Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: semantic web

Inveni Launches Discovery Engine That Gives You Human-Filtered Recommendations Based On Millions of Crowd-Matched Movies

Inveni-logoInveni LLC has launched a discovery engine that is says “will drive social recommendations in the Web’s next wave.” The company’s free consumer service will also enable better targeted advertising — and, says the firm, change how consumers both make and receive recommendations on the Web.  The service is now publicly available, after more than a year in development and several months of private beta testing. The company (formerly known as Open Preferences, and based in Minnetonka, MN) made its debut at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco this week, and also presented the same day at the midVenturesLAUNCH startup conference in Chicago.

“The next wave of the Web will be about personalization. We’re focusing on using personalization to meaningfully improve discovery and decision making,” said Aaron Weber, CEO and cofounder. “The Inveni discovery engine leaps ahead of other online recommendation services.  What we’ve developed is unlike anything previously available.  Inveni consolidates ratings you put anywhere online – Netflix, IMDB, and more – provides tools to make and receive recommendations wherever you are, and helps you make better, more informed buying decisions.” The service has received positive feedback from users during the private beta over the past several months, said Weber.

Inveni-PersRecommendations Inveni provides its highly personalized product recommendations based on a consumer’s universal taste profile.  To create a personalized taste profile, Inveni empowers users to aggregate product and service ratings they’ve made across the Internet to quickly build deep, rich profiles of their tastes.  Beginning with the media categories of movies and TV, users can share their taste profile information with friends and other services online.  Inveni also facilitates product recommendations between friends (word of mouth), based on their tastes.

“We use this taste profile data, along with our unique crowd-refined recommendation engine, to provide highly targeted advertising, while simultaneously providing consumers with a compelling personalized service for discovery and sharing,” said Robert Bodor, CTO and cofounder, “We aim to become the premier provider of highly targeted consumer data for advertising online. We do that by turning the current consumer data model upside down, putting the user in control of their information.  We are entirely opt-in, and are raising the bar on consumer privacy protection.” Inveni-MyTastes

The company produced a fun, two-minute video to describe its value proposition to consumers, which you can view here.

Inveni describes itself as being “dedicated to driving the personalization revolution that will be Web 3.0.”  It was founded in 2008 by two experienced Internet entrepreneurs, Aaron Weber and Robert Bodor, and has a stellar set of successful Internet-industry executives acting as advisors. It is privately funded. 

Prior to Inveni, Aaron Weber, CEO and Cofounder, was COO and cofounder of W3i (formerly Freeze.com), a software marketing company based in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Aaron helped bootstrap the company to $25 million in annual revenues in seven years.  W3i has been profitable every year since its inception, and has provided initial investors with a 10x return in the first 5 years.  Aaron has received the SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year award and the Ernst & Young Regional Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Robert Bodor, Inveni’s Chief Technical Officer and Cofounder, spent four years as a consultant for McKinsey & Company before he and Aaron founded Inveni.  There, he advised Fortune 500 clients in the high-tech industry on operations, innovation, and product development.  Previously, Robert was cofounder, president, and CTO of Point Cloud, an Internet company that provided interactive product visualization to prominent online retailers.  Robert holds a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering. He has invented and commercialized multiple Internet software technologies and has authored seven patents.

Follow Inveni on Twitter at www.twitter.com/discoverinveni and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/inveni.

NOTE: A version of this post first appeared on Minnov8.com, a site that showcases web innovation in Minnesota.

(Disclosure: the writer has a consulting relationship with Inveni LLC.)

SmartLinks: Give Readers More Without Taking Them from Your Site

AdaptiveBlue is a company founded by my friend Alex Iskold, who also does some great analysis type posts on Read/Write Web regularly. (I’m looking forward to seeing Alex at the Defrag conference, which starts tomorrow in Denver.) AdaptiveBlue, based in NJ, was launched at DEMOfall ’06 (my coverage). It has since received funding from Union Square Ventures in NYC.   I like the company’s mission: they want everyone to "browse smarter."  Who can’t support that?  Alex and his firm are very much out in front of the whole Semantic Web movement.  But they aren’t just talking about it; they coming up with practical tools now to help us see the power and the potential of the Semantic Web. The latest of these?  SmartLinks, which bring what Alex decribes as "fun, utility, and a social dimension to your pages…whether you’re a blogger or a big media company."  Here’s a screenshot showing some of the sites whose links are displayed when you click on a SmartLink.

Smartlinkstypes

It’s all based on a little blue icon that appears next to certain links on your site. I’ve intalled SmartLinks on this blog, and here’s what one of those little blue icons looks like, at the end of a book link on my blog: Smartlinkiconrebook

And here’s what you see when you click on this icon in this case — choices on where you can go to get the book, information on the author, reviews, and other links. (Installing was a breeze, by the way — it’s one click for Blogger or Typepad, my platform; a plug-in for WordPress; and just a single line of code for other types of sites. Note: to see where SmartLinks appear on my site, scroll down to the books section in my sidebar.) Smartlinkresultsrebook

Key point about these SmartLinks: they let your readers explore related information, such as book reviews,
similar movies, stock research, music videos, etc, without navigating away from your content. That is huge.               

One use of SmartLinks that’s really getting a lot of attention since the company introduced the tool a week or so ago is SmartLinks for stocks.  Here’s an example of what you’d see when you click on that little blue icon next to a Google link (stock symbol: GOOG): Smartlinksforstocks

For more discussion of what this is all about, see the company’s blog, including a post on how to use Smart Links for stocks. Also, on the same blog, here’s a Q&A on Smart Links.

Firefox Users, You’ll Love the Cool, New “BlueOrganizer Denim” Plug-In

AdaptiveBlue, a company we covered here and here last September when they debuted at DEMOfall, today launched the latest version of its BlueOrganizer plug-in for the Firefox browser, which it calls Denim. Alex Iskold, the founder and CEO, is a friend of mine, and a fellow writer at Read/Write Web. (Okay, I’ve written two posts there and he’s done what seems like 50 or more, and they’re all amazingly good.) How he finds time to do all this writing and run a startup, I don’t know. I’m threatening to start calling him Superman. Alex’s firm is based in New Jersey and was funded in a Series A round last fall by Union Square Ventures of New York City.

Anyway, I downloaded and installed the plug-in in about 30 seconds on my Mac. It’s an elegant solution — and the web site is very clean, well functioning, and informative, with good demos, graphics, and explanations. The plug-in worked flawlessly for me right from the start, and I’m now thinking it could turn me into more a Firefox user… 🙂

Blueorganizer
Duncan Riley reported on the launch today on Tech Crunch, noting that “Adaptive Blue also enters the widget market. The new ‘sharing links’ feature allows users to embed semantic links into any web page, include bookmark style lists in a sidebar, or just embed a traditional widget. Affiliate programs are fully supported with no revenue sharing; if a user includes their affiliate code for programs such as eBay and Amazon they keep 100% of any associated revenue.”

Richard MacManus also published a post today on BlueOrganizer on Read/Write Web, under the title “Semantic Web In Action?” He explained that BlueOrganizer “aims to provide extra contextual information to you while browsing the Web. Basically, after you install BlueOrganizer in Firefox, it enables you to discover all kinds of relevant content while you’re browsing – such as books, music, links, related information, etc. Essentially then, it adds personalization and semantics into the browser.”

How’s the new version of the plug-in different? “First,” says Alex, “it’s just much more fun! Its lighter, more clickable, and takes less space both in the toolbar and in the sidebar. There’s also a new BlueMenu right in the toolbar. This makes the menu much easier to use for people who are not into right-clicking.” He also says that the latest context detection algorithm “is a huge improvement over the previous versions. Try it on blog posts about books, music, wine or another topic and see for yourself.”

Probably the most important new feature is SmartLinks, according to Alex. “These are web links that feature contextual shortcuts. They carry all the smarts about the objects right into blog posts, web pages, and social network profiles.” With SmartLinks, he noted, you can share the power of context and semantics with your friends, family, or readers.

“This is fundamental and big,” Alex proudly points out. “We’re bringing semantics into the most basic element of the web – the link. Imagine the web where links no longer point to pages, but point to things….users can get to information faster; information that’s contextual and relevant.” While some people might call this the Semantic Web, “we would not be so presumptuous,” Alex says. “But we think BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks are powering a smarter web and that, in turn, paves the road to the real Semantic Web.”

Semantic Web Goes Blue at DEMOfall

Adaptiveblue is launching its blueorganizer Firefox extension at DEMOfall next week. Chris Shipley, executive producer of the conference, said it will give us a “glimpse of powerful semantic Web technologies to come.”

Adaptiveblue is a personalization and smart browsing company founded by Alex Iskold in early 2006. Adaptiveblue500w The vision of adaptiveblue, says the company, is to invent new browser technologies that deliver a personalized Web experience, enhance productivity, and save time.

Among other things, Alex writes frequently for Web 2.0 journal, Ajax World magazine, and the Read/Write blog. There’s more about him here. And here’s what some people are saying about the product. Amazon’s Web Services Blog recently said this.

Blueorganizer uses Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), which it calls “storage for the Internet” … “designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.”

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