Semantic hacking, business ideas and open APIs

March 19, 2008

Via Paul Miller writing on The Semantic web (channeling TechCrunch), we learn about a $1M challenge to leverage NLP and semantic analysis APIs from TextWise to develop a business idea. Semantic Hacker, as the challenge is known is promising a guaranteed payment of $100K to anyone who comes up with a winning idea + $900K. Unfortunately, this is only open to people from the US.

Over the past few days, at the SOT meeting, I’ve had a chance to speak to a few text analytics companies, focussed on the life sciences. bbgm has also covered various Semantic Web platforms that are targeted squarely at developers. It’s clear that extracting knowledge and information from text (and hopefully other media as well) is hot, and increasingly crowded. Paul is right when he says

There’s a lot of consolidation to come in this market segment, and the current players are working hard to draw attention to themselves. I, for one, would welcome some more effort devoted to explaining why they’re different.

Technorati Tags: Semantic Hacker, TextWise, NLP, Semantic Web