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Friday 8 July 2011

Web 3.0 Brings a New Wave of Startup Opportunities

By Effie Sha
What if your Google search for "Paris Hilton" listed your top result as the Hilton Hotel in Paris, because it knew your interests were not in the other direction? This is the current dream of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web.

He calls his dream "Web 3.0" or the "Semantic Web," meaning it understands user context. He and many other experts believe that the Web 3.0 browser will act more like a personal assistant than a search engine. As you search the Web, the browser records your interests in your local storage. The more you use the Web, the more your browser learns about you, and the more relevant will be your results.

Current advertising and public relations startups are already thinking along these lines in fields all the way from clothes shopping, art galleries, online advertising, to managing press releases. In some ways, these aren't that different from the old Amazon.com "recommendation engine," which suggests new products based on your surfing and buying habits, but they go much further.

Someday you will be able to ask your browser open questions like "Where should I take my wife for a good movie and dinner?" Your browser would consult its intelligence of what you and she like and dislike, take into account your current location, and then suggest the right movies and restaurants. If you are the first to deliver this, your startup can be the next Google success!

But some are skeptical about whether the Semantic Web - or at least, Berners-Lee's view of it - will actually take hold. They reference other technologies also trying to reinvent the online world as we know it, from 3D virtual worlds to intelligent avatars. Web 3.0 could mean many things, and most of the possibilities have not yet been invented.

The Semantic Web isn't really even a new idea. This notion of a Web where machines can better read, understand, and process all the data floating through cyberspace first surfaced in 2001, when a story appeared in Scientific American. This article describes a brave new world where software "agents" lead the way in performing Web-based tasks that elude most humans.

A current example is the GetGlue from AdaptiveBlue. If you visit a movie blog, and read about a particular film, it immediately links to sites where you can buy or rent that film. Another example is WolframAlpha, an amazing computational engine that went live recently, which creates intelligent results, graphs, and reports from any natural language question.

But we are a long way from agents that can do full natural language processing and think on their own (artificial intelligence). A recent startup, Alitora Systems, provides software to enterprises based on a natural language processing (NLP) engine.

It builds knowledge statements from unstructured media files - that's a particular challenge for the life sciences where high-value knowledge about many things, such as the relationship between genetics and disease, lies hidden within journal articles, research papers, clinical trial data, FDA websites, and even graphical data.

But extracting information from even less structured data such as Twitter feeds is a very different and sometimes more difficult knowledge extraction problem. The objective is the same; assimilating unstructured data, giving it some robust analysis, and offering the extracted knowledge across a collaborative network.

Just think of the fertile ground all this opens for startups! If you're looking for that "million dollar idea" to build a plan around, here is your chance. But don't wait too long, because the din for Web 3.0 is getting louder and louder. Catch the wave soon or it will pass you by!


About the author:
Senior Software Developer, working in RayooTech software outsourcing company, website: http://www.techomechina.com/

Saturday 25 June 2011

Technology in healthcare

An experiment in Tamil Nadu has highlighted, with some success, the role technology can play in ensuring quality healthcare, especially in villages.
The two-year programme involved the use of a Java-enabled handset application that health workers used to instantly transfer data to computers. The data was then collated and analysed.
The use of mobile phones and computers has been instrumental in keeping track of health data and identifying disease patterns. The system has helped in anticipating viral outbreaks in regions that were under surveillance.
If used effectively, this can help in taking comprehensive healthcare services to rural India and reaching out to the country's underprivileged. If the governments concerned are serious in improving our ailing rural health centers, using technology to generate and monitor data should be one of the first things they must be looking at.
The need of the hour is better involvement of private institutions and individuals to ensure a larger mass base is brought under the radar.

Read more here:  http://www.livemint.com/2010/09/02211944/Cellphonebased-technology-to.html?atype=tp 





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Saturday 14 May 2011

Facebook vs. Who? Users Stay Longer on Personal News Engine Genieo Than on Facebook

Unlike other news readers, Genieo is a completely automatic, completely private personalization engine that can sense the difference between intention (I am looking for a new apartment) and attention (I will always care about stories related to Venture Capital); it can differentiate between caring about Derek Jeter all the time (you are a scary stalker fan) and only caring about him from May to October (you're just a Yankees fan).

Tuesday 3 May 2011

5 reasons to try Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft's OneNote is a first-class note-gathering and editing tool. Here are five key features that make it so attractive:
  1. Note-taking functionality:  OneNote offers excellent drag-and-drop features that allow you to insert snippets, pictures, diagrams, text and other information from a website into your notes. It auto-saves the notebooks. You can also use it to embed and synchronize audio and video files to your notes.
  2. Search: Its powerful search tool helps you find information quickly - whether it is the written word, text in pictures, or words in audio and video recordings.  It even records the url of the original source for easy reference. Page tabs make it easy to go through, rearrange and search for pages in your notebooks.
  3. Sharing:  Multiple people can work on a OneNote shared file simultaneously. The programme maintains a copy of the notebook on local computers, allowing you to work even when not connected to the network.  Changes made by users are synchronized to ensure the shared notebook remains up-to-date.
  4. Outlook integration:  Hassle-free integration with Outlook allows you to save tasks on Outlook, email notes directly from OneNote, share notebooks and mark notes with an Outlook task flag. This is synchronized with OneNote, a feature that lets you move between the two easily. OneNote pages can also be published as HTML pages.
  5. Screenshots: This nifty feature helps you capture sections of a webpage. Unlike the screen print option, here you don't need to save the page or crop it. Just select and pick the area you need and you are done! 
OneNote also offers several other features, including customizable layout and design options, navigation history and note flags. Try it and you'll wonder how you managed without it for so long!  


Follow the link below for keyboard shortcuts:

Saturday 16 April 2011

The future of the internet

The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it

http://www.economist.com/node/16941635




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Saturday 26 March 2011

The future of lighting

What would you say to an idea of illumination which is easy to install, lasts much more, is economically viable, and uses a technology which is completely different from the conventional ways of generating light?

This might surprise you, but heat is not a by-product of light!  That’s something that should particularly appeal to those who spend a fair bit on air-conditioning in their attempts to kill the heat generated by the red-hot filaments of their monster-sized lamps.

The lights of the future that we are taking about are light-emitting diodes or LEDs. The reason why LEDs don’t sound (they are not talking lights, we are!) like our conventional lights is because unlike an incandescent bulb where current causes a filament to heat up and emit light, LEDs produce light when current passes through a semi-conductor chip.

An LED is basically a small semi-conductor chip, often less than one millimetre square, located in a small bulb. When voltage is applied to the semi-conductor, it causes electrons to flow in the semi-conductor – a process that produces the light without the heat that conventional incandescent lamps generate.

This tiny arrangement of a semiconductor chip with wires coming off it is supported by a lead frame. This package, neatly encapsulated in an epoxy or clear silicon, is a miniature light bulb.

There’s usually a little dome or lens of some sort as part of the package, but the whole thing is solid. That’s where the term solid-state lighting comes from.

Potent it may be, but we still need some more of these tiny pieces clustered together for a bright-enough light. The intensity and even the colour of the light can be changed. LEDs are small and sturdy and can be housed in flexible tiles, making it very easy to rearrange.      

This arrangement is the light source that you get in the market. It could anything: a table lamp that lasts you a lifetime, a mood-lighting arrangement sans mood swings, a downright cool downlight or a floodlight that can weather any storm! 




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