Future of semantic web

When I first heard about the semantic web in class I was intrigued by the power of this concept. It’s interesting to think about the possibility of organizing the information of the Internet in such a way that the web can interpret its own content.

In the beginning, I thought that the idea of an intelligent Internet would be sort of science fiction, but if you think about it, there are some versions of this idea already implemented. Communications intelligence has been there for some years and its objective is to monitor all sort of communications and identify those emails, telephone conversations, faxes, … that can represent a threat. These are completely automated mechanisms and the algorithms that make this happen are becoming more and more sophisticated.

Semantic web would make these algorithms more efficient given that the information is organized and therefore easier to understand. This will represent in my opinion a revolution in IT, some sort of “web 3.0” The number of applications can be endless.
For example, many traders use momentum strategy to invest. They read the newspapers and interpret signals before earning announcements to buy long or sell sort a particular stock. Say now, that you can subscribe to a news feeder and run an algorithm to know if the news are very positive, relatively positive, neutral, relatively negative or very negative. The algorithm would invest accordingly. Investment strategy is far more complicated than this, but you can get the idea.

Think about the applications in search (asking questions instead of writing keywords), marketing (interpreting what users write about your products), …

What can I sell online ?

Now that it is so complicated to find a job some people are considering to start up an online retail company. You don't need too much capital, you can do it from home and you don't need to be a tech savvy to implement it yourself. 

The real challenge is to find a niche where you can make enough money to survive. There are e-tailers specialized in every single product you can imagine!! I came across this shaving brushes online shop, this scarves shop , this wallets shop , ... there are online shops for everything!!!

However, there is one online retailer that really caught my attention these days. My Adwords challenge group (Team 5) is making a marketing campaign for a Spanish winery and while I was researching some competitors, potential keywords, strategy, ... I came across with what I think is a really exciting idea. 

The company is calcedoni.com and was started up by the famous Spanish chef Ferrán Adriá (maybe you remember him from our strategy exam). He is selling parts of a winery so that you become the owner of that small parcel that can produce up to 42 bottles of wine per year. You can participate in the decision making process as to when to water the grapes, which method use for the production of the wines, ... it's the dream of every wine lover!!!

Nowadays, wineries are full of sensors that measure soil moisture, temperature, wind, .... and decisions are made remotely, which means that an important percentage of the wine production process can be done online. I love the idea of producing my own wine!!! 

Let me know if you come across other interesting online retailers!

Free wireless access to Internet

I read some days ago in the Spanish press that Avilés (Asturias) was going to be the first Spanish city to provide free wireless access to Internet. The project will be fully financed through advertising. It will provide around 200 kbps which is not great, but enough to read emails and visit some "light websites". 

Given the importance of the Internet for our everyday lives, it sounds amazing that maybe one day we can all access it for free. I don't now yet to what extent this business model can work. This sort of test in a small city is highly regulated. If it works maybe we can think of the same thing implemented in a larger scale in cities like Madrid, London, ...  

I was living for some time in Leiden (The Netherlands), where there was free public WiFi access to the Internet, fully financed by the local government. This makes me wonder what is most important: government financing public WiFi network in most important cities or broadband access to every corner of the country as the British Government announced weeks ago?

I really hope this sort of experiment in Aviles spreads through the rest of Spain and Europe!