Just because the new iPhone arrived in stores today doesn’t mean the rest of the technology world shut down. In fact, today in San Francisco the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference continued its week-long series of talks and sessions about the semantic Web – the ability to understand and intelligently interpret content from the Web. A fascinating of how the semantic Web is colliding with the real-time Web is through Twitter and the impending release of annotations – and Ph.D student Joshua Shinavier provided some fascinating semantic scenarios for their use. Sponsor Twitter posts already contain plenty of metadata that allows for smart filtering and organization, including date and location. With annotations, however, the metadata possibilities will be literally endless. Tweet metadata could eventually contain information or links based on words or phrases in the tweet itself, other options added to the tweet, or even other external data like the weather in the senders location at the time it was sent. Imagine being able to add an infinite number of hashtags to a post without wasting precious characters. As Shinavier points out in his presentation ( see slides above ), Semantic databases could then plug into the annotation metadata and provide real-time semantic information to those who seek it. Using existing databases like GeoNames , Linked Movie Database and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) , very specific searches for genres of tweets can be collected. Searchers could ask for tweets about “places in developing countries,” “English-language movies starring Chinese actors,” or “songs by artists my friends like,” says Shinavier. Shinavier likens annotations to the real-time version of attributes from RDF (Resource Description Framework) , which provide websites with extended semantic metadata. Since Twitter’s annotations will be easy to implement for developers, the sheer size of the network of use will create the “long tail” of real-time semantic data, he says. The application of the semantic Web to annotations will make it easier for developers to create richer applications, which benefits the end user. In basic terms, the Web is getting smarter. Not Skynet smart, but smart, and with the mashup of the real-time fire-hose of information coming from services like Twitter, the semantic Web can provide even deeper and richer interactions for users. Personally, I am highly anticipating the release of annotations because I know brilliant developers are going to create amazing applications that leverage metadata. Throwing in semantic recognition only sweetens the pot. Image from Flickr user Colectivo Mambembe . Discuss

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At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative – which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It’s an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today’s update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly. Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google’s Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages. Sponsor Gupta told the SemTech audience that there are now more than 50 reviews sites using rich snippets, for example sites that offer restaurant reviews. Also there has been uptake on social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn. The most common use cases are events (which was added in January ) and recipe formats. Google is adding support for more formats, such as video, local businesses and shopping. Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. As the below chart shows, microformats is more common than RDFa for this feature. Google spent a good deal of today’s panel continuing its drive to get webmasters to adopt rich snippets. It has a tool called the Rich Snippets Testing Tool , which helps publishers utilize rich snippets. Finally, Kavi Goel from Google talked about how Google can accelerate growth of the ecosystem, noting that less than 5% of webpages currently have semantic markup. Google wants to see this rise to 50% or more. It is looking for critical mass, which includes adding more formats and encouraging more “beneficial peer pressure” for companies to support rich snippets. Goel cited restaurant review sites as an example – it’s not just Yelp which supports it, but other restaurant review services too. Rich snippets is an example of how the Semantic Web is being adopted by large and powerful Internet companies, so it’s encouraging to see that Google is pushing for rapid adoption. Discuss

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Online auction and marketplace eBay announced today that it has acquired the popular iPhone barcode scanning application RedLaser . The application and the image recognition technology behind it are built by Boulder-based TechStars graduate Occipital , who says the application “[outgrew] our basement office.” While the team at Occipital is refocusing its efforts to new fronts, eBay says it will pick up where the startup left off by continuing to develop the app and it’s third-party SDK users. Sponsor eBay says it plans to quickly integrate the barcode scanning technology into its current family of apps across its various brands, which include services like StubHub and Shopping.com . With over 200 million listings on eBay and over 7,000 merchants on Shopping.com, eBay’s purchase will certainly benefit RedLaser’s community of users and developers. Control of RedLaser SDK/API Occipital already offered an SDK which allowed third-party apps to embed the technology into their branded experiences, so if a barcode scanner is all they wanted, eBay could have simply licensed the technology. eBay apparently wants to control that network of third-party applications, which includes other major retailers like Target. With eBay’s past history of questionable acquisitions, one would hope the company has larger plans for RedLaser than to simply integrate it into their line of applications. eBay is providing the resources and man power to take RedLaser to the next level that Occipital didn’t have. In a phone interview with Robert Scoble today, eBay’s VP of mobile Steve Yankovich said the company plans to expand the application beyond the iPhone in order to attain the largest footprint possible. An Android version is coming “in the short term,” he said, and he hopes to provide it to other mobile operating systems as well. He also added that the company would not be commenting about its plans for the future of the SDK and API, but said they would be increasing support for developers. What This Means for Occipital The purchase is interesting because instead of just gobbling up the entire Occipital company, eBay chose to just purchase this one app and its related technology. Occipital co-founder Jeff Powers told ReadWriteWeb that the company wanted to remain independent to continue with its other projects, which means it is likely eBay originally wanted to buy the entire company. “Frankly, we didn’t start this company to scan barcodes,” said Powers. “Our vision for Occipital, and the groundwork we’ve laid over the past year expands beyond barcodes. We felt we absolutely needed to remain a freestanding company to pursue this vision.” As for Occipital, the company, which has been heads down on new projects for several months, is continuing full-speed-ahead toward their next front: augmented reality and computer vision. Powers mentioned today on Occipital’s blog that their next major release “begins our steps down the path of creating a human-computer interface that blends seamlessly with human vision, which will be Occipital’s primary focus for the foreseeable future.” “The next application we’re releasing next makes heavy use of new raw-video access on the iPhone, and dramatically improves the way people capture 360 degree panoramas,” said Powers. “From there, we’ll be continually increasing the ability of our interface to understand the world visually. We don’t call our stuff AR because AR has been associated with a watered-down experience that doesn’t make use of the most powerful mobile sensor — the camera. Instead, we prefer to call our work augmented vision. Kind of like what Iron Man had for his helmet.” Today, the company introduced a few new members of the team that will be leading these efforts into augmented vision and computer vision. The team has recently added two computer vision engineers and an augmented vision engineer, including one with a PhD in computer vision. The company is taking these efforts very seriously, and should have some interesting releases in the near future. Discuss

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As smartphone manufacturers improve on the hardware included in their devices, the possibilities for mobile app developers continue to expand. With the speedy new mobile processors and the high resolution cameras, image recognition apps have become very popular on smartphones, and companies like Occipital , makers of RedLaser on the iPhone, make it easy to embed barcode scanning technology into apps. For Android, however, there are fewer solutions, which is why ScanLife , developers of 2D barcode scanning technology, are providing an SDK for Android developers to leverage its scanning application. Sponsor Available now, the SDK allows developers to include a button in their app that will launch ScanLife’s scanning application, or download it if the user doesn’t have it on their phone. After scanning, the user is sent back to the original third-party app with their results. It’s a bit of a strange work-flow compared to RedLaser’s embeddable branded scanner on the iPhone, but it’s a decent solution for Android developers. The app can also be launched from a mobile website by adding a special link in the HTML code of the site. The SDK is free to use and supports several forms of 2D barcodes, including EZ codes, Datamatrix, QR codes and standard UPC barcodes. Right now the software development kit only supported on Android, but ScanLife says they are working on releasing an iPhone version soon. It’s great that more options are out there for developers to use emerging mobile technologies, but it would have been better to see ScanLife offer a more embeddable version of their scanner to foster more unified customer experiences. Having the ability to use the technology is one thing, but providing users with a smooth customer experience is a much higher value add for developers. Discuss

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Nimbula emerged from stealth today, and as you might expect with co-founders who developed the Amazon EC2 cloud service, it’s poised to be a pretty dig deal. The new project of Chris Pinkham and Willem van Billjon, Nimbula merges the technology of the public cloud – with all its efficiency and scalability – with the security and control of the private data center. And with such luminaries on board, it’s no surprise that the startup seems to be tackling some of the key challenges associated with enterprise cloud adoption: questions of private versus public clouds, security, and interoperability. Sponsor Challenging the Public/Private Cloud Dichotomy Recognizing the necessity for both public and private clouds, Nimbula seeks to make the two coexist more easily and hopes to disrupt the perceived dichotomy between the spheres. “Our solution allows customers to combine the operational efficiencies of the public cloud with the control, security, and trust of today’s most advanced data centers,” says CEO and co-founder Pinkham. Nimbula plans to make this combination seamless and fluid and supports private data centers that can make metered bursts to public clouds like EC2 during peak times or for specific applications. In this way, Nimbula wants to avoid some of the bottlenecks and siloing associated with private clouds, and also hopes to bring the easy accessibility of AWS-like services to the private cloud. But as Nimbula are targeting industries like finance and health, it’s clear that this agile move between public and private is undertaken with privacy, security, and regulatory compliance in mind. Security in the Cloud Nimbula offer a robust authentication system, with a finely-tuned policy-based authorization. Identity is granular, with control over not just who has access, but what parts of a server and what systems a user has access to. The Question of Interoperability: A Cloud Computing Operating System Nimbula Director, the company’s product, is an operating system for the cloud, addressing questions of security, reliability, flexibility, scalability, and ease of use. Nimbula offers an API, a command line and a web control panel in order to control all the cloud resources. According to Pinkham, Nimbula and a cloud OS will “redefine operating systems and what they do for us.” In the cloud environment, he adds, an operating system does more than merely control one machine. It’s about managing cloud resources, machines, and users. With a cloud OS, Nimbula seeks to addresses one of the major drawbacks to the current state of cloud computing: interoperability. Nimbula is in currently in beta, with a formal launch planned for the fall. The startup has been operating in stealth since 2009 and has received investment from Sequoia Capital and VMWare . Discuss

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