Kate Ray, a Journalism/Psychology major at NYU, has made a great short film on the semantic web.

I’ve been interested in the semantic web for the last couple years. My previous startup, LinkLarry, tried to improve the amount of relationship data on the web by increasing the linking around content. However, the overall theme of the semantic web is that these relationships are described to add even more meaning between the content. Not an easy task.

Image via Wikipedia

Kate shows Abraham Bernstein (University of Zurich) and David Karger (MIT) advocating for a more hybrid approach to the semantic web by providing some structure through ontologies while utilizing the unique intelligence of the human brain. This is important because the challenge for the semantic web is to find the best method to encoding all this meaning between content/entities.

I don’t think real meaning can be derived automatically through some super duper crazy analysis software using natural language processing and coming close to AI. At first I did think this way, but then I realized I was just a teenager dreaming. Instead I saw crowd-sourcing as a hybrid solution and so I tried this with LinkLarry. Unfortunately, I found out context is very important to consider when getting something to be used optimally.

Context is everything.

I think at the very fundamental level, the semantic web comes back down to the interaction with humans; of whom have the primary understanding of things. This is why I like the hybrid approach Bernstein and Karger were suggesting and would be interested in hearing and reading more from them on how this might work.

However, in an even bigger picture of things what’s more interesting is how the semantic web crosses over into physical reality. This is something the film does not touch on (and for good reason). Eventually all physical objects will be tagged with information about themselves and how they relate to others. Our mobile device of the future will understand the context of everything. More importantly, it will understand the context in relationship to you! I think this is an amazing future, exploding with opportunities of valuable applications.

What would you like to do in future if software/hardware could understand the relationships between everything?

In one word: Inspiring

TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 was pretty good timing for me. My startup has been changing directions over the past few weeks and it was time to take a step back and see what everyone else has been working on for a few days. The event definitely gave me some valuable perspective. After talking to a few dozen people I began to see where I personally fit into the ecosystem. There were dozens of exhibitors and I probably talked to more than half of them. The quality ranged from laughable to quite impressive.

The few startups that stood out to me:

6rounds is a really cool video chat platform that allows users to play games, watch youtube videos together, and more. Looking forward to speaking with Dany Fishel (Founder & CEO) about a potential partnership with my startup.

One i.tv’s new features include aggregating and attributing comments around the web to points in time in videos. They are also linking live (and non-live) TV with webpages. This among other things could seriously improve TV news.

There were a few other good looking startups, but the ones I listed above I think could really take off.

At first I wasn’t sure how good the event would be for me. I didn’t really know anyone else going and you could say my networking skills are below average. Fortunately, my good friend Alex Debelov from Babson came down last minute and we had a great time working the event to meet some of the top players.

Highlights from the event:

• I met another entrepreneur from my very small (1sq mile) hometown in Califon, NJ.
• I met Matt Coffin, a Babson alum who founded LowerMyBills.com and sold it for $330m. Now he’s very active angel investor.
• I received feedback from several VC and Angel investors, including Wesley Chan from Google Ventures. Although Wesley didn’t ‘get’ my pitch during the VC speed dating event, he was cool enough to grab a few drinks together at the after-party and talk about entrepreneurship among other things.
• I also met many of the staff from TechCrunch, including their CEO Heather Harde, who desperately needed my advice on which shoes to wear to the after party. The black ones were the obvious choice.
• And last but far from least, I welcomed Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) to the event Wednesday morning. I even had the opportunity get his thoughts on my startup’s new direction.  The best part was that his feedback was the final thumbs up I needed to hit the ground running.

Overall it was a great event and in conclusion, now is the time to crush it!

Less than 9 weeks left until D-Day.