however, already hypothetical plans for web servers to be hosted on Mars and on the Moon! Last week, Twitter’s effects on crowdsourcing was addressed by Alec Ross and Jared Cohen in a chat moderated by Google’s Eric Schmidt, where social networks in general were discussed. But, what really caught my eye was an article which reported the live coverage of an accident which was averted in flight. Apparently, a man attempted to open the plane’s exit door, but was promptly stopped by other passengers. Among those on board was the General Services Administration’s CIO, who sent out three tweets as the action took place, and in less than 300 characters, created a sensational news story.

E-mails, text messages, and social networks are some of the most innovative communication instruments today. The advantage of the text message is that it is simple and accessible to everyone (in fact, tens of millions of messages are sent everyday). These messages could certainly become functional and immediate channels for public involvement in safety issues. Citizens could use these systems, on a 24 hour basis, to give notice about events and situations as they happen, so that the public could be better served and numerous criminal acts could possibly be avoided.

The potential risk, however, is that these messages will go unacknowledged, or even worse, that they will be taken into consideration when it’s too late. For this reason, once citizens are offered the opportunity to participate directly, it is essential that law enforcement be ready and prepared to listen to them. The complication is that enormous quantities of information need to managed efficiently. Semantic technology can be used resolve this problem; it is able support the activities of data collection and analysis and can quickly sort through messages, thanks to its ability to “understand” text. In this situation, it could easily be applied to a system which allows citizens to use social networks, e-mails or mobile services to report crimes or alert officials of neighborhood situations, such as: broken streetlights, potholes, vandalism, etc.
Instant blogging has forever changed the life of new generations, but can it also revolutionize public safety? I believe it will, and I believe that the real enabler behind this revolution will be semantic technology.

This week we announced the appointment of Julie Hartigan, Ph.D. as CTO of Federal Programs, and Rita Joseph as Vice President of Federal Programs. The expansion of our executive team here in North American is directly in line with our overall goals and vision for growth in the U.S.

Julie and Rita have the extensive experience to help us drive our federal program initiatives. And we’re all satisfied that in an era where government seeks to “connect the dots,” both of these seasoned veterans will bring expertise, guidance and our advanced, high speed, multilingual semantic processing to federal government agencies.

The industry was in an uproar when Eric Schmidt stated that it will be necessary to switch from words to meanings, in order to better understand what users are asking and what is contained in indexed documents. It would be a considerable change in direction for the Mountain View giant, which has always sustained that keyword technology is more than sufficient to obtain the best results.In a way, it’s really nothing new. For some time now, in the world of Semantic Web, a sort  of  integration of semantic technology (which is able to understand meanings) has been going on within one of the most popular Internet search engines. When Bing was launched, Microsoft itself claimed to use semantic elements, but without actually specifying the types of elements and the ways they would benefit searches. However, just the fact that the industry leader is talking about ‘understanding meanings’, makes it legitimate and creates a time line of before and after: the era of widespread web-applied semantics has officially begun.

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When I previously wrote about Wolfram Alpha, I had suggested that this kind of system could become more than just a competitor of Google (or other types of general search engines); it could be an excellent complement to meet specific and punctual needs. Therefore, I was not surprised when I heard the news  that Microsoft had sealed a deal with Wolfram to integrate Bing and Wolfram Alpha for searches/questions belonging to a subcategory of topics for which Alpha has good coverage of.

The terms of the accord are still unknown, but I really believe it will be beneficial for both parties. After its initial launch, general interest in Wolfram Alpha greatly diminished (due also to the excessively high expectations which were created but could not be met…). An accord of this type could be just the thing to create a new buzz and new interest. Surely, it won’t help Bing make any improvements in quality, but for Microsoft, this agreement could help keep the hype about Bing and its ecosystem alive.