Monday, March 23, 2009

Tags Is The Organization Tool For Mac Users Who Have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Tagging can be the super-organizers dream tool. Apple application developer, Gravity Applications, recently launched a tagging software, Tags,
that allows Mac users to tag all their files, including emails,
bookmarks, pictures and files. The tags allow users to assign keywords
for files, grouping many different files that have something in common.
The tagging feature also allows you to apply many different types of
tags to a single file or apply the same tag to multiple files, giving
the user a little more flexibility than just the file/folder system.
The software costs $29 but you can set up a 30-day free trial to see if
the application works for you.

Article Link

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Twine Could Soon Surpass Delicious, Prepares Ontology Authoring Tool



Nova Spivack's semantic web company Twine
is developing a free service to write and host semantic ontologies; the
classification trees that enable machines to put concepts in topical
context. Ready to play Aristotle and create an ontology of cheese,
model airplanes, global anti-hunger organizations or any other topic?

What blogging was to publishing, a simple tool that made far more
people able to participate, Twine's new ontology writing and hosting
service could be to the act of teaching machines about new topics.















The company wouldn't let
us publish the new service's name but says it is aiming for a launch
date this year, as soon as a go-to-market strategy and appropriate
partnerships are lined up. The ontologies created won't only work on
Twine; they will be referenceable by semantic apps anywhere around the
web.

Article Link

GumGum Wants To Turn Celebrity Pics Into Shopping Sprees With ShopThisLook

Image licensing startup GumGum
is introducing a new ad unit to go along with all of those celebrity
pics that it helps to distribute. Next time you come across a paparazzi
shot of Lindsay Lohan
on the Web, you might see a ShopThisLook badge next to the image
courtesy of GumGum. Click on the badge and window will pop up with
shopping links for clothes and accessories similar to what Lohan is
wearing in the picture. When possible, GumGum tries to match the exact
same pair of jeans, dress, or shirt.


GumGum tracks images that reach 25 million people a month across the
Web. It has data on which images are spread around and viewed the most.
Using a combination of image recognition technology and human editors,
it adds tags to the most popular celebrity photos. These tags then
trigger cost-per-click (CPC) links with images from Shopzilla and Shopstyle.
There is a lot of human editing that goes into this process. Image
recognition techniques are simply not good enough yet to completely
automate the process. But all GumGum has to do is tag the most widely
distributed images of the most popular celebrities to see if the
concept has legs.


Websites that license images through GumGum can either pay for them
or use them free with advertising. The ShopThisLook badges will appear
in place of the ads for certain images. Website publishers who pay for
the images can also opt in to show the badges, in which case they will
receive 30 percent of any CPC revenues.


GumGum CEO Ophir Tanz says that in early testing, the badges are
clicked on about one percent of the time, but that the click-through
rate to an actual item after that is 29 percent. That implies a blended
click-through rate of 0.29 percent, and the effective CPM is 90 cents.
These numbers are based on a limited sample, and before any effort to
optimize them.


(Read our previous coverage of GumGum here and here).


Article Link

Sunday, March 15, 2009

he Semantic Web: A Treasure Trove for Marketers

Natural-Language Search



Consumer-generated content gives companies an opportunity to
understand their customers' concerns and conversations. Yet because so
much content is out there, companies need filters to find the most
relevant conversations. Natural-language processing can provide this
function by automatically summarizing online content for useful
analysis by filtering compiled conversations.

Content Enhancement



While natural-language search helps companies interpret data and see
deeper into the trends in the conversations of their customers and
prospects, think of content enhancement as a way for companies to make
their existing content more valuable. As "social marketing" -- or the
practice of deeply engaging customers through content and social tools
-- becomes increasingly important, so too is finding ways of giving
that content life and context.

Article Link

Thursday, March 12, 2009

The Semantic Web: A Treasure Trove for Marketers



Two technologies in
particular (natural-language search and content enhancement) promise to
bring companies much closer to their customers and deliver to consumers
more relevant content than ever before.

Semantic technology enables consumers and companies to find
information that is difficult to discover using traditional search
technology. Companies can use the results of this technology to improve
their marketing intelligence and provide more relevant content to their
customers.



With the cost of monitoring and providing relevant value to consumers lowered, the stage is now set for the development
of semantic technology: building out a customer engagement
infrastructure. Technology for finding relevant data may still be new,
but the deployment of semantic technology is giving a boost to the next
stage of development for mapping the engagement workflow to customers,
in which opportunities that appear on the web are brought to people who
can take advantage of them, whether marketers or consumers.



In essence, semantic technology will help marketers listen easily to
the increasing volume of content, sort through the clutter, and find
what's relevant to companies and consumers.

Article Link