We are thrilled to announce the lineup for the next Palo Alto Semantic Web (PAWS) Meetup sponsored by Microsoft on April 14 from 6:30 p.m.-9 p.m. in our Mountain View offices. RSVP today and bring a friend!

The Semantic Demo session will highlight semantic technology in mobile, consumer and enterprise applications, and showcase some applications from cutting-edge technology companies that have never before been demoed for the public.

Presenters include:

• Zemanta Semantic Blogging
• ZAgile Semanti Wiki
• Cogito Answers Semantic Mobile
• Noovo Semantic Search and Share
• Uptake Semantic Travel

Plus:

• Metaweb/Freebase
• Microsoft

We hope to see you there!

The next Palo Alto Semantic Web (PAWS) Meetup will be hosted by Microsoft. The format will be many short demos of semantically inclined products and technologies.

Got a unique product based on semantic technology? Do you have a geeky demo that, even though it’s demoed from the command line, will knock the socks off people? Spread the word, because we’re looking for companies and people to show off cool products. Please email kconry at microsoft dot com if you are interested, or if you’d like to suggest a company that is doing something different in semantics.

Each presenter will get five minutes for their demonstration and five minutes for questions from the audience. This is a great opportunity to disseminate your product to like-minded people, get feedback from a smart group, and get people excited about what you’re doing. Come learn, geek out, meet interesting people and show off your work!

The meetup will take place in the evening of April 14 at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View. We’ll have more details once we secure the presenters, but please save the date.

We are accepting proposals until Wednesday, April 1. Submit now!

Ubiquity is a research project from Mozilla Labs that has a lot in common with Powerset: the goal of the project is to reinvent the user interface through natural language. Ubiquity uses a command-line interface to allow you to get tasks done quicker by typing in exactly what you want. If you’re a Firefox user, you should try installing Ubiquity to try it out.

Powerset is excited to have written a few Ubiquity commands that you might find useful. To install the commands, you’ll need to first have installed Ubiquity and then go to Powerset.com and install the command using the install toolbar at the top of your browser.

Once you have the commands installed, you can just type in “powerset ” and you’ll get a full Powerset Wikipedia search of the topic you enter. Just like in a Powerset search, we’ll show you answers from Freebase, Factz that we’ve distilled from Wikipedia, and relevant Wikpiedia articles.

As a bonus, we’ve also included commands from Live Search. For example, try typing “live sean penn” to get Live Search results for Sean Penn. You can also type “live images sean penn” to get a list of images or “live xrank sean penn” to get answer. It was really simple to do this thanks to the new JSON API offered by Live Search.

In case you don’t have Ubiquity and you’re wondering what we’re talking about, we’ve included a brief video below of the Powerset ubiquity commands and the Live ubiquity commands. Let us know what you think!

Powerset Ubiquity from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

Live Ubiquity from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

Like many features at Powerset, our highlighting feature came about through the ingenuity of one of our engineers. Ian was having a discussion about circular polarized filters for camera lenses with his brother. He copied and pasted some text from Wikipedia into an IM chat, but his brother was dubious: “Where did that come from?” After Ian tried, unsuccessfully, to navigate his brother to the right passage in the Wikipedia article, he thought, “There must be a better way!”

Hence, a new feature was born. User Highlighting allows you to highlight sentences on a Powerset page. The highlighted passage persists when you bookmark or share the URL.

To use, just click the highlighter icon in the Article Outline and then click any sentences that you want to highlight. You can copy and share the URL; your modified page will automatically scroll to the highlighted section. This is made possible by the fact that Powerset semantically marks up Wikipedia and knows where sentences begin and end. It’s a great tool for sharing notes with a friend, posting a specific sentence in context to your blog, or proving someone wrong in an argument.

For example, let’s say that you wanted to share with a friend that John McCain has been a guest on The Daily Show more then anyone else, as of 2006. As opposed to just sending over that bit of information, you can send a link directly to the text. Now they can read the fact in context of the Wikipedia article, and read about McCain’s other television appearances. Check out the video below for a full demonstration.

Powerset User Highlighting demo video from Ian Collins on Vimeo.

Find a great use for the Highlighting feature? Let us know in the comments.

From October 20-22 Powerset will be attending the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, CA. This year’s theme is “Beyond 2.0: User-Focused Tools & Practices,” and Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land will be making a Keynote Presentation “Search Engine Land: What’s Happening Out There?”

We’re excited to be able to speak to so many internet-savvy librarians, to show off how Powerset is a cutting-edge research tool and to gather feedback about how to make Powerset even better.

Powerset is sponsoring the Internet Café.  If you’re attending, stop by to check your e-mail, learn about Powerset, and get some nifty schwag!

Powerset is excited to be participating in Web 3.0, held in Santa Clara from October 16-17, 2008. 

Scott Prevost, Powerset’s general manager, will be keynoting in the morning on Friday, where he’ll describe The Road to Semantic Search.  Also, Mark Johnson, a Powerset Program Manager, will be hosting a roundtable discussion on Thursday afternoon called Semantic Startup 101 – Successes, challenges, and strategic decisions, featuring Alitora, Cerebra, Metaweb, and Evri.

If you’re interested in attending, you can get a full conference pass or just come to the Expo Hall and keynotes for only $50.  We hope to see you there!

Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago and we’ve already completed our first few integration projects: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using our Factz engine . 

These projects were meant to be achievable in 30 days and act as a first collaboration between the Live Search and Powerset teams.  We have plans for deeper integration in the future, but these projects gave us an opportunity to get to know our colleagues up in Redmond and drive greater understanding of our respective technologies.  All of these projects are currently being “flighted” on Live Search, which means that they are being shown only to a small percentage of users (if you get one, consider yourself lucky!).  Once we’ve gotten data back from the tests, we’ll plan next steps and decide what features will eventually roll into the product.

The first project was to expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows Answers.  Queries like San Francisco weather, MSFT, and Banff national park already produce answers.  Also, many celebrities from abba to frank zappa and even bloggers from seth godin to leo laporte show up with xRank biographies.  But, many topical queries do not show Answers today such as  musicians, albums, films, etc. For this experiment, we selected some of these categories and will return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers we show in Powerset, using data from Freebase.  Eventually, we hope to give Answers for even more topics.
 
 

The second project was to use Powerset’s semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles.  Since Wikipedia articles show up in a large percentage of Live Search queries, it’s important that the captions are top notch.  These changes are transparent to the end user, but we’ll be able to analyze the Powerset captions versus the Live Search captions to see which perform better.



The third project is also transparent.  We used Powerset’s Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries.



We also started to use some of Live Search’s technology on the Powerset side.  You’ll notice that we now have “related articles” on Powerset enhanced Wikipedia articles.  We’re getting these directly from Live Search.

 

Powerset is excited that we’re already able to make improvements to Live Search.  Expect more announcements in the coming months, both of Powerset’s technology integrated into Live Search and of enhancements to Powerset.com.

-    Dr. Scott Prevost, General Manager, Powerset
-    Dr. Hugh Williams, Primary Development Manager, Live Search

Powerset+Microsoft hosted another Lunch 2.0 this year.  We seved delicious food, including sliders and cupcakes.  There were lots of people from many different companies present and we all celebrated the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset with our commerative shot glasses.  Andrew Mager of ZD Net did a great writeup of the event (and he tooks some rockin’ pictures). Terry Chay was there with his huge camera and took a gorgeous set of pics with his fancy camera.  In the photo is Marie Williams of SHIFT, Linda Chan of Powerset, and me.

Expect Powerset+Microsoft Live Search to be hosting more events like this in the future, so subscribe to our blog or check our Twitter feed for details. 

In fact, keep on the lookout for us at TechCrunch50 next week!

Powerset has always suspected that college students love Powerset because it’s such a great way to search and browse Wikipedia content.  However, the only evidence we had was from Powerset parents and glowing feedback e-mails from .edu domains. 

Last week, we conducted a study of 200 college students through Peanut Labs, which confirmed our suspicion: college students are huge fans of Wikipedia.  Here are some of the highlights of the study.

• Though 90% of students have used Wikipedia to complete an assignment, a surprising 73% of students have been explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia.
• Also, about a quarter of students always use Wikipedia when they’re completing an assignment.
• Not surprisingly, the most common use for Wikipedia is initial research.  However, about half of the respondents said that they use Wikipedia as a link to secondary sources of information.  That suggests that the reference section at the bottom of a Wikipedia article is an extremely valuable starting point for many topics.  Also, a third of students say that they’ve used Wikipedia as a primary research source.
• Students find Wikipedia very valuable.  28% of students thought that Wikipedia was a very valuable resource, 49% thought that Wikipedia was relatively important, and 23% thought that Wikipedia was only marginally helpful.

If you have any questions about the survey or you’d like to talk to someone at Powerset about why it’s better to read Wikipedia on Powerset, drop us a note at press@powerset.com.

On Friday, August 1st at 5:15 p.m., Powerset officially became part of the Microsoft family.  Though the deal was announced on July 1, 2008, there were a few more i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed.  That’s all finished and the deal is done.  Our employees are excited to be a part of Microsoft and the Live Search team.

Integration is underway in force.  This Thursday and Friday, there will be a bunch of folks down from Redmond for a Symposium to share details about our respective technologies.  We’re excited to learn about everything now available to Powerset in the Live Search stack.  We’re also excited to share the cool things we’ve cooked up here at Powerset and start planning opportunities for us to integrate with Live Search.  Check back over the next month to see what we’re up to both on this blog and the Live Search team blog.