Peer39 - The First Semantic Web Company That Makes Sense

There's a post on TechCrunch today on Peer39.  Worth reading.

Peer39 is a semantic analysis-enabled ad network.  The company's approach to information retrieval, their market focus, and their understanding the limits of their tech are what makes this company the first viable semantic web company.  While the company does all the usual "natural language processing" heuristic stuff which has come to be synonymous with Web 3.0 / "The Semantic Web," they also do what appears to be collaborative filtering and machine learning. In other words, they are at least partly making up for the shortcomings of heuristic approaches to information extraction with statistical analysis. 

As I've remarked before, it is impossible, given the current (and reasonably foreseeable) state of computer science for IE to work well enough to bring about the vision of the Semantic Web in the oft-cited travel agent example.  You can do NLP query parsing, define microformats, come up with better and better ontologies, and so forth all you like, and you will never solve the problem of incompletely, inconsistently, and poorly tagged source data.  Machines are too stupid and people are too lazy for all that data to ever get tagged right.  These things will not change in our lifetimes.

What makes Peer39 a sensible company is that they understand this and their goal is not to create a domain non-specific, highly accurate, robust information extraction service that enables the Semantic Web.  They just want to analyze content somewhat less inaccurately in order to enable ads to be served that will get a somewhat better clickthrough rate.  Improving CTRs is highly measurable and gets you paid; online ad serving is one area where having a better mousetrap really will get the world beating a path to your door.

My guess as to why this company is doing it right is because the founders and key technical leaders come out of online advertising and intelligence services. The ad people know where the pain points are and what level of "better" is enough to get market traction; the ex-spies know the limits of semantic tech and information extraction because intelligence services have been using that tech in production longer than anyone - those guys know what level of "better" is truly achievable, and how.  This team contrasts with most semantic web startups which are long on "visionaries" and researchers, and short on people who have had to use this tech with money (or lives, or national security) on the line.

This will be an interesting company to watch.