Mash-up, Cloud, Semantic Web

Have been on the road quite a lot with a bag full of new ideas.

In all the discussions, it became clear for me that the end-game is about superior and dramatically better user experience.

The end-game is not cloud, the end game is not Web 3.0 or 4.0 for the matter. These are just enablers. The end-game is user experience.

And much of that experience will come from Mash-ups, real-time and giving the power for creating in the hands of the end-user.

We all have seen the Google map mash-ups with addresses of best bars in town. For sure a life-critical application, but what i have seen the last couple of week is a bit more impressive.

I will NOT cover Google Wave announcement, as already all over the place, and this blog is not intended as just an echochamber of other sites.

It all started at the iMinds conference some weeks ago, where i saw a presentation by Ben Cerveny from Stamen Design. Ben used to be one of the founders of Flickr.

Ben was really mis-casted in a political-themes-debate, but did well anyway. He gave a pitch about the importance of web-literacy of our population, and about identity in a special way. For ex everybody recognizes the New-York skyline. But would you also identify yourself with the traffic visualization map of your own city ? Ben showed some great visualization examples. Have a look at http://delicious.com/benstamen. I most like the swarm example and the cab-spotting. The swarm shows you real-time visualizations of chat/twitters/social media conversations. The cab-spotters is also real-time, and the resulting visualization shows most used street patterns.

Thanks to my sponsors, I also was lucky to be able to attend Semantic Web3.0 in NY some weeks ago. Many good stuff, but i would like to share at least 3 examples: Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs, Dan Willis from Sapient and Alex Karp from Palantir Technologies.

Aza Rasking (have a look at his bio on wikipedia, the guy was already a star at the age of 17 😉 is Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs, and gave a preview of some cool things that will come out of the box in Firefox. And yes, I know IE8 Accelerators can do similar things but not quite yet.

Aza gave demo of Ubiquity and TaskFox.

Here is Ubiquity:

And here is TaskFox, a bit slimmed down version of Ubiquity in Firefox:

Dan Willis from Sapient gave a presentation on what happens when machines talk to machines. He did a great pitch illustrating with some sort of Kindle device with transparent screen capturing signals from semantically enabled objects. I love the very last example about taxis that radiate their traffic violation history. His presentation is on slideshare below, but you should really have heard Dan’s voice-over during the conference which makes it much more lively.

Last one for today comes from Palantir Technologies. At Web3.0, Alex Karp gave an amazing demo about a mortgage fraud investigation system, build as a mash-up of many different data-sources that were exposed with semantic techniques.

Here is the video of the Mortgage Fraud Investigation app. http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog/mortgage-fraud. Many other staggering mash-up videos from Palantir are at http://www.palantirtech.com/government/videos

The point i am trying to make is not that these are cool videos. The point i am making is that all these use the principles of the semantic web (which is essence is about giving meaning to data, meaning that can be exploited via APIs by a computer), ideally run in a cloud (where integration is done these days at data-level), enabling great user experience.