Paul Miller - The Cloud of Data » ZDNet

Siri brings their Virtual Personal Assistant’s smarts to the iPhone

Paul Miller — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:32:01 +0000

Siri provoked a flurry of interest last summer, and presumably not just because CTO Tom Gruber took part in one of my podcasts. With their genesis inside a big DARPA-funded Artificial Intelligence project, their talk of emergent Virtual Personal Assistants and their slick iPhone-powered demonstrations, the company ticked more than enough of the right boxes to get the semantic technology community positively drooling for more.

And then things went quiet.

Fast forward to 2010, and Siri is back. The back-end technology is faster, more robust, and fuelled by loads more data. Robert Scoble has been amongst those dropping not-so-subtle hints on Twitter for days, and other big names in and around the Valley have also been targeted in a carefully orchestrated programme of pre-briefings and beta invites. That all ends today, as the iPhone app is now out of beta and available this morning from Apple‘s App Store. Versions for Android devices and the Blackberry are coming along close behind, and the company has big plans for building upon what they already have.

I got my hands on the app earlier this month, and put it through as many of its paces as I could from 3,000 miles outside the US market for which the current app and data are optimised.

I’ve written up the results of my play (and my conversation with Siri’s other two co-founders) for ZDNet, and look forward to trying it for real on my next trip to the States.

DARPA’s CALO project, the militaristic Clippy, set to invade iPhones this year (engadget.com)
The drive and culture behind Siri (vator.tv)
DARPA Builds Smarter Version of Microsoft’s Clippy (tech.slashdot.org)

Talking with Jim Hendler and Li Ding about Data.gov

Paul Miller — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:53:32 +0000

My latest podcast is with Jim Hendler and Li Ding of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state. They’re part of a team converting some of the Federal Government data on the new Data.gov portal to RDF, and we talk about both how the work is going, and what it might mean.

There’s some more discussion of this work in my latest post on ZDNet, and pointers to the resources we discuss are listed in a post on Nodalities.

Even in an Architecture of Participation, Thomson Reuters believes Content can be King

Paul Miller — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:05:06 +0000

I write about Thomson Reuters‘ release of Calais 4.0 over on ZDNet today, and wanted to use this post to explore some of the broader context within which Calais should increasingly be considered.

As well as linking to ‘usual suspects’ in the Linked Data space such as the CIA Factbook, GeoNames, DBpedia, Musicbrainz and the like, Thomson Reuters is taking the additional step of providing access to parts of their information empire. Already recognised as one of the premiere sources for financial and company information on the global stage, the company is choosing to embed Thomson Reuters services such as stock tickers, information on corporate Boards, etc.

In a world in which everyone can participate, and in which citizen journalism, crowd sourcing and the rest are leading to powerful and wide-ranging disruptions to traditional media, Thomson Reuters is betting that authoritative, timely and branded data has value, and that opportunities exist to build that value by giving some previously expensive information away for free in order to jump-start a range of new and lucrative services.

Freebase employees once talked about a desire to become the canonical source of certain facts on the web; the go-to place for a class of information. Might Thomson Reuters have similar ambitions in the business information market, and might the undeniable (and free) value of the Calais web services be the hook that encourages a whole swathe of developers building applications for this market to perpetuate – and strengthen – the company’s reach?

This isn’t cynical, this isn’t devious, this isn’t ‘wrong,’ and there is absolutely no suggestion that the currently free services will ever incur charges for use. Instead, it’s an interesting example of a titan of Old Media thinking creatively about ways in which it can continue to have value in a changing world.

CNet sees the Wisdom of the Clouds

Paul Miller — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:36:29 +0000

James Urquhart’s ‘The Wisdom of Clouds‘ blog is well worth a read for those trying to keep up with this fast-moving space.

Yesterday he announced that the site is moving inside CNet‘s fold, and renaming as ‘The Wisdom of the Clouds.’

I look forward to seeing the same insight… with the added advantage (as I’ve found with my gig on ZDNet) that a whole new audience will be able to stumble upon James and his topic via the CNet homepage.

Nice one, James.