March 25, 2008

Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies - ReadWriteWeb

Alex Iskold wrote a nice article that provides an overview and categorization of semantic web approaches, technologies, and companies.

Here are a few key points from the article, interspersed with some of my own perspectives.

• The Semantic Web is now capturing broad attention, and has been called the number one trend in 2008 (by Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb).
• Yahoo! recently announced that their search engine is going to support RDF and microformats. This will provide incentive for publishers to use semantic markup in their content. This echoes a point I made in my semantic web keynote talk last year (see below), that search engines would create incentives to drive the semantic web faster than people may have expected.
• Several companies are now offering web services to support or automate semantic markup. These include the Semantify web service from Dapper, the Open Calais web service from Reuters/ClearForest, and the Semantic Hacker API from TextWise.
• There are top-down and bottom-up approaches to the Semantic Web. Bottom-up approaches require people to enter semantic markup. This can be in strong semantic web formats using standards like RDF, or in lightweight markup formats, like Microformats.
• Search is potentially a killer app of semantic technologies. The author argues that semantic technologies alone are not enough to deliver better search, but when used in combination with the other search techniques they might be better. I agree that the combination is best. But I disagree with the statement that

  Google's algorithm, which is based on statistical analysis, deals just fine with semantic entities like people, cities, and companies.

  I think there is a significant gap today between what we are used to with search engines and what is possible with stronger semantic approaches, and this will become clearer over the next year. Contextual technologies use semantic markup within the page and combine that with external content and services. Thus a user does not have to search in order to benefit from the semantics. Examples include Snap, Yahoo Shortcuts, and SmartLinks. Such technologies are making their way into the browser, where they will have wider appeal and accelerate the trend toward the semantic web.
• Semantic databases focus on building and utilizing structure semantic information (as opposed to marking up unstructured content). Twine, by Radar Networks, and Freebase, by Metaweb, are two examples. (I am personally familiar with Freebase as we are integrating this within our offerings at Powerset.) Over time, we will see increasing synergies between the semantic technologies based on structured and unstructured data.

I highly recommend this article to people interested in semantic technologies and search. For my own perspective on the relationship between natural language, search, and the semantic web, you can see the video and presentation of my Keynote Talk at the 2007 International Semantic Web Conference, entitled Natural Language and the Semantic Web.

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January 20, 2008

Crunchies 2007 Award Ceremony and After Party

Yesterday I attended The Crunchies, an award ceremony to honor innovation in the tech community. The event was organized by TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, and VentureBeat.

My personal highlights from the award ceremony were:

• Live performance by The Richter Scales, singing "Here Comes Another Bubble".

  In case you haven't seen the video before, it is must viewing. It combines melody from Billy Joel with acapella (my favorite kind of music) with technology startup themes and humor. The video opens with a line from my friend and Powerset investor and board member Peter Thiel stating there is absolutely not a bubble in technology. The song later features lyrics such as "Babies blogging in the womb" and "I sold my twenties for a worthless pile of tech stock". My friends in the group, Tom Shields and James Currier, invited me to come sing with them sometime, which could be a lot of fun.
  
  

• Fake Steve Jobs accepting the Crunchies award on behalf of Apple for the IPod.
  

  His speech is totally hilarious. The whole speech is like one big inside joke. I had previously read his book "Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody", an autobiography of Steve Jobs as told by Fake Steve Jobs, and this video conveys the parody well.
  
  

• A video of my friend Nova Spivak (Founder of Radar Networks) answering the question about the most important technology innovation. Given the position he has taken in recent panels we have been on together, one might have thought he would talk about the Semantic Web, but instead Nova argued passionately about the virtues of Cool Whip!

  
  

  He illustrated many uses of the technology and had had the crowd rolling with laughter. This also inspired us to attempt to have a cool-whip afterparty, which fizzled out.
  

• Running video commentary by Sarah Meyers. Even without the platinum wig and corset she wore during her Party Crashers career (including crashing Powerset's Series A Funding Party), she's still adorable and very personable.
  
  
• Luke Nosek from The Founders Fund presenting the awards for "Best Business Model" and "Most Likely To Succeed". While many of the candidates were Founders Fund portfolio companies, I appreciated that he was wearing a Powerset t-shirt (with the grunting pigeon) under his jacket.
  
  

The After Party took place in the famous Green Room. My group had to wait a little while to get into the party, which exceeded the capacity of the room. The wait itself was fun because we were joined in line by MC Hammer. The party was enlivened by a photo activity sponsored by Zivity. In his award introduction Luke Nosek had described Zivity as "Myspace for Grownups." People took photos with props, costumes, and attitudes, accompanied by several Zivity models. I included a photo of me (in cowboy hat) with Pearl and Cyan in this post. The rest of the collection is fun.

Overall, while the event had its ups and downs, there was really a nice sense of community and cameraderie in both the presentations and in the audience. The award recipients made really brief and generally humble speeches (with the exception of Fake Steve Jobs, of course), most of them thanking their engineers and their moms. The videos shown during the ceremony were mostly sent in by nominated companies. Altogether it felt more like a summer camp show than the Oscars and it is good to see our community not taking itself too seriously. On that note, it was great to see Om Malik on stage at the event shortly after recovering from a heart attack that had left him hospitalized and the subject of much concern among his friends. When people saw him at the event there much applause and support.

I took some photos of the event myself and plan to post them here soon.

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November 19, 2007

My first trip to Korea

Last week I visited Korea for the first time. The primary reason was to give an invited keynote talk at the International Semantic Web Conference. I have posted about that talk separately. This post is about what else I did on my trip to Korea.

The conference came at a busy time for me so, I had to keep my trip to Korea very short (less than 4 days on the ground!). This was sad for me because I have heard about Korea for such a long time, having grown up with Korean family (my step-father was Korean). I did manage to make a visit to two interesting Korean companies.

First was NHN, the parent company of Naver, Korea's dominant web portal / search engine. Naver pioneered human powered search, as now seen in Yahoo Answers, among others. It turns out that the technical folks at NHN are already collaborating with the tech folks at Powerset on Hbase, the Powerset-initiated open source project for big distributed tables, ala Google's BigTable. They are also working with a local university to apply Hbase to distributed storage of large RDF databases, a perfect tie in to the activity at the Semantic Web conference. NHN is a pretty amazing company, especially for one that most people in the USA have never heard of.

Second, I visited KT, formerly Korea Telecom. I met with there with SanKu Jo, Vice Present of New Business Group, and Dongmyun Lee, Vice President of BcN business Unit, who are also quite visionary in semantic technology.

While there was not much time for fun, my hosts at NHN (Paul Sung and Ed Yoon) picked me up at the airport and took me out to a meal at a traditional Korean restaurant. We sat on the floor which was heated from below. I was told this is traditional for Korea and it makes for a comfortable bed, without needing a mattress. It also helps relieve the fatigue of sitting cross legged on the floor while eating from the low table. The next day, during an hour between my company visits and catching the next flight, we went to a high-up mountain fortress in the clouds, from which we could see all of Seoul.

My only other time out in Korea was at a dinner in Busan with the conference organizers and other invited speakers. We went out to a Korean seafood restaurant. The highlight of this for me was eating some other-worldly sea creature that responded to prodding as though it didn't realize it was no longer alive.

Although I only got a taste of Korea this time, I look forward to visiting again soon and hopefully to have more time to see this amazing country.

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November 9, 2006

John Battelle interviews Yahoo's David Filo and Bradley Horowitz at Web2.0

• A Conversation with Yahoo!
• David Filo and Bradley Horowitz
• Interviewed by John Battelle
• Web 2.0 Summit
• November 9th, San Francisco, CA
• Notes by Barney Pell

Here are my raw notes from the talk just now. It came right after a fascinating panel with teens and parents, in which almost everyone knew and used Google and Myspace, with Yahoo receding in the distance. In contrast, David and Bradley seemed very positive about Yahoo's situation and prospects for the future. They have had competitors over the last 12 years, and this isn't much different from the past.

At least we had a promise from David Filo that there wouldn't be any announcement about Microsoft acquiring Yahoo tomorrow.

Continue reading "John Battelle interviews Yahoo's David Filo and Bradley Horowitz at Web2.0"

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November 4, 2006

Amazon Web Services and Powerset in Business Week article

Rob Hof at Business Week just came out with an article called Jeff Bezos's Risky Bet. The article talks about Amazon's Web Services initiative, in which Amazon is enabling other companies to take advantage of the massive technology infrastructure Amazon has developed to power its own operations:

Amazon has spent 12 years and $2 billion perfecting many of the pieces behind its online store. By most accounts, those operations are now among the biggest and most reliable in the world. "All the kinds of things you need to build great Web-scale applications are already in the guts of Amazon," says Bezos. "The only difference is, we're now exposing the guts, making [them] available to others."

This article was the first to announce that Powerset is one of the major early customers for Amazon's new Electric Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. Here are the relevant paragraphs, which mention Powerset and some of our key angel investors:

Continue reading "Amazon Web Services and Powerset in Business Week article"

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August 28, 2006

Amidzad Summer Party

Powerset investors Amidzad had a really fun summer party at their Plug&Play facility in Mountain View. The food was amazing (5 course meal!), as was the entertainment (4 belly dancers). I bumped into many friends including Scott Waterman and Matson Wade (CommonLoop) and Nivi, and met the guys from Melodis. It turns out they are great karaoke singers. I hope to upload the video I took of them someday, unless the pay me not to. Pejman and Saeed were great hosts.

Here is a big set of professional photos from the Amidzad party.

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March 10, 2006

Calendars and Natural Language

My friend Matt Hurst on his DataMining blog wrote about Spongecell, a new Ajax-based calendar that lets you enter events using natural language. Here are some examples Matt tried, with his comments:

• Visiting Granny at 12 on March 1st: no problem, off to a good start.
• Flying to Cambridge on the 2nd then back on the 4th: sweet - it got the two dates. They were placed in February, so no context (my last entry was March), but that is probably the right behaviour.
• Flying to Boston tomorrow: this got entered in today's field, could be a time zone problem. It is 2am on the 31st where I am, so the entry should have been on the 1st of February.
• Flying to Boston in a week: nope, turned up in yesterday's list. Could be related to the issue above in that it really meant to put it in today's list - either way it's wrong.
• Flying to Boston on Thursday: no problem.
• Flying to Boston a week on Thursday: nope - just Thursday. Flying to Boston on the 30th of Feb: oops - turns up on the 2nd of March. An understandable error, but certainly a corner case that needs to be addressed.

I tried out the site. My initial impression of the look and feel was good, including the appearance of the calendar itself and the bubble tips for new users. I found about 75% of my NL inputs were handled correctly on the system, but as Matt says it is likely that users will learn which cases work well and then get high performance using those patterns.

It's perhaps the best kept secret at Microsoft, but did you know that Microsoft Outlook already supports some natural language entry of calendar events as well? Open up an appointment (new or existing) and in the day slot for the time, enter "fourth monday of April". Outlook converts that into the correct date. I use this feature all the time.

TechCrunch has a writeup about SpongeCell and many other players in the Calendar2.0 space. That page features 73 comments, many by other calendar companies, so to some extent this captures the current state of play on this topic. One missing related company from the list is TimeBridge (product coming soon), a Mayfield portfolio company for which I'm advisor, along with my friend Mark Drummond (founder of one of the Calendar1.0 companies, called TimeDance, for those who remember).

After writing the first draft of this article, I saw another post on TechCrunch about Google's upcoming calendar. The information was leaked by a beta tester, and includes detailed screenshots. Key elements from that posting:

• Natural-language event input: Just type in your event details and the service will parse them to fill out the form automatically: "dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow" (just like SpongeCell).
• Event pages: Create an event and automatically have a web page you can share with friends or the world at large.

• There is also discussion about Google Calendar scraping events from around the net, just like Zvents does.

  All of this was to be expected. It's not necessarily bad news for all the Calendar2.0 startups. I think they're not likely to succeed standalone and Google is unlikely to acquire them, but the enhanced feature set will likely become important for all the major portals, leading the top 3-5 of the new entrants to acquisitions in the near future.
  

Update: I got pointed to another cool calendar2.0: 30 Boxes. It also supports natural language entry, and it looks like it makes it really easy to share events with friends and family.

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September 21, 2005

Magic Wallpaper

I just learned about the MagicBoard.

The MagicBoard project aims at augmenting a perfectly ordinary whiteboard-like surface with electronic capabilities, via a video projector and a pan / tilt / zoom camera. The user works on the board as in the usual way, drawing or writing with ordinary marker pens. Whenever she chooses, the user can "grab" an electronic copy of the things that have been drawn or written with the marker pen. This copy is projected back onto the board, precisely overlaying the original markings with the appropriate colour. The physical ink may then be erased and the electronic version manipulated on the board's surface: it can be duplicated, moved, enlarged or reduced, printed, or hidden for a moment before being recalled. Meanwhile, the user may add to her designs with the marker pen as before. At any time, these new markings can be turned into digital form to merge with the electronic version of her work.

Continue reading "Magic Wallpaper"

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August 4, 2005

VC Taskforce on Next-Gen Tools in Global Software Development

Emerging Technology Forum

Global Software Development: Why next-gen tools matter

July 28, 2005

Abstract:

Software complexity has been steadily on the rise. Some persistent problems
have dogged programmers for 60 years, and still need solutions. New problems
arise as the landscape changes. What are the opportunities and maintenance
challenges ahead as teams work faster and collaborate across different time
zones, languages, and countries? What areas might be investable? This panel
of experts will explore these questions and new developments in a spirited
discussion on the state of software development.

Moderator:

• John Mashey, Techviser, briefly reviews the history of software development tools, environments, and productivity aids, emphasizing especially those environmental changes that create new opportunities.

Panel:

• David Hartford, CEO of N8 Systems, and previously a VC, will discuss his company's solutions to getting requirements right, a difficult, expensive old problem whose solution is even more critical when doing distributed development.
• Steve Mezak, CEO, Accelerance, will discuss experience with his company's global outsourcing methodologies and tools, with teams in 14 different countries, and a wide variety of clients.
• Sam Jadallah, Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures, previously VP at Microsoft will discuss the current investment landscape for software.

Continue reading "VC Taskforce on Next-Gen Tools in Global Software Development"

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June 16, 2005

Yahoo Buys Dialpad for VoIP: What's next?

A Mercury News article today announced that Yahoo plans to buy Dialpad to expand its VoIP offerings.
Quoting from the article:

The technology of Dialpad, a 6-year-old company, will allow Yahoo to expand its VoIP offerings. Currently, Yahoo's VoIP service allows people to speak to each other only through computer-to-computer connections. In the future, the company will able to offer the nearly 62 million monthly users of Yahoo Messenger the ability to use VoIP to contact someone on a phone.

``It's basically enabling us to get where we want to go faster,'' Stevens said. ``By integrating the expertise and technology that Dialpad has, we can scale more rapidly to offer PC-to-phone calling services and in-bound PC calling services so somebody can call your PC from a telephone.''

I think this is an exciting development that furthers Yahoo's move to be an integrated media and communications company.

I have been expecting developments like these ever since learning about my friend Wendell Brown's company, Teleo. I'll go out on a limb and predict that Google will make a related VoIP announcement in the next 3 months. I'm less confident but about who they will acquire, but my leading candidates would be either Skype or Teleo.
Andy Abramson, who follows the VoIP space on his blog, speculates about the next player to get acquired being a company called DeltaThree.

With all the portals moving to support voice, this might open a space of innovations in telecom. A couple examples I would like to see:

• It would be nice to just click on an IM buddy and say "call by phone", then have the relevant pc or telephones ring so you can move from typing to talking.
• Integrated voicemail with your web-based emails (e.g. yahoo mail, gmail)
• Text-to-speech for instant messages and emails (you can email or IM as text, the recipient hears it on their phone)

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June 13, 2005

Combining Google Maps with other data using open APIs

An Associated Press article last week, Google Maps Make Demographics Come Alive , describes a variety of nice hacks built by developers using Google Maps API with outside data sources.

As it turns out, Google charts each point on its maps by latitude and longitude — that's how Google can produce driving directions to practically anywhere in the nation. Seasoned developers have figured out how to match these points with locations from outside databases that can contain vast amounts of information — anything from police blotters to real estate listings.

The applications include:

Crime locations (Police data): http://www.chicagocrime.org

Sex predators (Police data): http://www.floridasexualpredators.com

Cheap gas (Gasbuddy data): http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/

Home buying: http://www.cytadia.com

Apartments (Craigslist data): http://www.housingmaps.com

On Housingmaps.com, the listings he wants are represented on a single map, marked by either a red or yellow pushpin symbol. Yellow come with apartment photographs; red have none. A click on a yellow pin sends Tan directly into the Craigslist posting on the street where he hopes to live.

"It takes two seconds to glance at the map to see if there is anything for me that day," Tan said.

These stories trigger a few broader themes.

Continue reading "Combining Google Maps with other data using open APIs"

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May 30, 2005

Spontaneous Navigation for TV, from Hillcrest Labs

Hillcrest Labs has developed a new way to navigate TV.
Their product, a new kind of remote control and navigation system, looked really usable, and I can't wait to have one myself.

Dan Simkins, CEO, demonstrated the product at the D3 conference, organized by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (from the Wall Street Journal). My raw notes from the demo are below.

Continue reading "Spontaneous Navigation for TV, from Hillcrest Labs"

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May 19, 2005

Online Deliberation Conference

This weekend (May 20 - 22) I will be attending this event:

The Second Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice / DIAC 2005, will bring together software developers, social science researchers, and practioners of online deliberation for three days of presentations and workshops on the Stanford University campus in May of 2005.

The program looks really exciting. Abstracts and papers are available online for those who can't attend.

Some topics I am particularly interested in:

• third-party annotation of content to provide additional context right when we are reading political or scientific information.
• providing automated support for conversational protocols to make communication more effective (e.g. automating parliamentary procedure)
• increasing collective IQ

My friend Michael Ginn and I worked together on a set of ideas like this in the mid 90's in a company called Realize Communications, one of the early companies to commercialize collaborative filtering for discussion groups. The time is probably right for such ideas to play a larger role in society, driven by recent trends in grassroots media (e.g. blogging), rating systems like epinions, folksonomy tagging, and XML, and Semantic Web.

Posted by barney at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2005

Recent Innovations in Search: Notes from BayCHI panel

The San Francisco Bay Area ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) hosted a panel discussion on "Recent Innovations in Search, and Other Ways of Finding Information". 

Abstract:

Search has been an exciting area, with a spate of recent innovations and
acquisitions.  From Visual Yellow Pages to sophisticated client side
interactivity, from RSS feeds to folksnomies, developments have come at
a fast and furious pace.

  - Where is all this leading?
  - Is search evolving beyond the simple search box?
  - What else can we look forward to in the near future?
  - What type of user experience challenges do these innovations bring?

Panelists:

  - PETER NORVIG, Google
  - MARK FLETCHER, Ask Jeeves, Inc.
  - UDI MANBER, A9.com
  - KEN NORTON, Yahoo!
  - JAKOB NIELSEN, Nielsen Norman Group

BayCHI Program Co-Chair RASHMI SINHA will moderate.

--------
Complete abstract and bios: http://www.baychi.org/program/

There was an overflow crowd, with people sitting in the aisles.

The rest of this blog entry contains my notes. 

Continue reading "Recent Innovations in Search: Notes from BayCHI panel"

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February 17, 2005

Merging of ecommerce and social networking

The merging of social networking and ecommerce is heating up...

• Overstock.com launches "reputation networks" (see article below)
• buy.com acquires metail.com
• tribe.net reaches 1 million classified postings
• I also heard about a site called "shopularity", who are still under the radar.

Continue reading "Merging of ecommerce and social networking"

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