Live from ESTC2008 – Semantic Web business idea contest

The Business idea contest is a contest where entrepreneurs gets 5 minutes to explain their ideas to investors with a €5000 prize. The contest shows some good ideas that 

• Stephan Decker of DERI presents his idea around Sindice, a semantic web index. A crawled index of RDF you can use in your application. Business model as paid API or micro ads. Sindice already up and running, and I was not surprised that Stephan and his team won the prize. Congratulations!

• Discoteka is a centeralized store for metadata and ontolgies for media.

• D.o.o.m. SRL is a semantic based ranking system. The idea of a semantic ranking system of D.o.o.m. is good, but the pitch is not convincing me. 

• Know who knows. Based on the mega-trends globalization, specialization and decomposition. Combining social software, semantic technology, information retrieval techniques, and data mining into Social interprice search. These guys got the third place. The Know who knows was a well polished presentation, but unclear what was new compared to current knowledge management systems.  

• Webmark, equivalent to the branding trademark. Unfortunately the presenter did not manage to get his presentation running.

• Emanuelle della Valle presented Squiggle a semantic search engine without convincing me.

It is nice to see some ideas being pitched to investors, unfortunately varying quality and mostly they did not convince me on how their solutions where better than existing solutions. Also the business model was not very clear in most cases. 

Explore posts in the same categories: SemanticWeb

Tags: CX

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.