the reflexions insider

Google is full of really smart people working on really hard problems. This is nothing new. Indeed the image of brilliant young engineers working on game-changing new products has come to define the company’s identity. What’s surprising to me is Google’s relative lack of significant innovation in recent years on its bread-and-butter product: search. Recent rumblings indicate that this may start to change.

The company is understandably hesitant to tinker with its core product, which some analysts estimate generates over 90% of its total revenue, especially given its most recent quarter which exceeded even the most optimistic expectations (in a recession, no less). But the sands are shifitng, and the sheer size of Google means it will be hard-pressed to compete with smaller, more nimble competitors who are starting to get attention, like Powerset and Twitter.

A recent article at Google Watch suggests that Google sees its future in the semantic web, a collection of standards and technologies that seek to deliver more meaning and structure to the web’s content but have largely languished due to a lack of widespread adoption. From the article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is recently quoted as saying:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in [...]

(Image by nswlearnscope via Flickr)

Recently the ever-snarky tech/finance blog Silicon Alley Insider held a contest to propose how to fix what they called Digg.com’s “broken business model” (”broken” because Digg lost $2M on $6.4M in revenue, a staggering loss by any standard). The winner would have his or her proposal (and resume) delivered personally to Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson. The winner was Keith Cowing, an MBA student at Cornell, who suggested among other things that Digg generate revenue by selling sponsored posts on the home page and data to marketers about its users. Probably something Digg should consider but it’s hardly a revolutionary thought and not exactly the kind of model that will transform underperforming web 2.0 properties into revenue generators.

By and large the “web 2.0″ crop of business models has been disappointing. There are no shortage of examples. YouTube, purchased by Google for $1.65 billion, has a revenue model that’s “so secret, even Google doesn’t know what it is.” While Google doesn’t publish financial information about YouTube, its impact on revenue has been [...]

Last week I attended the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The atmosphere was a cross between an academic conference and a trade show, trending toward the latter. Sessions were mostly organized as panel discussions split into two tracks: technology and business.

I’ve compiled some comments and insights from the sessions I attended. I thought I’d share them here for anyone who’s interested. This is the first of three rounds of comments, split into Strategy, Technology, and VC/Startups. These are my best attempts at paraphrasing based on my notes and I’ve done my best to attribute these comments where possible.

Semantic technologies are about defining an architecture of participation (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)

Shared ontologies are a necessary condition for web 3.0 and therefore must be community-driven (Marc Hatfield, Alitora Systems)

Semantic tech is increasing the granularity of the web’s nodes, shifting from documents to things like objects, facts, places, and people. This increase of granularity is a defining characteristic of web 3.0. An effect of this trend is to increase the number of storable data points by several orders of magnitude. This presents an enormous information management problem. Therefore we need fundamentally new tools to process, organize, and consume this amount of data. (Tom [...]

Unless you follow the often arcane world of web standards and the organization that defines them, you probably haven’t heard much about two emerging standards that by some credible accounts will do more to change the landscape of the internet than anything since the web itself: RDF and SPARQL.

Part of what makes these technologies so compelling is their elegance: they are incredibly simple and yet have the potential to yield extremely powerful and useful results. (NB: while this entry focuses on RDF and SPARQL, these are only two pieces of a larger heirarchy of standards and frameworks designed to help realize the semantic web as a widespread and practical technology.)

RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is a collection of methods for structuring information and representing knowledge. The goal is to enable applications to automatically catalogue and exchange information based on common sets of meaningful terms, or ontologies. In its simplest form, RDF statements are triples of the form (a,b,c) representing subject-predicate-object statements. It’s a subtle but powerful tool that can enable the efficient sharing of facts — e.g., (”Kinshasa”,”isCapitalOf”,”Democratic Republic of Congo”) might be a representation of a fact about an African nation’s capital (note that the same triple can be used to derive information about both the subject and object). [...]

In the ever-shifting landscape of internet titans, the Microsoft/Yahoo! power struggle is looking more like a teenage soap opera, albeit one with billions of dollars and control of the #2 internet search position in play. But what’s more, the side effects of the struggle are starting to point to a power play for dominance of the burgeoning world of the semantic web.

Besides the posturing and very public nature of both companies’ actions, what’s most interesting — and sometimes most telling — are the investments, partnerships, and acquisitions that have been unfolding since the saga began.

One of the more recent moves was Microsoft’s acquisition of the semantic search firm Powerset, itself coming on the heels of Yahoo!’s recent announcement of its open search platform, providing some support for semantic data to third party developers.

The Powerset acquisition is more than bet-hedging against losing out on its bid for Yahoo!. What Microsoft has started to understand is that the next killer app of the web will be found in the nascent semantic technologies and standards that are only starting to take shape.

Companies large and small are starting to invest big money in semantic web research and development. But if Microsoft can spend big money buying their way [...]