Peer39: Interview with Amiad Solomon

Founded in 2006 by an innovative group of scientists and engineers, Peer39 was voted by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the Top Ten Web Startups to Watch in 2008.  Semantic Universe editor Tony Shaw recently spoke with Founder and CEO Amiad Solomon about the company’s innovations, the FTC and what we may expect in the future.

Tony Shaw: Over the last few years, it seems that your business has changed.  Can you update us on what Peer39 is currently doing?

To extract applicable information from an abundance of available data takes companies a great amount of time. The same applies to consumers who are searching for an answer to a question on the Internet. Semantic technologies promise to take on a large part of this task. iQser’s Middleware provides the basis for the efficient development of such intelligent applications. The bottom up approach makes this possible, by means of a fully automatic semantic analysis.

The adage “content is king” has never been truer than it is today. Companies across the board are rapidly evolving their services to provide their customers with even more value in the face of the economic meltdown. With its near unlimited capacity and zero-cost of publishing, the Internet has grown astronomically. In 2006, it was estimated that the Internet encompassed 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites (three million times the information size of all books ever written), and is currently growing by ten thousand pages per hour. What’s particularly interesting is that it’s not just traditional publishing companies that have to find ways to compete with the explosion of information – companies ranging from pharmaceutical developers to mortgage companies are exploring ways to create new information services by tapping the immense amount of information available on the Internet today. However, creating these new information services can be extraordinarily time consuming and expensive without the help of semantic technologies.