Month: May 2010

The Semantic Web – Is it about Relationships?

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Today I stumbled across a 14 minute documentary from student Kate Ray (see below) on ‘the Semantic Web’. In the documentary a interesting set of specialists are interviewed on this topic and it gives a good overview of its meaning and necessity.

I also noticed that most specialists concentrated on relationships. I believe this to be a result of scientific and mathematic ‘old school’ thinking. Relationships are easy; you can define them relatively simple and they fit in the world of ‘yes/no’, ‘on/off’ or ‘0/1’ thinkers.

I believe the Semantic Webs is more about context and not just about relationships. One could argue that context is just a bunch of relationships, but I feel it is more than that. Relationships are a defined set of properties; context is about a set of properties that can be discovered – they are fractal (or even better ‘pi’) in nature – the more you look at it, the more information you get. Similar to a starry sky in the middle of the desert on a dark night.

I also think the relationships are defined and the context can be imagined.

So, anyway, the documentary is embedded here for your viewing pleasure. Let me know your thoughts on this.

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Microsoft BPOS – the ultimate resource

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Peter de Haas from Microsoft has recently published a presentation on SlideShare.com that shows all resources related to Microsoft Online Services. Now they just have to make it profitable (see the businessinsider.com article).

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chart of the day, microsoft's online income, mar 2010

(source: http://www.businessinsider.com/sai)

Courier killed

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03-05-10courier News:

Microsoft executives have confirmed that the project around the development of a touch and/or stylus based 2-screen tablet “Courier” has been stopped.

Microsoft Corporate VP of communications, Mr. Frank Shaw:

“At any given time, we’re looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them. It’s in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project is an example of this type of effort. It will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.”

I feel disappointed. Courier bundled a lot of new and innovative ideas and the available information on the device showed great potential for a mobile workforce.

I blogged several times about it and promised myself to be an early adopter as soon as the device would be launched.

Maybe something secret is still lurking within Microsoft, but an iPad (without the current shortcomings) looks to be the most innovative device at the moment and worth a second look (maybe….).

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Apple Buys Siri

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Image representing Siri as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

On February 10, 2010, I blogged about Siri and called it “the next chapter of the web”? Well it seems I was not alone in thinking this was a big thing. On April 28, 2010, Apple announced they bought Siri for a undisclosed amount of money (educated guess? between 100 and 200 million dollars).

Some will say this is about Apple going into the ‘search business’ – but I believe it is not that what interests Apple. Their strategy is to create platforms that integrate the web and Siri does exactly that. I have seen the term API-broker or info-orchestration. This kind of strategy allows Apple to build the best platform and have the information infrastructure to make it profitable. With so much experiences in online stores with mini-transactions, we can see a new business model emerging.

In fact, is there really a lot of difference in bringing entertainment content or any other content to a web store? Buying a new song, movie, theater or restaurant reservation is basically all the same. The combination, presented in a very user-friendly way to the consumer brings added value and access to millions of users will reinforce the value.  

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