UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?
Image courtesy of http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/
By Linda Broughton
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.
Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.
In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.
Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.
Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.
The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.
Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.
Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.
Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?
http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/
A Mind of Its Own: Search Engine Technology Ever Pervasive
By James Zipadelli
Americans performed more than 15 billion searches in January, which is up 3 percent from the month before, the audience measurement service comScore says. The latest search engine rankings show that Google is still king when it comes to search engines. “Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million),” the release says.
Although Google spokesperson Nate Tyler declined to comment on Google’s numbers, he did say that Google Suggest Technology is an effective way to help users search for what they are looking for.
“As you type into the search box on Google Web Search, Google Suggest offers searches similar to the one you’re typing. Start to type [ new york ] — even just [ new y ] — and you’ll be able to pick searches for New York City, New York Times, and New York University (to name just a few). Type some more, and you may see a link straight to the site Google thinks you’re looking for — all from the search box,” Google’s Help Forum says. (Ask.com and Microsoft were not available for comment at press time.)
Kevin McFall, co-founder of the vertical search engine RushmoreDrive.com, says the level of difficulty “is pretty high” for anyone trying to gain a share in the search engine market because established search engines spend large amounts of money on marketing and advertising. However, he says there are ways a new search engine can differentiate themselves from their competition. RushmoreDrive.com was a sister site of Ask.com and was shut down in June 2009 due to the recession.
“One must position the value of one’s search in such a way as to change existing behaviors and habits of those who already use Google, Yahoo, AOL or Bing by offering them a reason to change and then delivering a rich enough experience to warrant their frequent return,” McFall says. “One must also realize that instead of taking on the major search players head on, one must find a way to backdoor them to get a slice of the market share instead of trying to compete directly.”
According to McFall, he was able to do this with Rushmore Drive.com by marketing his website as a discovery engine and a search engine. “We achieved the ability to deliver a richer and more relevant set of results through our unique index and page ranking algorithm, along with a distinguished universal results page, which delivered text, image, video and blog results all in one page,” McFall says.
He also suggested search engines that have a social component would be more successful long-term.
There are also specialized websites that find search engine technology useful. For example, Healthline Networks uses search engine technology to help customers with health and drug information.
Healthline Networks CEO West Shell says, “We’ve found out that consumer search can be complicated when it comes to health. Consumers and doctors speak different languages, and often consumers don’t know what to look for when they start.”
Shell says the technology Healthline Networks uses is based on “semantic taxonomy,” or classification, of health information. He also says the technology is always being updated to ensure customers have the latest information available and that they are partners with health carriers like Aetna.
Rich Kahn, CEO of the search engine eZanga.com, says his search engine is being redesigned and should be finished by late 2010.
The redesign allows eZanga.com to “significantly increase the number of sources we pull information from, improve our relevancy algorithm so that our results will be more accurate to the queries performed by our users [and] designing new technologies, that are not used by any other search engine at present, that will improve how we display our results to users in a way that will be more useful to our users,” Kahn says.
Mobile Credit Card Payments: Fad or Future?
Image courtesy of VeriFone
By Sheila Shayon
According to Ross Howe, sales and product development director for mStation/Mophie, “Mobile credit card transactions are the first big innovation since PayPal, and the biggest innovation in the credit card industry in 50 years. Plastic is old news.”
Mophie, a leader in creating iPhone accessories, is releasing a new product called the Mophie Marketplace. It’s a magnetic Strip Reader for iPhone 3G and 3GS. It enables the phone as a mobile payment solution that is fast, secure, completely transportable, light-weight and form-fitting. It’s an intelligent case solution for any merchant looking to drive sales at point-of-purchase, with assurance to customers that their card data is encrypted as it is swiped.
Encryption is ensured at the iPhone entry point by a tiny circuit board that bypasses the HH device completely. The iPhone never actually sees the credit card information - but sends it to a server in cyberspace where it is decrypted. Mophie is working on the next level of security, another layer at the swipe-head level, and the company is passionate about the issue.
The particular expertise at Mophie comes from its experience on the consumer side, rather than the payment side. Howe refers reverently to “making accessories for Apple customers that are beautiful, sexy products. The biggest challenge in developing Mophie Marketplace was to keep it as small and thin as possible. We are driven by a commitment to ergonomic design.”
Competitor VeriFone recently announced PayWare Mobile, which turns the iPhone into a card reader. A combination of an iPhone/iPod touch app, with a swipe card reader, it allows merchants to accept and process credit cards on the go. VeriFone’s product is aimed at small business merchants who need a mobile card reader for enterprises like home repair, small cafes and door-to-door sales.
Paul Rasori, senior vice president of marketing, considers his company the granddaddy in the payment business, with a 30-year track record and penetration in more than 100 countries. “In addition to the PayWare payment App, the card reader and the hardware device, the VeriFone gateway adds a fourth crucial component - connectivity. Our proprietary gateway allows the merchant to manage payment devices and credit card transactions seamlessly. It has built-in features that help merchants manage and update security and safety, provide extra reporting, and the ability to turn your device off and deactivate it remotely,” Rasori says.
The average consumer uses the VeriFone gateway in drugstores and supermarkets at check-out, but the company is striving to raise consumer awareness of its mobile brand with commercials now running in 10,000 taxis in New York City.
The PayWare Mobile card reader slips over the iPhone to accommodate card swipes and uses the secure magnetic stripe read head and certified firmware. “With the VeriFone gateway, the swipe read head is already secure even before the data gets to the phone. There’s no chance of rogue data capture,” Rasori says. “Our gateway gives PayWare a pedigree for quick adoption by iPhone users. When you buy online, making manual key entries is tedious, and the merchant pays a higher fee. PayWare is an alternative that bypasses large transaction fees.”
Both Mophie and VeriFone would like to enter the Blackberry and Android markets with their mobile Apps, but for now, Apple’s standardized ecosystem wins hands-down for ease in development and deployment.
Both companies would also like to enter global territories outside the US. “Everybody is ahead of America,” Mophie’s Howe says. “In the Asian markets, particularly Japan, they’re making big purchases on mobile as well as micro-payments for bus fare or a stick of gum. Cash is out. The younger you are the less cash you carry and ATM’s are considered an inconvenience.”
“But it’s five times more complicated outside the US with smart card chips and individual PIN’s - it’s much more complex,” Rasori says. “VeriFone is working with big bank customers in Europe to launch something later this year. It’s a solid business, but still in biz dev mode. There’s great interest in it - but how it all develops remains to be seen. Our US experience is successful so far - we’ve embraced the banks and their issues with fraud and come up with solutions that suit everybody.”
Howe agrees it’s an innovation that’s here to stay. “The greatest challenge going forward is paying attention to what’s possible tomorrow, making connections and thinking in advance.”
And then of course there’s Apple - who may outmaneuver them all with its recently announced EasyPay touch. This change to an iPod touch with Apple software would bring the entire point-of-sale (POS) system under Apple’s control.
Sheila Shayon is president/founder of Third Eye Media, third-eyemedia.com, multimedia production with core competencies in broadband production, creative design and execution, and social media. Shayon has several decades of multimedia experience working for companies like Time Warner Cable and Home Box Office.
U.S. Mobile Web Usage Grew 110 Percent Last Year; Apple Dominates, Android No. 2
By: techcrunch.com
The mobile Web grew 110 percent in the U.S. last year and 148 percent worldwide as measured by growth in pageviews, according to a new Quantcast Mobile Trends report (embedded below). Even so, the mobile Web accounted for only 1.26 percent of Web consumption in the U.S. (and 0.99 percent worldwide).
How Integrated is Your Web Analytics Package and is That a Good Thing?
By: cmswire.com
According to BtoB Magazine the web analytics market is expected to hit US$ 953 mil by 2014, and suggesting that the pickings might be even juicier Adobe recently acquired Omniture for the tidy sum of about US$1.8 billion.
New Nielsen Data Likely to Shock Some Web Publishers
By: adage.com
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Imagine a world where only half of the visitors to FoxSports.com had watched a sporting event in the past week, or where students comprised less than 5% of visitors to MTV.com.
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