Archive for the ‘playence’ Category

playence is a member of the user advisory board of the European research project “INSEMTIVES – Incentives for Semantics“. The objective of INSEMTIVES is to bridge the gap bet­ween human and computational intell­igence in the current semantic content authoring R&D land­scape. This means the project analyses tasks in semantic content creation, i.e. mostly building ontologies and semantic annotation, and investigates and defines incentive models around them. The motivation for the project is that at many ends annotation requires some form of human input but at the same time a human user needs to be motivated somehow to invest time. Web 2.0 makes an impressive demonstration of well-defined incentive models: Flickr, del.icio.us, and Wikipedia are only three examples for Web 2.0 success stories with clear incentives, such as reputation, reciprocity through later re-use, sharing, belonging to a community, etc. Thereby, INSEMTIVES also puts a focus on games with a purpose, i.e. hiding the abstract flavor of ontology building or annotation behind games – just like playence Crowd.

The first user advisory board meeting only took place recently and the project presented a first version of their tools to get feedback. The issues discussed centered around usability, difficulty of use, and – of course – incentives. Naturally, it is difficult if not impossible to define incentives for all possible scenarios of ontology building and semantic annotation. However, from the case studies the researchers are now deriving some general rules how to make semantic applications addictive and involve their users by means of participatory design. Latest version of tools is available at http://insemtives.org/tools.html.

Incentives and usability are also core issues for playence: the connex to playence Crowd is obvious but also in playence Media are playing with different means to make adding multimedia annotations workflow-integrated, easy and somehow appealing. “What are my incentives?” in semantic content creation really is a million dollar question.

Last week we were invited by the EU funded Project VALUE-IT to participate as technology providers in two focus groups meetings, – Telecommunications and Banking -, taking place in Madrid. In both cases, playence provided its point of view regarding how Semantic Technologies can help solve some of the problems this verticals are currently facing. In both cases, participants were companies in the top 10 of their fields in Europe.

In the case of the Telecommunications sector, it was clear, from the beginning, that their main problem was related with the inherent cost to minimize the time to market of a new product or service. Within the Telco market, being agile and dynamic is one of the main strenghts when trying to get more customers or to retain them. Another very important aspect deals with improving the relationship with the customer, especially in those fields where personal users are involved. And, of course, system integrations, like any other else, especially in this climate of company concentration and big fusions.

In the specific case of Banking and the Financial sector, their most important issue was, again, system integration, but also they felt that applying Semantic Technologies to their websites could improve significantly, the way in which users obtain information from them. In particular by easing, the language gap that already exists between the bank offer and people’s needs.

We, in playence, think that the market is already mature for having these kind of technologies industrially spread, not only in Telecommunications and Banking, but also in many others sectors, like Retail, Media, Tourism, Public Administration and, in general any sector characterized by any of the factors:

• Knowledge-intensive documentation
• Interoperability among different players
• Interaction with the end user
• Manual and repetitive knowledge-intensive processes.

Time will tell, but we feel these topics are getting more and more attention now.

On December 2^nd and 3^rd we will be attending the ESTC 2009 in Vienna. This is one of the most relevant meet-ups in Europe for semantic technology guys. The conference is one of the main industry events in Europe for Semantic technology. This year’s event promises to be very attractive especially for start-ups. playence was selected among many competing submission to participate in the Innovation Seed Camp (ISC), an elevator pitch competition that has attracted a lot of  talent. There will also be opportunity for mentoring session with angel investors and VCs. In case you happen to be around this is a great networking opportunity and I am sure it will be fun to see what’s going on in the semantic start-up arena. See you there!