Google announced their acquisition of Danny Hillis’s Metaweb, owners of Freebase which allows people to store data as entities, together with relationships.

This is a big step in the rise of Web 3.0, also known as the Semantic Web, which will allow machines to compute using human understanding or human knowledge to a certain extent. Google was already overtaken by the awesome WolframAlpha knowledge computation engine and had to close the gap.

Google writes that their acquisition will be used to enhance search for tougher questions which a search on pure keywords is lacking. That kind of search, to quote Google’s example of “colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000″, necessitates additional capabilities. These include the entity being queried, its type, its relationships with other entities, and so on.

Although the initial use will be to enhance search, right after this comes the automation of human understanding. With logical predicates, one will be able to construct a body of knowledge and infer deeper meaning from information available on the web.

For instance, “Google acquires Metaweb” can be broken down into the semantic relationships below (like Thomson-Reuters‘ OpenCalais already does):

Acquirer: Google

Acquired: Metaweb

Relationship: Acquisition

Status: Confirmed.

Within the trading context, such a news headline could be used to automate Merger Arbitrage orders (Provided, of course that Metaweb was publicly traded).

Hence, to some extent at this point, computers will be able to ‘understand’ and interpret the meaning of human language and this information, in turn, could be used for further automation.

But beyond this step, with machine learning, comes the promise of an even wilder web, a web with sufficiently advanced understanding of human language, knowledge and mind, that it is indistinguishable from a sentient form.

Watch this video from Freebase to understand why entities are important:

Following the Google I/O developer conference, it is good to make an update on Google’s sprawling offerings and business explorations and conclude as to what their strategy long-term is, which I do at the end of this post.

Google’s AdMob acquisition goes through

Last Friday, the FTC actually allowed the deal to go through and Omar Hamoui’s AdMob is now part of the Google stable. Apple’s foray into mobile advertising with Quattro Wireless must have helped the FTC make its decision.

I expect an additional lucrative revenue stream from Mobile Adverts for Google, as mobiles (smart phones, tablets) take over.

Google TV

At Google IO, during the Day 2 Keynote, Eric Schmidt unveiled Google TV. What I grasp from the keynote presentation and Google’s partners is that they will heavily back Adobe, especially Flash.

In fact, Vic Gundotra did send a jab toward Apple, using the latter’s own past words “It is a future we don’t want”, referring to access being controlled by one man, one company, one platform, just as Apple jabbed IBM in 1984 at the launch of the Mackintosh.

Google TV’s partners

On stage with Schmidt, featured Google’s partners:

• Intel
• Sony
• Adobe
• Logitech
• Dish Networks

Augmented TV

What Google envisions is a social way of watching TV, or a melding of the web and television platforms. In this respect, it is ‘Augmented Television’.

Google’s strides with online video

The following events are very significant in my opinion, in semantics and timing, especially when taken in light of Apple’s own projects:

• Google open-sources the VP8 codec

They open-sourced the VP8 codec which they obtained following the acquisition of On2. They are giving it away as a new format called WebM, which is in fact a version of the Matroska container, and which supports Ogg Vorbis Audio. Ogg Vorbis is open-source.

• Google funds the Ogg Theora optimization on ARM platform

Google decided to finance the optimization of the open-source video codec for the ARM platform. This can mean only one or two things:
- It’s about mobile video, as ARM has the best platform for mobiles & tablets computing, platform heavily relied upon by many licensees like Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Marvell, and several others.

• Google acquires Global IP Solutions

This acquisition appears to me to be more about the actual Intellectual Property than the technology itself, but it does give Google access to interesting things, including, but not limited to:

- Web-based, real-time, high-quality audio and video streaming
- Web-based audio-conferencing and video-conferencing

• Google acquires Episodic

This gives Google access to marketing data, but also a monetization platform for videos as well as great user experience experience (yes, you read that well).

• Google acquires BumpTop

You may think that this is not related to online video, but in reality it is, albeit in an indirect way.

As I mentioned in my post in 2007, BumpTop was more suited to touch-screens. This acquisition, therefore, can only mean that Google is making a big push for their tablet computing platforms, since BumpTop as is needs a bigger screen than that of smartphones and is not suited to the Desktop and mouse.

Add this fact to the race of online video/video-conferencing acquisitions that Google is running and you can see that the Tablet platform, running Android or Chrome O.S. should ideally support video-conferencing, something that Apple forgot to include built-in in the iPad.

Google makes Core APIs accessible – Google Prediction API

Machine Learning, to me, is one of Google’s core strengths. It is therefore amazing to see them open up access to its Google Prediction API. Some critics will say that it’s a black box because you can’t choose the internal algorithm. I say that it is rather a blessing, because startups will be able to leverage Google’s algorithms and infrastructure to build their own technology for free or nearly free (some costs will apply when using Google Storage, which is necessary):

Google Prediction API

Another API Google offers is Google Latitude API, which will help with all those location-based services.

Conclusion on Google’s Strategy

Google’s Nexus One phone

I like Android, open-source and Google, and I want my machines to compute for me and access data and information on-the-go.

In addition, when the service is ready, I will communicate worldwide using Google Voice through it, doing away with the hefty charges Traditional Telcos pass onto the consumer.

Apple’s tablet or as some say ‘tablets’.

It is rumoured that one tablet will be sold as an eBook reader and another one as a general-purpose computer. Personally, I wish that Apple just gives us a multi-touch general-purpose computer, and I prefer Snow Leopard 64-bit rather than the iPhone O.S.

In any case, Google and Apple will clash on several fronts as I detail in a previous post.

I like the following design prototype, and if anybody can make it work like this, it is Apple.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

As for web services, the following are going to be instrumental in the coming years’ socio-cultural and technological evolution:

Augmented Reality

Applications like Layar and Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera will pave the way for location-aware applications and services. For these, your Internet mobile devices need a camera, GPS, a magnetometer or compass as well as an accelerometer. I like Google Goggles too.

The Internet of Things

Pachube is another web service and technology I find fascinating after reading Richard McManus’s posts about it on ReadWriteWeb.

A lot of the benefits will be made through mobile computing devices and smart phones.

Read:

Morgan Stanley/Mary Meeker’s Mobile Internet Report.

Mobile computing is ramping up faster than the Desktop Internet did, as there are 5 trends converging:
3G, Social Networking, Video, VOIP, Impressive Mobile Devices.

and

Fred Wilson’s areas of interest.

Augmented Human

This will be a trend for the next decade, a time like no other in history where technology empowers and augments Human capacities. This entails watching anything having to do with AI.

Any application or service which allow me to enhance aspects of my human life is going to fall in this category, like Networked-computing, Cloud-computing and Social Computing, and AI of course.

Augmented Human apps and services will exponentially increase society intelligence.

Web 3.0 or the Semantic web

I think that 2010 is the year where semantic applications and services become prominent and usable for the mainstream.

A key factor to overcome is the inertia of publishers to push structured Web data. The answer is to allow the infrastructure to do that automatically, e.g. your WordPress platform.

One service I am watching here is Thomson-Reuters’ Open-Calais.

Trading & Investment applications using one or more of the above.

I am especially excited by the prospects in systematic or algorithmic trading and analytics. In fact, I believe we should be doing a DOW theory 2.0 right now.

This got me thinking about which IPO I would look forward to myself and what the characteristics of the company would be, including the state of its technology.

What I am looking for is

1. Not just a technology or feature, but something which matured into a platform

2. Something which is near ubiquitous at the turn of 2009 on the web or in the circle of geeks and people living on the edge, the innovators and early adopters who try things or grasp things early, the visionaries.

3. Something which already has significant inroads in the platform space with high-profile or low profile companies or associations using their service or building upon them.

4. Something which can already be useful in:

• Customer Relationship for enterprises
• Targeted Marketing or targeted advertising for enterprises or startups
• Behavioral Analytics, or just Analytics
• The Finance industry – Automated & Algorithmic trading

Today, Erick Schonfeld followed through with an article on the Top 10 IPO Candidates for 2010, but strangely omits Twitter, which Kedrosky mentioned.

As I wrote in this post about Twitter raising 35M USD from Google and Microsoft, Twitter has become a platform and checks all four points on the checklist above.

If they are not acquired, the two Technology companies whose IPOs I am looking forward to are:

Facebook

and

Twitter

For a contrarian view on none other than Forbes, read The Death of the IPO by Quentin Hardy.

I think many people underestimate the value of Twitter.

If Twitter has an IPO, would you buy it?

This shows how essential real-time has become on the Web.

For me it’s a big win for the underlying open source technology framework for Rapid Web Development, Ruby on Rails, which I have been recommending to enterprises since about 4 years ago.

Where are you on the Technology Adoption Lifecycle below regarding Ruby and Ruby on Rails? Have you innovated? Are you an early adopter because you understand the business implications, or will you be at the other end of the spectrum, a laggard?

Technology Adoption Lifecycle

The news is, however, huge for Twitter, which is said by Bloomberg to be profitable now.

Twitter has become a platform essential to the Web in Marketing/Advertising, Customer Care (though less as people understand this less) but also in Finance. Witness Howard Linzon’s StockTwits, itself leveraged by NASDAQ’s Portfolio Manager application for the iPhone.

It’s huge news because the real-time web can be input signals into high-frequency trading strategies.

If Twitter does an IPO, I won’t miss it.

I nearly covered a shorting position with a limit today but cancelled it. The day was good and my portfolio is up 53.7%. One of the short positions is now top on the list in terms of dollar gain, though not percentage gain.

Shorting and trading, by their very nature are shorter-term positions as compared to investments. It is quite difficult to be able to hold on to a shorting position for a few days. For some traders it can be a nerve-wracking experience, especially if the threat of a short squeeze looms, where the potential for losses is unlimited. Therefore, level-headedness is of the essence.

The trade must be well-researched, and requisites for a good trade must be fulfilled: entry, exit, % of bankroll risked, stops or limits.

I believe you should forget about a short trade which was profitable when covered in the following sense: “You should have no regret about any other action which could have brought more profits.”

This said, it is important to have a trading journal where trades can be stored and analyzed.

Value Investing

Buy-and-hold and regular investing with DRIP can bring some peace of mind to the Trader/Investor, but in some market conditions it can be much more nerve-wracking than holding on a short.

Consider Buffett seeing his portfolio literally melt by $25 billion during the global economic crisis and still keeping at it. There is simply no way that he could not be affected by this stupendous loss unless he really doesn’t look at his portfolio at all.

In addition, it was possible as I showed in this blog to call the massive losses in the market months before October 2008. With such a large exposure to market and systemic risk, one could have cashed in, or done like Paulson and make the Greatest Trade Ever – as it is, the title of a new book by Gregory Zuckerman:

Trend-following

My thoughts on trend-following are related to the amplification effect of people using this strategy. Moreover, these strategies can also be set and triggered in an automated way.

With the tendency to go more towards automation, thus removing the deleterious effects of human emotions on trading, I can only foresee that similar strategies and systems will cause charts to spike one way or the other, with the amplitudes getting higher with time.

It would be interesting to model these changes, and build meta-strategies to profit from these trends.

A book I recommend on Trend Following is the one by Michael Covel:

The date, it turns out, will be April 19th or April 20th. The host at the ContraHour blog reveals he is watching the USD rather than the broad stock market whereas I had interpreted it as a ‘Get-out-of-stocks’ signal. This is significant to me amongst the talks of a Global Currency before and after the G20 summit. Besides, I am convinced myself the dollar will crash. Or it could be a massive event stemming from Quant funds deleveraging as they are taken aback by the recent rally when the fundamentals are still very bad. Here’s another similar view from Business Insider.

I wrote about Martin Armstrong and his flabbergasting model in this post on YashLabs – A Global Economic Crisis – New models for investments

In short, Armstrong has detected a historical cycle for major events based on Pi. What else could be anyway, right? A cycle – circle – cyclical – circular – it can only be a model incorporating Pi if it’s regular. In his model, there’s also a time-frame for the collapse of whole political or societal structures, and that would coincide with the collapse of the U.S.A. around next year or in two years.

Read Martin Armstrong’s latest at ContraHour, Why models are our only hope – should we create a model to manage our social-economy?

In it, he recounts in additional detail how his Judge (Armstrong writes from jail) seemingly accuses him of inspiring himself from the movie Pi by Aronosky, when it fact, the movie is based on Armstrong himself.