Semantic Business

Bet On Nokia & S60, Not Google & Android

The excitement of Android's launch has died down a bit so this seems like a good time to cast Google's entry against Nokia. Sounds like an unfair contest right? After all, one is a giant in its industry, a leader in R&D and technical innovation, with a long history of support for the developer/open source community, not to mention a globally recognized brand. I'm referring to Nokia, in case you were wondering. I'm not ignoring Apple and the iPhone, but I don't get the impression they're pressing as hard to shape a play that stretches from fundamental infrastructure up to the end user experience - which I do believe has crossed the minds of people at Google & Nokia.

Both companies have money, talent, recognition, and deep commercial relationships. Nokia probably has the lead in governmental relationships due to the highly regulated nature of the telecom industry. Google's got search so solidly nailed it's scary. With Android, Google is moving onto Nokia's turf. In the meantime, Nokia's plans appear to call for an increasing emphasis on Web services and certainly mobile content, as demonstrated by its launch of Ovi and its own music store (maybe Nokia's taking a shot at Apple, after all). 

I won't dwell on the increasing sophistication of mobile devices or that they'll become a prominent means of Internet access (or even primary for some people), instead, I'll focus on the evolution we're seeing on the WWW toward the SW. Since the SW is simply an extension of the WWW, it's safe to assume that wherever the Web can be reached, the Semantic Web can be reached as well - it's all due to HTTP after all.

Here's where the respective paths of these companies begin to diverge. Google's demonstrated its schizophrenic approach to the SW pretty clearly, as I explored in this post. It seems they're quietly exploring the fringes of the SW, but they're probably expending just as much effort in denying the existence of these activities. I haven't looked through any of Android's documentation for SW references, but since I haven't found any elsewhere, it's possible that there simply aren't any.

On the other hand, Nokia's involvement in the Semantic Web goes back to at least to 1997, when Ora Lassila wrote a brief note titled "Introduction to RDF Metadata," likely when he was a visiting fellow at W3C. Ora's gone on to play an influential role within Nokia, promoting the SW all along the way. Others within the company have followed suit so that now there's a raft of internal SW projects here and here (they're not all SW projects, but a good number are). So, given the complexity of mobile environments, the differences in platforms, operating systems, regulatory environments, etc., it seems like SW technology might be well suited to service composition and delivery, provisioning issues generally, and offloading processing requirements from the handset.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Nokia acquired Navteq over the summer? Frankly, I don't think there's enough of a difference between Google Maps, Navteq, Yahoo! Maps, or others to really make a difference. But the point is that by purchasing Navteq, Nokia no longer needs to rely on Google and it no longer needs to divulge any information regarding how location based services might be developed and deployed. That's knowledge Google will have to acquire on its own. Since I've already indicated in my earlier post about Google that there's no evidence they're recruiting people with expertise in RDF, OWL, ontologies, SPARQL, graphs, triples, etc., it doesn't look to me like they're going to catch up any time soon. As a matter of fact, now that Google's cutting its workforce , I'm guessing the company's appetite for innovation may slow down, meaning that if they want to catch up in any contest with Nokia, they're going to be sucking serious wind.

Diversifying away from a reliance on search makes all the sense in the world to me. But can a mobile operating system succeed on its own without its very own fleet of handsets, infrastructure, content beyond maps, software development in what I believe will be a key technology, and deep experience in global telecom regulation? I don't know, but it's not a bet I would take.

Company Updates and New Profiles

Since publishing On The Cusp at the end of September, a number of companies have contacted me to schedule briefings and quite frankly, I'm very happy to do so. Of course, now I feel self-conscious because I have a bit of a backlog to attend to...

With that said, I'm planning to provide updates on the companies I've profiled while also profiling new companies (or at least, new to me) in the Semantic Web industry. 

Additionally, as I become aware of new information or discover something interesting, I'll provide updates accordingly. Along these lines, anyone reading this is welcome to contact me about companies they'd like to see profiled, even if it's their own(!)

In the meantime, you'll be seeing new profiles and updates starting in the very near future.

David

Company Profile: Inform Technologies, Inc.

Inform Technologies, Inc.

URL: http://www.inform.com/

HQ: New York NY, USA

Products (Primary): Inform

Contact: Josh Kirschner

Vendor Category: NLP

Employees: --

Revenue: --

Installed base: --

Primary Offering:

It’s safe to say that Inform has built a successful business by using NLP technology to process its customer’s Web sites and then enrich these pages by linking to relevant content published elsewhere on the Web. One look at Inform’s customer list, which includes names like Ziff Davis, The Economist, Wired, and many more serves as solid evidence that the company has a winning product. Each of these customers has decided that it’s in their best interest to seek out relevant external content and then publish it to supplement the original article on the page. 

Increasingly, publishers seem motivated to engage in this practice in the belief that it reinforces their authoritative standing in the eyes of their audience. As would be expected, customers can control what external content is deemed suitable for publication on their site by creating white lists and black lists, as well as whether or not to keep visitors within the publisher’s “family” of media properties.

In practice, using Inform’s solution is easy enough – Inform hosts the back end where the processing is performed, and when a publisher creates an article its submitted through Inform’s API. The article is processed, the (desired) relevant content is identified and linked, and the results are returned to the customer for final publication. Aside from expanding the content presented to visitors, these results also play an important role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), with customers reporting page views increasing by 10% to 20% and in some cases as high as 25%.

Key Differentiators:

In the course of its existence, Inform created a well developed, professionally maintained taxonomy. This complements the work of the company’s library scientists, linguists, and ontologists and has had the effect of positioning the company well to pursue specific vertical markets such as health. As a result, Inform is prepared to move into select industries and may well do so from a position of strength, unburdened by the need to play “catch up”.

A very interesting (and fully operational) example of just how far Inform’s solution can be extended is found at NewsDaily.com. Reportedly, this site is operated by a single individual who uses a Reuters feed subscription to form the content kernel for processing by Inform. Clicking through the top-level Reuters content leads to pages the clearly include related articles from a wide range of publishers. Readership or audience numbers weren’t supplied, but the low fixed costs of this business suggest that modest advertising success could yield solid revenues for a one man operation.

Six/Twelve Month Plans:

Aside from its potential entry into specific verticals, Inform is considering opportunities in advertising. While it’s easy to imagine the extraction of primary concepts from an article and then associating relevant advertisements, the actual implementation has challenges which Inform has yet to fully define. Aside from these two possibilities, Inform is deep into execution mode and at this point, a primary goal for the company is to continue building on its track record of success.

Analysis:

Inform has a roster of believers who have contracted for their services. In many ways, the business case is fairly easy to express – in a traditional publishing environment there might be a number of editors who spend part of their time tagging stories for a variety of reasons. Time spent tagging means time taken away from other, higher value activities. Inform’s solution reduces this burden on content editors which translates into time savings, cost savings, and higher productivity (arguably, these are all ways to describe the same business result). These savings, combined with an improved audience experience, create a compelling argument for publishers to take a close look at this technology and how it fits with their overall goals.