DARPA Hires Company to Build a Machine Reader That Scours the Web

The intelligence community is inputting data to the Web at an amazing rate. That mountain of data can be overwhelming to mere humans who are trying to read through pages and pages of information to pinpoint exactly what they're after. Mark Rutherford of CNET News reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has hired a tech company to develop a reader that will scour the Web and render certain information and knowledge into a form that is more easily digested and usable.

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BBN Technologies was recently awarded a $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine that will capture intelligence and render it usable to humans as well as artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Officially called the Machine Reading Program, this new system will "automatically monitor the technological and political activities of nation states and transnational organizations - which could mean everything from al-Qaeda to the U.N." for the US military. BBN expects there may also be many useful civilian applications for its new reader. The company has also developed a real-time audio stream called the the BBN Broadcast Monitoring System that automatically transcribes real-time audio streams and translates them into English.

With this new project, BBN hopes to "develop techniques that can generalize across the linguistic structure and content of diverse documents to extract relations and axioms directly from text rather than relying on a knowledge engineer to encode such information." Here's how it will work:

Although it is not immediately clear when (or if) this new machine reader will be available to civilians, we are certainly looking forward to trying something like this out. Some paranoid types will believe this is nothing more than "the man" trying to spy on us, but those people need to realize everything we do online is being watched by someone. If you are really concerned about your online privacy you should secure important data on your computer, call your government leaders and try to change privacy laws, or stay off the Web altogether.

Researchers, medical professionals, consumers, students and others are all likely to benefit from such an application. Not having to spend unnecessary time searching through mountains of information on the Web for something relevant makes life easier and allows us to be more productive.

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12 Companies Targeting Early Tech Adopters

Our mission at ReadWriteWeb is to explore the latest Web technology products and trends. We're fortunate to have a great group of sponsors who support this goal. So, once a week, we write a post about them; about who they are, what they do, and what they've been up to lately. We hope you'll pay them a visit as a way to show your appreciation for their sponsorship of this site.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

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Ready to learn more about the smart companies that support this site you love to read? Read on...

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Skip to info about: Socialtext: enterprise 2.0 | Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Hakia: semantic search | Weebiz: business networking | Mollom: spam filtering | Domain.ME: .me domain registrar | Enterprise 2.0 Conference: business/IT conference | SiSense: Business intelligence | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

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Socialtext

Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled "5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration." It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free white paper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Hakia

Hakia is a semantic search engine. It delivers a new search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. You can compare Hakia to Google and Bing here.

Hakia currently powers the contextual advertising link engine at ReadWriteWeb with its semantic advertising module, Contexa. Contexa provides page-level contextual analysis (in this case, of blog posts) on the fly and outputs keywords that represent the meaning of the page along with their meaning score. The Contexa system then matches ReadWriteWeb sponsors' requirements with the contextual representation of the page to provide relevant ads for readers. Contexa is offered as a service and can be integrated into any ad system.

Learn more about Contexa by clicking here.

Weebiz

Weebiz is the social network for companies. It's the place where you can promote your products and services, meet new clients, suppliers and partners, share valuable industry information, and leverage your business relations. Weebiz puts companies at the center of a hub where opportunities converge. It is a beautiful and simple-to-use tool that provides the perfect environment for business networking.

You can pre-register your company on Weebiz by clicking here.

Mollom

The web is changing. User contribution is now what makes or breaks a site. Allowing users to react, participate and contribute while still keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. Mollom is a Web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website. When site moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your community.

Mollom is currently protecting over 9,000 active websites and has caught over 83 million spam messages since it started. Its average efficiency is 99.96%. Find out more on the Mollom website.

Domain.ME

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combination possibilities, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me potential is enormous and it simply asks for you to be creative and coin the name that suits you best. If you have a great, original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Forward-looking businesses are using web 2.0 and social tools to achieve new levels of productivity and efficiency in a tough economy. The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is the leading event for business and IT professionals challenging the status quo and leading the charge to Enterprise 2.0.

Over forty sessions across six conference tracks cover the latest trends in Enterprise 2.0 technology innovation and organization-wide change: Enterprise 2.0 in action; social tools for the enterprise; foundations for Enterprise 2.0; new ways to work (Organization 2.0); and community engagement through social media.

SiSense

SiSense sees enterprise business intelligence as being a heavy and expensive project that requires a ton of IT support. Its main product, Prism, enables immediate deployment and connects to any data source, dynamically. In doing that, it frees IT from the need to maintain and build data warehouses, OLAP cubes, and refresh reports. It also frees users to use any business intelligence methodology, reports and charts, to bring more common sense and provide them with uncommon insights.

SiSense Prism is a powerful business intelligence tool, easy to learn and use, that works on your desktop. Create stunning visuals, reports and performance dashboards using a smart tool that is fast and easy to use.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's Movable Type.

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

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Get Your Mitts On GridIron Flow 1.0, A Stunning Workflow Manager

GridIron Software has finally brought Flow, its visual workflow manager, out of public beta.

This first stable version available for purchase ups the ante by allowing groups to collaborate on a workflow via the Share Maps feature, as well as adding direct access to Flow from within Adobe applications.

Flow was created with the help of visual designer Mark Coleran, who is known for his work on films such as The World Is Not Enough and the Bourne series. Though it's aimed squarely at creative professionals, Flow is probably the most advanced workflow manager out there, and is well worth a closer look by almost anyone.

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During its public beta, Flow was already being hailed as a cutting edge way to organize workflows. On top of the slick interface for creating a workflow map, features such as automatic time tracking, visual search and versioning made it something of a designers dream.

But for managing the projects that actually used the workflow you just created, Flow was limited to purely individual use, since it had no robust method for sharing a workflow map among a team.

Enter "Share Maps", the most expansive addition to Flow's public debut. The new feature makes room for creating a workflow group that can all have access to the same map. In addition to enabling real collaborative workflow creation in Flow for the first time, Share Maps means project managers can now join in. That's sure to make it something more friendly to enterprise use.

The next integration should place Flow one step closer to becoming an essential utility for designers during their work. An Adobe CS4 Flash Panel now included in the package allows users to access their workflow maps directly inside Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or Flash.

GridIron Flow can be bought through the site for $299 per single license or $399 for three. 1.0 also now supports both PCs and Macs, and there is a free trial as well for those who are still curious to give it spin.

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New Tool From Aviary Makes Taking Website Screenshots Really Easy

Aviary, which is known for its fully featured, browser-based image creation and manipulation tools, just released a new tool that makes it extremely easy to capture a copy of any web page by just adding 'aviary.com/' in front of a URL. Unlike most screen capture tools, Aviary is able to capture a complete web site, even if it extends beyond the borders of your screen. Aviary already offered a Firefox plugin, Talon, which allows users to create screenshots, but this new method is available from any browser, as long as it supports Flash for the image editing portion of Aviary.

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Easy to Use

For more control over the screenshot, you can also invoke Talon from Aviary's web site, where you can manipulate the image quality, set the screen resolution, and decide if you want to capture the entire page or just the part that would be above the fold. In the next version, users will also be able to set which browser and OS to take the screenshot from (which should be great for web designers who want to test their creations).

Some Issues

One problem with the Firefox plugin, however, is that it doesn't capture Flash content, and that, of course, is a deal-breaker in many cases. Using the 'aviary.com' prefix to capture Flash content works, but you can't select a specific moment in a video to show in your screenshot, for example. For this, you still need desktop based tools like Jing or Skitch, which a lot of us here at RWW use. Though they can't capture a complete web page that goes beyond the fold, you can use another desktop tool like Little Snapper, which makes it pretty easy to capture complete web pages at once.

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Nowhere to Run to, Baby: Moms' Social/Mobile Web Use Up by 400%

The days of moms covertly stalking their children on MySpace or freaking out over Facebook party pics are not-so-slowly shifting to headier days of proactive moms using the Internet to meet their own needs.

A new study from BabyCenter shows that mothers' social media use has increased 462 percent over the past three years. The same group's mobile web usage is up 348 percent over the same period of time. And these moms aren't just keeping tabs on secretive teenagers. They're networking for themselves, finding answers online, and sharing stories about their offspring. The two-part study was conducted between 2006 and 2009 in conjunction with NovaQuant. BabyCenter also conducted a series of 18 in-depth surveys between January and June of 2009

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This "21st Century Moms Report" states that the number of mothers using social networks has risen from 11 percent to 63 percent since 2006. And there's good news for brands who are using the same networks. According to the BabyCenter press release, "Forty-four percent [of moms on the social web] use social media for word-of-mouth recommendations on brands and products, and 73 percent feel they find trustworthy information about products and services."

As far as hardware is concerned, almost all moms - 91 percent - say they never leave home without a mobile device. More than half say they have replaced traditional photo albums with online photo-sharing services. And moms are also the primary console gamers in the household after the birth of a first or second child.

Health an important vertical for digital moms. Again, the report reads, "In online communities, children's health issues are the leading topic of interest in online communities (91 percent), followed by childhood development tips (79 percent)." Mothers are also seeking out expert medical advice, parent-to-parent wisdom, and product reviews via social media.

As Gen X and millenial women and men come of age and start families, their technological preferences are applied to new aspects of life, as well. Longstanding sites such as BabyCenter and niche startups such as LilGrams are in excellent positions to serve the needs of digital parents and connect them to brands, hopefully in ways that are relevant, helpful, and innovative.

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