And then things went quiet.

Fast forward to 2010, and Siri is back. The back-end technology is faster, more robust, and fuelled by loads more data. Robert Scoble has been amongst those dropping not-so-subtle hints on Twitter for days, and other big names in and around the Valley have also been targeted in a carefully orchestrated programme of pre-briefings and beta invites. That all ends today, as the iPhone app is now out of beta and available this morning from Apple’s App Store. Versions for Android devices and the Blackberry are coming along close behind, and the company has big plans for building upon what they already have.

I got my hands on the app earlier this month, and put it through as many of its paces as I could from 3,000 miles outside the US market for which the current app and data are optimised.

I’ve written up the results of my play (and my conversation with Siri’s other two co-founders) for ZDNet, and look forward to trying it for real on my next trip to the States.

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“All too often, insider analyst research and commentary is costly, inaccessible or ineffective to the entrepreneurs, investors and innovators who need timely insights most. We’re changing this by making high-quality expert reports, data and commentary easy to access and highly interactive for our community in key emerging technology areas.”

I was therefore delighted when VP of Research Michael Wolf got in touch before Christmas to ask if I’d be interested in providing them with content.

My first piece, which is published today, explores some of the issues faced by Cloud service providers and users in negotiating the attitudes and laws of the different jurisdictions through which their data may pass. I would welcome any comments on the piece, and must thank Microsoft’s Matt Deacon, Sun Microsystems‘ Michelle Dennedy, IBM’s Harriet Pearson, Rackspace’s Simon Abrahams, Computacenter’s Matthew Yeager and F5 Networks‘ Lori MacVittie for taking the time to talk with me as I prepared it. Thanks, also, to Celeste LeCompte at GigaOM for editing and for Americaniszing my spellingz… Any misunderstandings, misrepresentations, typos etc, are of course my own.

I look forward to my next GigaOM assignment!

For those on this side of the Atlantic with a particular interest in the topic, London’s Powered By Cloud event (where I participated in a panel last year) is back for a second edition on 8 and 9 February. Of particular interest in this context is an addition to this year’s event; 10 February’s dedicated to a Cloud Law Summit.

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Backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Seattle-based Evri is using semantic technologies to

“change the way consumers discover and engage with content on the Web.”

Via the site at evri.com, users are able to explore news-like topics of interest. Through partnerships with The Washington Post, Hearst and others, Evri is also able to reach established audiences on those sites. An API enables developers to leverage Evri in their own applications, and the forthcoming version 2 of Evri promises further capabilities.

As well as discussing Evri itself, we explore some of Will’s views on the changing role of semantic search, and the potential for this fledgling market to reach wider consumer awareness and adoption. Have a listen, and see what you think.

Links to some of the resources mentioned during our conversation follow, after the cut…

• Bing
• Business.com
• DARPA
• Evri
• Evri’s iPhone application
• Farecast
• Gap
• Google
• Hearst Corporation
• Go2.com
• Insightful Corporation, now part of TIBCO
• Overture, now part of Yahoo!
• Powerset, now part of Microsoft
• Rich Snippets
• SearchMonkey
• Siri
• Vulcan Capital
• The Washington Post
• Yahoo!

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Like the BBC, the UK Government and others, they’re interested in the opportunities created by adoption of Linked Data, and will be issuing a call to fund some projects in the space early next year.

As part of the process, I was asked to prepare a short report and some recommendations for activity across the sector.

A draft of that report is now available, and both JISC staff and myself would welcome any comments that you might have before we finalise the document. I should stress – several times – that this document is a draft, and that its recommendations have not been endorsed by JISC.

Earlier this week Flip and I got together on Skype to reprise some of the conversation as a podcast, which is now available.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis.

My arrangement with Talis concludes with the release of this podcast, so if you want to keep listening to my content you will need to subscribe directly to my feed, either on this site or in iTunes. Talis podcasts continue without me, and you can find their various channels aggregated here.

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I spoke with Felix recently to record a podcast exploring the issues that Collibra sets out to address for their growing band of large enterprise customers.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis.

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Carr blogged on Friday, noting that video from the event has been made available on YouTube, and I’ve been steadily working through the material ever since.

Krish followed up on CloudAve with his take, flagging Carr’s presentation as of particular interest. I liked Carr’s presentation too (although prefer our podcast, as I think he went deeper there), and found much to value in most of the other talks as well.

My particular highlights, I think, were three sessions later in the day;

Paul Cheesbrough (CIO at Telegraph Media Group), Francois Blanc (CIO at Valeo), Todd Pierce (SVP & CIO at Genentech) and Andy Beale (CIO at Guardian Media Group) participated in a panel session (embedded below) to discuss their real-world experiences of rolling Google Apps out across large organisations. The key take-aways? Benefit won’t be recognised across the board until six months in, and Executive Assistants need to be kept on-side as their day-to-day work inside people’s calendars is disrupted… and they’re both ‘loud’ and ‘influential.’

Google’s Dave Girouard covered similar issues from the company’s perspective, and is clearly someone to add to my list of podcast targets.

My final highlight was Geoffrey Moore (he of Core, Context, and Chasms), applying some of his broader business ideas to the Cloud. I’d certainly like to explore some of his arguments a little further another day…

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For various reasons, I was unable to make it to Virginia for the event, but a scan through the presentations from Leigh, Tom Heath (another former colleague), Jordan Hatcher (with whom I worked on earlier iterations of the Open Data Commons license), and Creative Commons‘ Kaitlin Thaney, it looks like they did a great job covering the bases on this critically important aspect of the evolving Data Web.

If we are to encourage the sorts of break-out use of data that Tim Berners-Lee and Tim O’Reilly were discussing at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit, we need to move past the current laissez-faire approaches adopted by too many and ensure that there are licensing regimes in place to enable, facilitate and encourage widespread re-use.

As Leigh’s work demonstrates, we have a long way to go. Only around a third of the current Linked Data projects are explicitly licensing their content, and several of those may be mis-licensing by applying copyright-based licenses such as those from Creative Commons to data not covered by copyright legislation.

With the current state of data licensing, and the reliance of CC0 and Open Data Commons’ Public Domain Dedication and License upon the public domain as a means of overcoming territorial differences, will we find enterprise use of Linked Data increasingly relying upon the more cumbersome tool of contract law… to the detriment of a free and flexible exchange of ideas?

‘Linked Open Data Rights Survey‘ image by Leigh Dodds, shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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