Archive for the ‘Technology’ 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.

In a speech about UK’s plan to secure recover, growth and jobs in the global market place on 22 March, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a groundshaking set of changes, essential to place Britain as a world leader inthe new age of digital economies in the very close future. The cornerstone of these measures was the  announcement of the creation of an Instituteof Internet Science headed by the British inventor of the Web TimBerners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. The focus of this institute,which will receive £30m of government funding, will be on the application of the next generation of the web – semantic web technology– to improve government’s IT way that technology is used in government.
Here you can watch the whole video:  

The semantic technology relevant part is announced in the interval 4:07– 7:00.

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.

Having attended ESTC in the past, it is rewarding to see how it is improving and gaining momentum year after year. The organization of the event was excellent and the quality of the speakers was very good as well. That combined with a great wealth of professionals attending as general public and savvy venture capitalists, made the best ESTC so far.

For us the event went quite well also. We had the opportunity to pitch our start-up for the Innovation Seed Camp prize. We did not make it this time, but we learnt some very valuable lessons and received very positive feedback. Next year we will try to win! By the way, congratulations to our friends from Collibra who won the competition, the guys really deserve it. Other than that, we made new contacts and found interesting business opportunities to follow up. All in all, very positive for us.

As the proverb says: “from defeat to defeat we will win the war because we will have learnt from our mistakes”.

See you next year at ESTC 2010!

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!