Saplo will have a session and talk about predictive text analytics. If you are interested in knowing more please join our session on Tuesday (you can find tickets here). We will be in Berlin between Sunday to Tuesday, if you are interested in meeting us at the conference, or at another place in Berlin, please let us know.

Picture from officialgdc

Saplo is a Red Herring 2011 Global Finalist

Saplo’s text analysis technology have been awarded before but this is something extra since Red Herring is a global competition finding the best and most promising technology companies in the world from thousands of companies. Back in May this year Saplo was awarded the Red Herring Europe Award and thanks to that and the progress during the year Saplo is now been been honored as one of the Global Finalists.

The final award and the Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony on December 7. So keep your fingers crossed =)

About the Red Herring Award
The Red Herring editorial team selected the 2011 Finalists as the most innovative companies from a pool of thousands of companies from over 40 nations. These companies, representing past Red Herring Asia, Europe and North America winners.

The Innovative Sweden Exhibition shows the best innovations from Sweden and the first stop was Stanford in the beginning of November. Swedish Institute held a one week program with different theme days such as Future of Mobile and Cracking the Code of Innovation. As one of the 20 selected companies Saplo and our text analytics innovation was a popular visit for hundreds of the top influencers from Silicon Valley that took the chance to visit the event.

Saplo will be a part of the full tour that will continue for several years and visit cities in all continents. Next stop will be Toronto in January 2012 (January 23 to February 12) and then we will visit Washington in March (March 1 – April 30). Later next year the exhibition will visit Brasil,  Rio de Janeiro in May (May 21 – June 24) and São Paulo in July (July 9 – middle of August). The tour will later also visit both Asia and Europe.

For latest information regarding program and not yet released cities please visit Swedish Institute’s website. If you are in one of the cities or interested to have the exhibition in your city please contact Swedish Institute or write us an email.

Hope to see you on the text analytics world tour.

Fredrik Hörte and Joakim Stenberg has taken Team Saplo all the way to the finals of the prestigious Swedish Business Golf Tournament. The finals will be played in mid October at PGA Catalunya Resort, Barcelona, Spain.

Disclaimer: The image is not from any of the golf courses mentioned in the post, but from a course in France.

The tournament is played as a foursome, where players compete in teams of two, taking alternate shots. Team Saplo entered the tournament August 16 at PGA of Sweden National, together with another 100 teams.
Solid drives and amazing short game got us a third place. Luckily, since Saplo was one of the entrepreneur teams invited by Nya Affärer, that was enough to get us to the semi-finals.

The first semi-finals and the one Saplo was entering took place September 2 at Sand Golf Club together with over 60 other qualified teams from south Sweden. Team Saplo played better golf then ever before and mixed with a good portion of luck we managed amazing 7 strokes under par net after nine holes!

Unfortunately that made us realize that we had a great chance of winning the whole thing and suddenly nerves was a prominent part of the game. For another five holes we managed to keep our great score intact, then it all came crashing down. The last four holes we went from 6 under par net to even. A disaster!

Again, Team Saplo finished third, just missing the finals in Barcelona! We were pretty happy anyway, we had played great for most part of the round and got rewarded with some really great bags from Victorinox. Add to that playing two of the best golf courses in Sweden, PGA of Sweden National and Sand Golf Club, and we were all but sad.

Then September 6 during lunch Fredrik from Team Saplo gets a phone call. Apparently the best entrepreneur team from each of the semi-finals get a spot in the finals at PGA Catalunya in Barcelona!
So, of more then 1300 teams, Team Saplo will be one of eight going to Spain in October! Isn’t that a treat!

Thanks a lot to all of you that make the tournament such a great event! For those of you who understand Swedish, you can read more about the tournament at http://www.foretagsgolfen.com

Semantic Search

A lot of focus at the workshop have been on entity tagging and linking entities to each other using rdf and resource databases. When talking about semantic technologies in content management systems I feel there are good solutions that has been overlooked. If that’s because these solutions haven’t been explained properly or if the tools for using them haven’t been around for long enough I don’t know.

As the Internet gets flooded by all this information we need a way of filtering and relating documents and texts to each other. Saplo has something called related texts which is a semantic way of relate the contextual meaning of texts to each other. Using this feature it’s possible to create a graph structure between content without using any entity extraction or any resource databases at all. For example it’s a great way of structuring all pages that exist in a wiki. It can be an internal wiki where you automatically want to link to or between content regardless of what department you are working for or what space it’s published in. A person working within human resources can find related content from the finance department and reversed. Our current customers (primarily publishers) is using this to provide site visitors with links to related texts within their archive. In this way editors don’t have to search for those articles manually.

One of the best parts about this technology is that it’s totally language independent. All that is needed is a bunch of texts to learn from.

For those interested in related texts who is currently using Drupal we have built a module that automatically finds and presents related texts from your archive. It will soon be committed to the Drupal community, we just have some last tests left to run. If you are interested in the module just signup and we will notify you when ever it’s released.

Contextual Recognition

Personalization is hot! How can we personalize the content? Just because we are friends and we share the social graph, that doesn’t mean that what is relevant to you necessarily have to be relevant to me.

We have created a way of using contextual recognition to be able to recommend or filter content based on a specific contextual profile.
It basically works like this. You create a group of texts which represents your profile and you can then compare texts to that group (or even compare a group to another group) to find out the relation between them.

Here I demonstrated Saplo Stream, a way of creating personalized filters and recommendations using Saplo Text Analysis API. I have made a screencast including sound that briefly explains how Saplo Stream works.

The reason I was demonstrating this is because I really think a CMS is also about showing the most relevant content to the user. Imagine a front page at the New York Times where the articles at the top is more relevant for you to read than the articles at the bottom. Or use this feature to actually relate people to each other based on their personal interest rather than what friends they have in common. It would be a great way of getting to know if there are anyone else working on the same problem within a large organization just by analyzing what they have posted on the company intranet.

Prediction

I also wanted to give a heads-up regarding a service that we have been working on for some time and that we are planning to release for beta users this autumn (if everything goes as planned).

It’s a prediction engine where you can create your own prediction model. The model is basically several texts with an associated value e.g. number of re-tweets, credit score of a company or something else and based on the trained model it is possible to predict an outcome for another text. Balancing on the edge of overselling this, but wouldn’t it be cool to be able to predict the future?

Entity Tagging

Oh I almost forgot…we do have entity tagging as well. We currently support English and Swedish and return tags categorized into persons, locations or organizations and we also give tags a relevance value for the given text. Entity tagging will also be available in our soon-to-come text analysis module for Drupal.

How to get started

To get started using the Saplo Text Analysis API is pretty easy.
1) Signup
2) Download libraries
3) Follow our “Get started” guide – with code examples to all methods and all libraries

That’s it for me! Hope to get invited back ;)

The workshop is arranged by IKS (Interactive Knowledge Stack) which is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open and flexible technology platform for semantically enhanced Content Management Systems (CMS). This particular workshop focuses on how to bring semantic capabilities and text analytics to your CMS.

Many well known persons (e.g. Seth Grimes, Lynda Moulton, Mark Greaves) within both the field of semantics and CMS is attending and many interesting key notes will be held.

The second day of the workshop, Saplo will be presenting what’s possible to build and create using our Text Analysis API and core technology. The goal for the workshop is to have developers go home with working prototypes so if you need any assistance or help getting started using Saplo Text Analysis API in your CMS I’ll be available for questions and support.

If you want to meet up for discussions or demos just let me know.

Twitter: @horte or @saplo

Media Momentum took place in the famous W Hotel in Barcelona with the hottest digital media companies from Europe. I see several different trends but most of them can be summarized as “how can we make more money”.The main trends are ad optimization, automatic recommendations and social.

Ad optimization
How can ads be displayed more efficient? There is so much data about the ads such as users and texts. How can that data be used to increase performance? Hot trends are targeting based on social profiles and targeting based on interest of the user.

Automatic recommendations
Since the content already exists there is a need to make it easier for users to find and read the content. Today this is often made manually by adding related stories and tagging. The value is high but since it’s done manually it cost both time and money. The trend is now to integrate services that do related articles and tags automatically.

Social
Most sites have integrated some sort of commenting system to increase users interactions on the site. They also use social sharing such as Twitter and Facebook to get stories spread and increase traffic. The next step is to implement social games to make the users share and interact even more with content.

So what’s next?
Next thing is a combination of all three trends where you will get personal recommendations based on your social profile. This means that you automatically will get interested articles recommended for you and that ads will no longer be boring they will actually be interesting and add value.

About Media Momentum
Media Momentum is the awards recognizing the most innovative and fastest growing companies in the European Digital Media Economy, organized by GP Bullhound. Saplo was awarded as one of the Media Companies to Watch 2011.

The Red Herring Award is about finding the most innovative companies in Europe and companies on the Red Herring Finalist list will compete for the top 100 in Amsterdam on 25th of May.

Today Saplo was also mentioned in the Swedish press as one of the companies that could become the next Skype (link to story – Swedish).

About the Red Herring Award
The Red Herring editorial team selected the 2011 Finalists as the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across Europe. The Finalists are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.The 2011 Red Herring Top 100 Europe will be announced in Amsterdam on May 25 at a special award dinner at the Red Herring 100 Europe event.
Read more here

SI found through an exhaustive selection process, 20 of Sweden’s, right now, most interesting innovations. Together with a number of research innovations that provide a glimpse into the future of how the Swedish spirit of innovation creates the conditions for international competitiveness.

Saplo have been chosen for it’s text analysis technology and is one of eight IT companies and other companies are from life science, environmental technology, gaming and entertainment industry.

SI will showcase this innovations at exhibitions around the world. The first will be in Silicon Valley this autumn and will then tour around the world in close cooperation with the Swedish embassy and local partners.

We truly look forward to this and will keep you updated regarding date and place for the exhibitions.

Think of a small island far away from large cities or other signs of civizilation. Imagaine a life without cellular reception, only a few power supplies and most of the time no Internet connection. This is what hundreds of Swedish people have been looking forward all summer and finally this weekend 400 happy and enthusiastic Swedish web geeks have experienced this together.
Sweden Social Web Camp (#SSWC) is an unconferance for people interested in social media. Me (Mattias Tyrberg) and Fredrik Hörte joined SSWC to get feedback from developers regarding their need of text analysis such as tagging and related texts. So what is SSWC?

The history – SSWC 2009
400 social media geeks on an island outside of nowhere, how did this happened?
The (un)conference started by chance last year by Tomas Wennström & Kristin Heinonen. Tomas thought it would be fun to meet some guys in a country house and talk about social media. A couple of tweets later (and a lot of re-tweets) hundreds of people had shown interest in a meetup. Since Tomas didn’t have that a big country house he needed to find a bigger place and in August 2009 the first SSWC with 280 participants toke place on the island Tjärö.

SSWC 2010
SSWC 2009 was nothing but a success. Thanks to all swedish twitter users SSWC got a lot of media coverage and the interest for SSWC-2010 grew bigger.

Tjärö is a small island and the number of rooms for rent is limited. Those who are not as lucky as others need to spend the nights sleeping in tent. Despite the risk of being without proper shelter it only took 40 minutes before the (un)conference was sold out.

So why this hype of going to an island with almost no similarities to the world that we are so used to?
Maybe because we love the idea of being different? Maybe we want to live offline and talk to people in the real world? Maybe we are tired of tweeting about what we had for breakfast?

For us it was all about meeting inspiring people and getting feedback from people using our text analysis services. For others it might be just getting some fresh air and leave the stressful city. Anyhow SSWC 2010 was a success with a lot of good sessions and meetings.

After SSWC 2009 people said that the Swedish Twitter stream died during that weekend since those tweeting the most was trapped on an island without any Internet connection. This year was no different so in our next post we will share what happend during this weekend when Twitter in Sweden was dead.