Facebook IPO details strategy and its vision of itself

Social network eyes expansion into China, hopes to boost mobile experience (see video below

By Sharon Gaudin

Facebook’s IPO filing lays out a pretty good image of where CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to take the company: He sees the social network as having significant historical value to the economy, governments and — he hopes — to every person connected to the Internet around the world.

“There are more than 2 billion global Internet users, according to an industry source, and we aim to connect all of them,” the company said in its S-1 filing with the SEC on Wednesday.

And, it seems that Facebook executives – Zuckerberg in particular – not only have some very specific plans on how it will string its influence around the globe. The company’s co-founder also has some thoughts on Facebook’s importance right now.

“At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter included the company’s IPO filing. “We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society…. Today, our society has reached another tipping point.”

Zuckerberg went on to note that his social network aspires to build the services that enable users to communicate and transform core institutions and industries around the world.

“We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services,” he added. “We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.”

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, noted that while Zuckerberg has some lofty visions of Facebook’s place in the world, he’s making a good sales pitch to potential investors.

“The letter of the CEO in an S-1 filing is where you can puff. And Zuckerberg puffed really big in this one,” he added. “And I think that, in his head, this is what he thinks Facebook is going to be. When he sees what happened in Egypt and he realized that it was his creation that helped overturn a government there, he’s going to take part ownership of that action because it was his baby.”

So how do Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives plan on expanding the social network’s reach and clout?

Part of their plan seems to be to figure out how to move into China, which has historically restricted access to global Internet companies. Early in 2010, for instance, Google pulled its business out of that country after announcing that an attack against its network came from China. The attack, Google said, had forced it to rethink its willingness to agree to China’s mandates on censoring data for Chinese users.

taken from: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223940/Facebook_IPO_details_strategy_and_its_vision_of_itself

Related articles

• 10 Standout Quotes in Zuckerberg’s Facebook IPO Letter (mashable.com)
• Justifying FaceValue (umpf.co.uk)

Image via Wikipedia

By Dennis Howlett

Summary: This is not about ‘Google going social.’ The company has the potential to become something that is at the heart of enterprise. Everything else is just happy talk.

Google Plus, Google’s idea of a social network is in highly controlled beta (aka ‘Field Test’) at the moment. Very few people have had their paws on it but Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadRightWeb invested a whole night trawling through the features. He emerges impressed:

This is a really big deal, a super ambitious effort involving scores of engineers over months of near total secrecy. (Though some helpful sources and I scooped the core Circles part of all this three months ago.) The service is really, really well done. Will it be good enough? I have no idea, but I have felt drawn to keep using it all night long.

OK – so Google’s off to a good start. I was more interested in last evening’s stream of consciousness coming from John Furrier of Silicon Angle who says he’s been following Google for more than a decade, loves the company but critically important to this discussion says:

Google has the Oracle problem..how long do you hold on to your money making “declining” franchise before killing your own to keep a future

Furrier argues (among other things and in no particular order – all via his Tweetsream)

what just happened on twitter is why search is dying @JillatHP just shared a link with me that was relevant, perfect context, and timing

Facebook is a threat to Google’s search franchise which is why Google has to run with new paradigm; at risk – billions of dollars

Google is realizing that their incumbent user experience is getting worse everyday..the sooner they cannibalize their old product the better

more people are relying less on google as they “discover” content from other sources – search engines are changing so is google

people don’t get me wrong I’m a Google fan but Google is out to lunch on anything social and human oriented

I remember years ago Paul Strassmann talking about the success of Google but caveatting that there is nothing so unique about Google that its business model is invulnerable. If you’ve heard Strassmann, are a lover of history and facts garnered over many decades then you also know that Strassmann is not a sensationalist but highly rational and engaging human being. At least that’s my view. There’s another truism – all empires fall, eventually.

And while technology can and often does provide the means to establish what at times seems an unassailable fortress, somewhere along the way, the foundations of the empire always crumble. It is that knowledge (which you can check for yourself by going back to any and all of the great empires) that informs my view that Furrier is right and that despite its mountain of cash, Google will fall.

What is different today is that Internet speed is accelerating both the growth and then destruction  of these empires. I have recently speculated idly that 40 years seems to be about the tipping point, using SAP and Oracle as examples. Google is a little different as it was born in a different age and appears to be acquiring those ‘incumbent’ characteristics far quicker than either Oracle or SAP. It’s a sign of the time. That also means I am not convinced that Facebook is the inevitable beneficiary.

But what the heck does this have to do with enterprise?

A number of my colleagues are of the opinion that the dominant forces in the enterprise software space of tomorrow do not lie with the usual suspects of SAP, Oracle, IBM, Infor and the rest. It fits well with the 40 year theory. I’m not even sure that we know who that company will be though I am having a tentative bet on Workday.

As I listen to the many voices continuing to bellow the need for enterprise to be more social, whatever that’s supposed to mean, I can’t help but notice that not one of them and I mean NOT ONE, has for one minute thought through the deep needs of enterprise to continue transacting for goods and services and how the social mantra is mediated across those needs and systems.

Those systems are not going away until either, they are fully automated or, we invent a viable alternative to Pacioli. Try as I might, I cannot see either scenario happening in my lifetime although I am guessing we’ll get to the former before the latter.

On the other hand, signs are emerging that at least some are starting to listen to what it means although I find that conversation to be somewhat shallow.

That is why companies like Appirio, with its emphasis on integrating Google, Workday and Salesforce, represent the front line troops in offering what I believe is an intermediate waypoint.

It is why TIBCO will be the kingmaker in this new battle for the hearts and minds of enterprise decision makers.

It is also why Google, for all its power, has to get serious about Circles (plus a slew of other assets) AND solve the never ending problem of privacy in an open and transparent manner. If it does that, then it shifts track and moves to a road that recognises that human intervention can very usefully act as what Sameer Patel calls the ‘enterprise middleware of the future’ between man and machine and which Furrier alludes to in reference to search via Twitter as a social network. If Google does all those things (and especially focuses on mobile,) then it does not survive. It does as Furrier suggests. It cannibalizes and reinvents. Just like IBM had to when staring disaster in the face in the early 1990s.

That’s where opinion is going to polarize. This is not about ‘Google going social’ but realizing that it holds in its hands the potential to become something that is at the heart of enterprise, the value that can deliver and the massive revenue opportunity that is staring it in the face. Everything else is just happy talk.

taken from:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/google-plus-why-google-must-fall/3259

Related articles

• Oracle v. Google – A Potpourri of Filings and Orders (groklaw.net)
• Is Google+ Killing Twitter? (smallbusinessmavericks.com)
• Google+ To Suspend Users Using Pseudonyms (mashable.com)

Image by pmsyyz via Flickr

Geolocation refers to the method of identifying the actual Geographical location of a Computer on the internet or a visitor on your site or even the a mobile device. With reference to Hosting Clusters, we mostly trace the geographical location of the website visitors. There can be various procedures used to track down the geographical location of the visitors some of which are:

Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) Lookup:

This is the most common procedure we use on our setups. The visitors are traced on the basis of the whois lookups done to their current IP address. These lookups are automated, real-time and are implemented using special server side modules or even third party lookup services. These lookups can provide the most accurate locations of the visitors as these IP whois databases can always have updates.

Media Access Control Address (MAC Address):

Media Access Control or MAC addresses is an Unique Identifier assigned to most network adapters or Ethernet Cards by their Manufacturer. It contains a combination of the manufacturer’s unique Identification number and some other codes to generate an unique MAC address for the physical device. The location of this device can be traced based on the Sales data for the manufacturer or some other similar methods.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID):

Radio Frequency Identification or RFID uses Radio waves to transmit data with the help of devices like Transponders. RFID does not have much applications on internet related geolocation but it has wide uses in corporate and enterprise supply chain management systems for inventory tracking and other applications.

Global Positioning System (GPS):

Global Positioning System or GPS uses different Artificial Satellites to interpret the microwave signals obtained from certain GPS enabled mobile devices to calculate the exact geographical location of the device. The device receives this interpreted data which it can use to locate itself and obtain navigation instructions for a particular destination from its current location.

The IP whois lookup method is the most commonly used method for clusters. We will study the exact implementation of this technique in the actual case studies we will be releasing soon.

taken from:

http://www.rrdns.com/geolocation-explained.html

Related articles

• Network Vulnerabilities – Media-Based Vulnerabilities (codingexplorer.wordpress.com)
• IP Address Lookup Tools (businessinsider.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Working at AMS-IX means working in an International environment driven and inspired by Internet technology. A team of about 27 committed professionals currently operates the Exchange from its charming Amsterdam city centre office building. The colocations are seperate entities from AMS-IX and the people working there, even if they are dedicated to AMS-IX, do not work for the AMS-IX company.

Decision-making lines are short at AMS-IX creating an open and direct working environment within an informal atmosphere.

AMS-IX offers its employees a market conform salary, a good package of secondary benefits and the chance to grow by following training courses, self-study, etc.

Currently we have two vacancies: one for Junior Service Manager and one for Senior Service Manager

Junior Service Manager

About AMS-IX

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange, AMS-IX in short, is one of the largest Internet Exchanges in the world right in the heart of the Internet. AMS-IX was founded by the European Internet community in 1997. Now interconnecting hundreds of IP networks, by means of peering services, together forming the Internet. Peering is what makes the Internet robust and resilient, a network of networks all linked together. You would join a driven and dedicated team working in an informal atmosphere in a charming Amsterdam Centre office.

About the position

The Internet as an industry is maturing, quality and service levels have become higher and more professional. AMS-IX commits to quality with an Service Level Agreement (SLA) as an important new service feature. We are setting up a service management team and are looking for a starter to support the senior service manager in setting-up a team that handles the SLA process and is the customer interface, the intermediary to the customers and the other AMS-IX operational departments. The Service Managers have a key-role in the relationship with existing customers regarding service delivery according to SLA. The Junior Service Manager reports to the Chief Marketing Officer as it is a customer facing role, however he/she is also required to work closely together with the engineering team.

As the role is new within AMS-IX we are looking for a self-motivated individual that is flexible and likes a challenge. Affinity with technical environments and the Internet is key.  Some experience in a telecom or Internet Service provider environment is a pre. The role is internationally oriented, so foreign nationals already based in Amsterdam are welcome to respond.

Apart from the SLA management the service manager may also be required to perform other technical-commercial activities such as technical account management, technical sales support or representing AMS-IX and presenting at industry events. Occasionally the service manager will be required to travel in relation to company or industry events.

Role & Objectives

The main objectives and activities within the role are:

-       Execute the operational activities relating to the SLA process

-       Interface with the SLA customers and network engineering department relating to connection issues

-       Provide the monthly Service Level Reporting to individual SLA customers

-       Have regular service meetings or calls with customers

-       Interface with the out-of-hours and overflow call center.

-       Support sales regarding SLA and other technical-commercial activities

-       Represent the company at events and conferences

-       Contribute to increasing the customer service satisfaction and evaluation thereof

-       Be a sparring partner for sales, customer service and the network engineers

Required Knowledge & Experience

-       About 2-3 years working experience in a service related/commercial support role

-       Working experience in a telecom or ISP environment is a pre

-       Minimum bachelor graduate (HBO), either a business or technically relevant study

-       Understanding of the Internet and (wholesale) IP interconnection market

Required Skills and Personality

-       Excellent communication skills (both verbal and writing)

-       Strong customer focus

-       Eager and inquiring mind

-       Strong interpersonal skills and enthusiastic team-player

-       Ability to express and understand complex issues in English, both verbally and in writing, is required

We offer

On top of an interesting job in a great work environment at a unique, innovative and well-respected company we offer a competitive salary and secondary remuneration package.

Responses can be sent to: jobs@ams-ix.net

Senior Service Manager

About AMS-IX

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange, AMS-IX in short, is one of the largest Internet Exchanges in the world right in the heart of the Internet. AMS-IX was founded by the European Internet community in 1997. Now interconnecting hundreds of IP networks, by means of peering services, together forming the Internet. Peering is what makes the Internet robust and resilient, a network of networks all linked together. You would join a driven and dedicated team working in an informal atmosphere in a charming Amsterdam Centre office.

About the position

The Internet as an industry is maturing, quality and service levels have become higher and more professional. AMS-IX commits to quality with an Service Level Agreement (SLA) as an important new service feature. We are looking for a professional to further consolidate the service in the organization and set-up a team that handles the SLA process and is the customer interface, the intermediary to the customers and the other AMS-IX operational departments. The Service Manager has a key-role in the relationship with existing customers regarding service delivery according to SLA. The Senior Service Manager reports to the Chief Marketing Officer as it is a customer facing role, however he/she is also required to work closely together with the engineering team.

As the role is new within AMS-IX we are looking for an experienced self-motivated and self-organized professional with a proven track record in a in a telecom or service provider environment. A hands-on pioneering mentality, especially in the first period of set-up will be essential. The role is internationally oriented, so foreign nationals already based in Amsterdam are welcome to respond.

Apart from the SLA management the service manager may also be required to perform other technical-commercial activities such as technical account management, technical sales support or representing AMS-IX and presenting at industry events. Occasionally the senior service manager will be required to travel in relation to company or industry events.

Role & Objectives

The main objectives and activities within the role are:

-       Manage and control the operational activities relating to the SLA process

-       Interface with the SLA customers and network engineering department relating to connection issues

-       Provide the monthly Service Level Reporting to individual SLA customers and overall to the management team

-       Have regular service meetings or calls with customers

-       Set-up and management of the relationship with the out-of-hours and overflow call center.

-       Product manage the SLA service, including the development of the customer portal interface

-       Support sales regarding SLA and other technical-commercial activities

-       Represent the company at events and conferences

-       Contribute to increasing the customer service satisfaction and evaluation thereof

-       Be a sparring partner for sales, customer service and the network engineers

Required Knowledge & Experience

-       Mid-career level with about 10 years working experience with at least several in a service related role in a telecom or ISP environment,

-       Minimum bachelor graduate (HBO+), either a business or technically relevant study

-       Understanding of the Internet and (wholesale) IP interconnection market

Required Skills and Personality

-       Excellent communication skills (both verbal and writing)

-       Strong customer focus

-       Eager and inquiring mind

-       A driven, extrovert personality

-       Not a 9 to 5 mentality

-       Strong interpersonal skills and enthusiastic team-player

-       Ability to express and understand complex issues in English, both verbally and in writing, is required

We offer

On top of an interesting job in a great work environment at a unique, innovative and well-respected company we offer a competitive salary and secondary remuneration package.

Responses can be sent to: jobs@ams-ix.net

taken from:

http://ams-ix.net/working-at-ams-ix/

Related articles

• Amsterdam internet hub gets ready for 4G mobile VoIP (go.theregister.com)
• MyIX Announces Upgraded Internet Exchange Network for Malaysian ISPs (it-sideways.com)

Image via CrunchBase

by Ron Callari

When a god-forsaken parcel of frozen tundra was put up for sale by the Russians back in the mid-1800s, many saw the $7.2 million dollar acquisition as a frivolous venture that would reap no rewards for the U.S. History indicated otherwise. The same might be said about Microsoft and the recently leaked news of its covert social network under development.

Microsoft’s project name for its venture into the social media space is as foreign to most as Alaska was to Americans back in the 19th Century. Tulalip (pronounced Tuh’-lay-lup) is actually the name of an Indian tribe of about 4,000, where 2,500 members reside on a 22,000-acre Indian Reservation located north of Everett and the Snohomish River and west of Marysville, Washington. The only conceivable connection to Microsoft is that this location is not far from the Big M’s Redmond, Washington headquarters.

According to screenshots provided by Fusible.com, which first spotted the landing page at socil.com (before Microsoft removed it) it appears that Microsoft might be following the Google+ lead by creating a “sharing” network versus Facebook’s social network model.

In that same report, J.B. at Fusible noted that the Web site social.com was acquired for $2.6 million on behalf of a mystery client. Shortly afterwards, according to a Whois record, it turned out Microsoft was indeed behind the purchase. Subsequently, the teaser landing page (as seen in the image above) was mistakenly revealed at socl.com – tipping the Internet giant’s hand prematurely.

Matt McGee of Search Engine Land was able to question a Microsoft spokesperson regarding their intentions in creating yet another social network – and was told the following: “Microsoft has taken the site down and posted a message stating, ‘Thanks for stopping by.  Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn’t mean to, honest.’”

There were non-working links on the page that noted: “See how it works,” along with “terms of service” and “Privacy Statement” links. There were also Facebook and Twitter sign-in buttons. In fact, the Twitter sign-in/authorization page confirmed further that Tulalip was an “experimental app” developed by Microsoft Research.

So the question that surfaces: Is Microsoft reacting to the sudden popularity of Google+ and its own obvious omission from the playing field? With Bing having such solid working agreements with both Facebook and Twitter, it seems a bit odd that that it would risk straining those relationships.

But then again the Internet giant has sunk a lot of money into Bing, its search engine that still struggles to capture a fraction of Google’s dominance of the Web. Will Microsoft champion another venture that proves to be “folly” or “fortuitous?” After all Alaska was a win-win for the U.S. – or was it? When one considers “one bridge to nowhere” and an ex-Governor that delivers ‘fair and balanced’ news, it gives one pause to wonder.

taken from:

http://inventorspot.com/articles/tulalip_microsofts_seward_folly

Related articles

• What is Microsoft’s Tulalip? (news.cnet.com)
• Microsoft ‘accidentally’ leaks secret new social project (digitaltrends.com)

by Mike Yamamot

Related articles

• The Impact of Web 2.0 on Enterprise Strategy – Enterprise 2.0 (serve4impact.com)
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The Semantic Web is a “web of data” that enables machines to understand the semantics, or meaning, of information on the World Wide Web.^[1] It extends the network of hyperlinked human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other, enabling automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users. The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee,^[2] the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards. He defines the Semantic Web as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.”

The term “Semantic Web” is often used more specifically to refer to the formats and technologies that enable it.^[3] These technologies include the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

Many of the technologies proposed by the W3C already exist and are used in various contexts, particularly those dealing with information that encompasses a limited and defined domain, and where sharing data is a common necessity, such as scientific research or data exchange among businesses. In addition, other technologies with similar goals have emerged, such as microformats. However, the Semantic Web as originally envisioned, a system that enables machines to understand and respond to complex human requests based on their meaning, has remained largely unrealized and its critics have questioned its feasibility.

Purpose

The main purpose of the Semantic Web is driving the evolution of the current Web by allowing users to use it to its full potential, thus allowing them to find, share, and combine information more easily. Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for “folder”, reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, machines cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that can be interpreted by machines, so machines can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.

Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the semantic web as follows:^[4]

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

— Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Semantic Web application areas are experiencing intensified interest due to the rapid growth in the use of the Web, together with the innovation and renovation of information content technologies. The Semantic Web is regarded as an integrator across different content, information applications and systems, it also provides mechanisms for the realisation of Enterprise Information Systems. The rapidity of the growth experienced provides the impetus for researchers to focus on the creation and dissemination of innovative Semantic Web technologies, where the envisaged ’Semantic Web’ is long overdue. Often the terms ’Semantics’, ’metadata’, ’ontologies’ and ’Semantic Web’ are used inconsistently. In particular, these terms are used as everyday terminology by researchers and practitioners, spanning a vast landscape of different fields, technologies, concepts and application areas. Furthermore, there is confusion with regard to the current status of the enabling technologies envisioned to realise the Semantic Web. In a paper presented by Gerber, Barnard and Van der Merwe^[5] the Semantic Web landscape is charted and a brief summary of related terms and enabling technologies is presented. The architectural model proposed by Tim Berners-Lee is used as basis to present a status model that reflects current and emerging technologies.^[6]

Semantic publishing

Semantic publishing will greatly benefit from the semantic web. In particular, the semantic web is expected to revolutionize scientific publishing, such as real-time publishing and sharing of experimental data on the Internet. This simple but radical idea is now being explored by W3C HCLS group’s Scientific Publishing Task Force.

Semantic blogging

Semantic blogging, like semantic publishing, will change the way blogs are read. Currently “the process of blogging inherently emphasizes metadata creation more than traditional Web publishing methodologies”.^[7] Some blog users already tag their entries with topics, allowing for easier migration into a semantic web environment. It is intentionally saved in not only a human-readable format, but also in a machine-readable format as the tags can be linked easily to other blogs containing similar information. When a release of a game or movie occurs, bloggers tend to rate them using their own system. If there were to be a unified system, these blogs could easily become assimilated using similar semantics and give a user a score when searching using a semantic search. RSS feeds are another way that blogs already have machine-readable data that is easily accessible by the semantic web.

Web 3.0

Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of ‘Web 3.0′.^[8]

The internet community as a whole tends to find the two terms “Semantic Web” and “Web 3.0″ to be at least synonymous in concept if not completely interchangeable. The definition continues to vary depending on to whom you speak. The overwhelming consensus is that Web 3.0 is most assuredly the “next big thing” but there only lies speculation as to just what that might be. It will be an improvement in the respect that it will still contain Web 2.0 properties while continuing to add to its ever expanding lexicon and library of applications. There are some who claim that Web 3.0 will be more application based and center its efforts towards more graphically capable environments, “non-browser applications and non-computer based devices…geographic or location-based information retrieval” and even more applicable use and growth of Artificial Intelligence.^[9] For example, Conrad Wolfram, has argued that Web 3.0 is where “the computer is generating new information”, rather than humans.^[10]

Others simply state their belief that Web 3.0 will primarily focus on dramatically improving the functionality and usability of search engines.^[11] An important factor that users must continue to keep in mind is that the transition to Web 2.0 from “Web 1.0” took approximately ten years. Given the same time frame, this next transition will not be complete until around the year 2015.

People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource…”

— Tim Berners-Lee, 2006

Highly specialized information silos, moderated by a cult of personality, validated by the community, and put into context with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets.^[12]

— Steve Spalding, 2007

Relationship to the hypertext web

Limitations of HTML

Many files on a typical computer can be loosely divided into documents and data. Documents like mail messages, reports, and brochures are read by humans. Data, like calendars, addressbooks, playlists, and spreadsheets are presented using an application program which lets them be viewed, searched and combined in many ways.

Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms. Metadata tags, for example

<meta name="keywords" content="computing, computer studies, computer">
<meta name="description" content="Cheap widgets for sale">
<meta name="author" content="John Doe">

provide a method by which computers can categorise the content of web pages.

With HTML and a tool to render it (perhaps web browser software, perhaps another user agent), one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as “this document’s title is ‘Widget Superstore’”, but there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of €199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text “X586172″ is something that should be positioned near “Acme Gizmo” and “€199″, etc. There is no way to say “this is a catalog” or even to establish that “Acme Gizmo” is a kind of title or that “€199″ is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.

Semantic HTML refers to the traditional HTML practice of markup following intention, rather than specifying layout details directly. For example, the use of <em> denoting “emphasis” rather than <i>, which specifies italics. Layout details are left up to the browser, in combination with Cascading Style Sheets. But this practice falls short of specifying the semantics of objects such as items for sale or prices.

Microformats represent unofficial attempts to extend HTML syntax to create machine-readable semantic markup about objects such as retail stores and items for sale.

Semantic Web solutions

The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web.

These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases,^[13] or as markup within documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering cues stored separately). The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.

An example of a tag that would be used in a non-semantic web page:

<item>cat</item>

Encoding similar information in a semantic web page might look like this:

<item rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cat">Cat</item>

Skeptical reactions

Practical feasibility

Critics (e.g. Which Semantic Web?) question the basic feasibility of a complete or even partial fulfillment of the semantic web. Cory Doctorow‘s critique (“metacrap“) is from the perspective of human behavior and personal preferences. For example, people lie: they may include spurious metadata into Web pages in an attempt to mislead Semantic Web engines that naively assume the metadata’s veracity. This phenomenon was well-known with metatags that fooled the AltaVista ranking algorithm into elevating the ranking of certain Web pages: the Google indexing engine specifically looks for such attempts at manipulation. Peter Gärdenfors and Timo Honkela point out that logic-based semantic web technologies cover only a fraction of the relevant phenomena related to semantics.^[14][15]

Where semantic web technologies have found a greater degree of practical adoption, it has tended to be among core specialized communities and organizations for intra-company projects.^[16] The practical constraints toward adoption have appeared less challenging where domain and scope is more limited than that of the general public and the World-Wide Web.^[16]

The potential of an idea in fast progress

The original 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web.^[17] A complete evolution as described by Berners-Lee has yet to occur. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: “This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized.”^[18] While the idea is still in the making, it seems to evolve quickly and inspire many. Between 2007–2010 several scholars have already explored first applications and the social potential of the semantic web in the business and health sectors, and for social networking ^[19] and even for the broader evolution of democracy, specifically, how a society forms its common will in a democratic manner through a semantic web^[20]

Censorship and privacy

Enthusiasm about the semantic web could be tempered by concerns regarding censorship and privacy. For instance, text-analyzing techniques can now be easily bypassed by using other words, metaphors for instance, or by using images in place of words. An advanced implementation of the semantic web would make it much easier for governments to control the viewing and creation of online information, as this information would be much easier for an automated content-blocking machine to understand. In addition, the issue has also been raised that, with the use of FOAF files and geo location meta-data, there would be very little anonymity associated with the authorship of articles on things such as a personal blog. Some of these concerns were addressed in the “Policy Aware Web” project^[21] and is an active research and development topic.

Doubling output formats

Another criticism of the semantic web is that it would be much more time-consuming to create and publish content because there would need to be two formats for one piece of data: one for human viewing and one for machines. However, many web applications in development are addressing this issue by creating a machine-readable format upon the publishing of data or the request of a machine for such data. The development of microformats has been one reaction to this kind of criticism. Another argument in defense of the feasibility of semantic web is the likely falling price of human intelligence tasks in digital labor markets, such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Specifications such as eRDF and RDFa allow arbitrary RDF data to be embedded in HTML pages. The GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Language) mechanism allows existing material (including microformats) to be automatically interpreted as RDF, so publishers only need to use a single format, such as HTML.

Need

The idea of a semantic web, able to describe and associate meaning with data necessarily involves more than simple XHTML mark-up code. It is based on an assumption that in order for it to be possible for machines to accurately interpret web content, far more than the mere (natural language) ordered relationships involving letters and words is necessary – as underlying infrastructure attendant to semantic issues. Otherwise, most of the supportive functionality would have been available in Web 2.0 (and before) and it would have been possible to derive a semantically capable Web with minor, incremental additions.^{[citation needed]}

Additions to the infrastructure to support semantic functionality include latent dynamic network models that can, under certain conditions, be ‘trained’ to appropriately ‘learn’ meaning based on order data, in the process ‘learning’ relationships with order (a kind of rudimentary working grammar). See for example latent semantic analysis

Components

The semantic web comprises the standards and tools of XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF Schema and OWL that are organized in the Semantic Web Stack. The OWL Web Ontology Language Overview describes the function and relationship of each of these components of the semantic web:

• XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within. XML is not at present a necessary component of Semantic Web technologies in most cases, as alternative syntaxes exists, such as Turtle. Turtle is a de facto standard, but has not been through a formal standardization process.
• XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and content of elements contained within XML documents.
• RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects (“resources“) and their relationships. An RDF-based model can be represented in a variety of syntaxes, e.g., RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, and RDFa^[22]. RDF is a fundamental standard of the Semantic Web^[23][24][25].
• RDF Schema extends RDF and is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes.
• OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.
• SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources.

Current ongoing standardizations include:

• Rule Interchange Format (RIF) as the Rule Layer of the Semantic Web Stack

Not yet fully realized layers include:

• Unifying Logic and Proof layers are undergoing active research.

The intent is to enhance the usability and usefulness of the Web and its interconnected resources through:

• Servers which expose existing data systems using the RDF and SPARQL standards. Many converters to RDF exist from different applications. Relational databases are an important source. The semantic web server attaches to the existing system without affecting its operation.
• Documents “marked up” with semantic information (an extension of the HTML <meta> tags used in today’s Web pages to supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers). This could be machine-understandable information about the human-understandable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about animals, people, places, ideas, etc.) Semantic markup is often generated automatically, rather than manually.
• Common metadata vocabularies (ontologies) and maps between vocabularies that allow document creators to know how to mark up their documents so that agents can use the information in the supplied metadata (so that Author in the sense of ‘the Author of the page’ won’t be confused with Author in the sense of a book that is the subject of a book review).
• Automated agents to perform tasks for users of the semantic web using this data
• Web-based services (often with agents of their own) to supply information specifically to agents (for example, a Trust service that an agent could ask if some online store has a history of poor service or spamming)

Challenges

Some of the challenges for the Semantic Web include vastness, vagueness, uncertainty, inconsistency, and deceit. Automated reasoning systems will have to deal with all of these issues in order to deliver on the promise of the Semantic Web.

• Vastness: The World Wide Web contains at least 24 billion pages as of this writing (June 13, 2010). The SNOMED CT medical terminology ontology contains 370,000 class names, and existing technology has not yet been able to eliminate all semantically duplicated terms. Any automated reasoning system will have to deal with truly huge inputs.
• Vagueness: These are imprecise concepts like “young” or “tall”. This arises from the vagueness of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers, of matching query terms to provider terms and of trying to combine different knowledge bases with overlapping but subtly different concepts. Fuzzy logic is the most common technique for dealing with vagueness.
• Uncertainty: These are precise concepts with uncertain values. For example, a patient might present a set of symptoms which correspond to a number of different distinct diagnoses each with a different probability. Probabilistic reasoning techniques are generally employed to address uncertainty.
• Inconsistency: These are logical contradictions which will inevitably arise during the development of large ontologies, and when ontologies from separate sources are combined. Deductive reasoning fails catastrophically when faced with inconsistency, because “anything follows from a contradiction”. Defeasible reasoning and paraconsistent reasoning are two techniques which can be employed to deal with inconsistency.
• Deceit: This is when the producer of the information is intentionally misleading the consumer of the information. Cryptography techniques are currently utilized to alleviate this threat.

This list of challenges is illustrative rather than exhaustive, and it focuses on the challenges to the “unifying logic” and “proof” layers of the Semantic Web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Incubator Group for Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web (URW3-XG) final report lumps these problems together under the single heading of “uncertainty”. Many of the techniques mentioned here will require extensions to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for example to annotate conditional probabilities. This is an area of active research.^[26]

Projects

This section lists some of the many projects and tools that exist to create Semantic Web solutions.^[27]

DBpedia

DBpedia is an effort to publish structured data extracted from Wikipedia: the data is published in RDF and made available on the Web for use under the GNU Free Documentation License, thus allowing Semantic Web agents to provide inferencing and advanced querying over the Wikipedia-derived dataset and facilitating interlinking, re-use and extension in other data-sources.

FOAF

A popular application of the semantic web is Friend of a Friend (or FoaF), which uses RDF to describe the relationships people have to other people and the “things” around them. FOAF permits intelligent agents to make sense of the thousands of connections people have with each other, their jobs and the items important to their lives; connections that may or may not be enumerated in searches using traditional web search engines. Because the connections are so vast in number, human interpretation of the information may not be the best way of analyzing them.

FOAF is an example of how the Semantic Web attempts to make use of the relationships within a social context.

GoodRelations for e-commerce

A huge potential for Semantic Web technologies lies in adding data structure and typed links to the vast amount of offer data, product model features, and tendering / request for quotation data.

The GoodRelations ontology^[28][29][30] is a popular vocabulary for expressing product information, prices, payment options, etc. It also allows expressing demand in a straightforward fashion.

GoodRelations has been adopted by Google, BestBuy, Overstock, Yahoo, OpenLink Software, O’Reilly Media, the Book Mashup, and many others.

SIOC

The Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities project (SIOC, pronounced “shock”) provides a vocabulary of terms and relationships that model web data spaces. Examples of such data spaces include, among others: discussion forums, blogs, blogrolls / feed subscriptions, mailing lists, shared bookmarks and image galleries.

SIMILE

Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments

SIMILE is a joint project, conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL, which seeks to enhance interoperability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, meta data, and services.

NextBio

A database consolidating high-throughput life sciences experimental data tagged and connected via biomedical ontologies. Nextbio is accessible via a search engine interface. Researchers can contribute their findings for incorporation to the database. The database currently supports gene or protein expression data and is steadily expanding to support other biological data types.

Linking Open Data

Datasets in the Linking Open Data project, as of Sept 2008

The Linking Open Data project is a W3C-led effort to create openly accessible, and interlinked, RDF Data on the Web. The data in question takes the form of RDF Data Sets drawn from a broad collection of data sources. There is a focus on the Linked Data style of publishing RDF on the Web.

OpenPSI

OpenPSI the (OpenPSI project) is a community effort to create a UK government linked data service that supports research. It is a collaboration between the University of Southampton and the UK government, led by OPSI at The National Archives and is supported by JISC funding.

GoPubMed

Is the first semantic search engine for the life sciences. It uses the GeneOntology (GO) and the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to semantically filter millions of biomedical abstracts from MEDLINE. The public website GoPubMed.com allows users to verify papers including their background information. The platform has already about 60,000 enthusiastic helping hands. GoPubMed shows the semantic path to the future: community generated ontologies and so improves the quality of search results.

See also

• Agris: International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology
• Business semantics management
• Computational semantics
• Corporate Semantic Web
• Entity-attribute-value model
• Linked Data
• List of emerging technologies
• Ontology learning
• Semantic advertising
• Semantic computing
• Semantic Sensor Web
• Semantic Web Services
• Social Semantic Web
• Website Parse Template
• Smart-M3
• Web 3.0

References

Further reading

• Grigoris Antoniou, Frank van Harmelen (March 31, 2008). A Semantic Web Primer, 2nd Edition. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-01242-1.
• Dean Allemang, James Hendler (May 9, 2008). Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-0-12-373556-0.
• John Davies (July 11, 2006). Semantic Web Technologies: Trends and Research in Ontology-based Systems. Wiley. ISBN 0-470-02596-4.
• Pascal Hitzler, Markus Krötzsch, Sebastian Rudolph (August 25, 2009). Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies. CRCPress. ISBN 1-4200-9050-X.
• Thomas B. Passin (March 1, 2004). Explorer’s Guide to the Semantic Web. Manning Publications. ISBN 1-932394-20-6.
• Liyang Yu (June 14, 2007). Introduction to Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services. CRC Press. ISBN 1-58488-933-0.
• Jeffrey T. Pollock (March 23, 2009). Semantic Web For Dummies. For Dummies. ISBN 0-470-39679-2.
• Martin Hilbert (April, 2009). The Maturing Concept of E-Democracy: From E-Voting and Online Consultations to Democratic Value Out of Jumbled Online Chatter. Journal of Information Technology & Politics. ISBN 1-68080-271-5242.

External links

• Official website
• W3C Semantic Web Activity
• links collection on Semantic Overflow
• Semantic Technology and the Enterprise
• SSWAP: Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol
• How Stuff Works: The Semantic Web
• The Semantic Web Journal

Image via CrunchBase

Related articles

• BBC to stream news site to Samsung tellies (go.theregister.com)

Image via CrunchBase

(Reuters) – Media and technology moguls gather in Idaho this week to once more debate a shift to a digital world, but the talk this year will finally focus on how to make money off it.

Unlike in years past, this year’s attendees at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley will discuss how to go beyond experimenting with digital services such as mobile TV, and begin thrashing out ways to overhaul long-standing business models designed for a print and video-tape era.

The annual pow-wow attended by the giants of old and new media — from News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch and Walt Disney Co’s Bob Iger to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — is traditionally the venue for hatching blockbuster deals.

In the past year, industry executives have increasingly talked about taking action, not protecting preexisting revenue streams — even if that means selling digital assets like video site Hulu or failed social networking site MySpace to revamp their strategy.

The establishment is still far from certain how their diverse digital businesses will shape up, said James Schwab, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.

But with newcomers such as Google Inc — a potential buyer of Hulu to supplement its Youtube service — and Apple Inc jumping feet-first into Web-based media and Facebook and Groupon luring away advertisers, it may be approaching crunch-time for media conglomerates.

“What they do know is that they need to engage with digital opportunities on each of these fronts,” said Schwab, who has brokered numerous media deals, including the merger that created Time Warner Inc.

Hollywood studios planned this year to roll out a system called Ultraviolet, which lets consumers stream a movie bought online to mobile devices. And TV Everywhere, a proposal led by Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and Comcast Corp CEO Brian Roberts, aims to allow cable customers to access their shows online away from home.

DIGITAL’S LONG SHADOW

Executives meeting in the shadow of Idaho’s Pointer Mountains from Wednesday will talk also about the stuttering U.S. economy — as they have for the past three years. A newer topic of concern will be cyber-security following a series of severe hacking incidents at Sony Corp.

But it’s the long-term future of media that will top the agenda. Media executives, particularly content owners, have long been keen to avoid jeopardizing lucrative global licensing arrangements, only to see them replaced with less valuable digital ones. This has been one Hulu’s challenges.

The popular TV video website raises both a conflict and opportunity for its owners. News Corp and Disney in particular may have felt the site would do better for all concerned as a stand-alone business. Hulu is also owned by Comcast’s NBC Universal and Providence Equity Partners.

Several of Hulu’s potential buyers are expected to attend the Allen & Co’s organized event including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.

The owners have renewed long-term content licenses to make Hulu a more enticing prospect. Some observers note that Hulu still underscores how content rights-holders retain an edge over up-and-coming media players like Google, which excels at engaging an Internet audience but needs quality programing.

“Google has been trying for years to acquire eyeballs and challenge the traditional media business. But the rights-holders still hold all the cards,” said Chris Marangi, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Multimedia Funds.

Hulu’s potential new owners — so far all divorced from the established content business — will no doubt be watching Netflix Inc for signs the market is ripe for a new distribution model — distinct from cable or satellite.

Netflix has over 20 million U.S. subscribers and is on course to overtake Comcast as the No.1 pay-video subscription service — albeit on lower per-user revenue.

Ted Sarandos, the Netflix executive charged with inking expensive deals with content producers, is expected to be in Sun Valley and it’s likely he’ll be busy. He will also offer new opportunities for content owners: on Tuesday, they announced an expansion into Latin America.

(Editing by Edwin Chan and Lisa Shumaker)

taken from:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/06/us-sunvalley-idUSTRE7647B020110706

Related articles

• G5 Idled? Check! Name Tags On? Check! Week-Long Mogul Fest in Sun Valley Will End With Zuckerberg-Gates Chit-Chat (allthingsd.com)
• Murdoch Responds To Hacking Claims From Sun Valley (paidcontent.org)

Image via CrunchBase

Article by Raja

These include Voice Search and Google Goggles. The first of the announcements is Voice Search on the desktop.

While people who use Android-based phones are aware that it includes support for using voice to enable Google search, the company has just today enabled searching using its web site via voice for PC users. The official Google blog site has the details of the new feature which at the moment is exclusive to Google’s own Chrome web browser. Users will be able to see a microphone icon on the Search button. Chrome users can simply click on it and speak their search terms (assuming they have a microphone installed of course). At the moment only English is supported by the new Google Search PC voice feature.

In addition to the voice search addition, another feature that debuted on the Android has made its way to the PC desktop. It’s the Search Images feature at images.google.com. Using the feature you can upload an image or even plug in an image URL and then the Search Images features will try to find out things like a location and more. The feature will be available in 40 languages and will be supported by both Chrome and Firefox web browsers via extensions.

Finally Google has announced a new way to speed up searches in general called Instant Images. According to the blog, “Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you’re choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches.” It will be launched in the next beta version of the Chrome browser or you can try it out now by downloading the latest version that’s made primarily for developers.

If you like this, you might also like other similar articles in following section: Tech News .

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taken from:

http://www.spicytricks.com/2011/06/google-launches-voice-search-and-search.html

Related articles

• “Google Launches New Search Features: Voice Search for Desktop, Search by Images, Instant Pages & More” and related posts (readwriteweb.com)