Semantic search applications are finally starting to gel this year. Tonight, Adaptive Blue is releasing the latest version (dubbed Indigo) of its FireFox add-on, Blue Organizer. Put simply, Blue Organizer lets you surf things instead of Web pages. It recognizes when a Webpage that you are browsing is about certain classes of things: books, movies, music, stocks, recipes, restaurants, blogs, wine, clothing, electronics, celebrities, musicians, hotels. And it creates shortcuts to other Webpges about that same “thing” (or object). If you are reading a book review on a blog, for instance, Blue Organizer will let you jump directly to the page on Amazon about that book, or AbeBooks, Alibris, Barnes & Noble, eBay, and more. You can also go to a custom Google page that only searches book reviews for that book. For each different class of things it recognizes, you get a different set of contextually-relevant options.

Blue Organizer was developed by Alex Iskold, a frequent contributor to ReadWriteWeb. He raised $1.5 million from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures back in February 2007, and is going to try to raise a B round soon.

Baked into Indigo is semantic search technology that acts more like a discovery engine than a traditional search engine. It is limited in what it can recognize, but it does recognize certain things and concepts and matches those with other Webpages about the exact same thing. You never have to go to a search engine, you just have to surf the Web and hop from concept to concept. The software can make inferences about entire Web pages, text inside those pages, and links inside those pages.

When it recognizes that a Web page is about a book, a movie, a recipe, or some other thing, the Blue Organizer icon at the top of your browser changes to an appropriate image (book, movie reel, chef’s hat) to indicate that it has identified an “object” on the page. And it offers a series of appropriate links, such as the Amazon page for a book or a list of reviews, as well as other links based on the way you use the Web, such as “Save to Delicious,” “Share on Facebook,” or “Digg This,” options. The software studies your Web history to surface links to Websites you already frequent. And Adaptive Blue has created a customized Google search engine for each class of objects it recognizes for more relevant search results.

Within a page, if you highlight the name of an author or a movie, for instance, a little SmartMenu box will pop up with links about that person or thing. If it recognizes the name of a book or restaurant that is already hyperlinked, a little blue folder icon will be embedded right next to the word. Click on that, and you get a bunch of associated “SmartLinks.” The SmartLinks also appear in search results pages, much like the Stumbleupon icon does when a you have the StumbleUpon Firefox add-on and you come across search results which have been rated by that community.

As with the previous releases of Blue Organizer, you can also save objects in the slide-out sidebar. This is a bit different than just saving links because you define what kind of “object” you are saving (blog, book, image, stock, toy, etc.), and you get the associated SmartLinks, custom search pages, and other categorization that goes with it.

Thinking of the Web in terms of things instead of Web pages does not come naturally. I installed the old Blue Organizer add-on more than a year ago, and have maybe used it twice. It was too advanced and didn’t fit into the flow of how I use my browser. (It is not just me—the add-on has been downloaded 1.3 million times, but only a couple hundred thousand people use it actively). The new features in Indigo, however, surface the utility of the application implicitly as you surf the Web. You don’t have to remember to save anything. You see a little blue folder, click on it, and get helpful links about that concept. You see the toolbar icon change, and you click on the pull-down menu to do something useful.

Complex apps need easy entry points, and Indigo has plenty of those. There is a lot more to this app than I can go through here. It makes it easy to create smart widgets, supports microformats, recognizes common names and addresses, and lets you highlight any text and send it as a message on Twitter, Tumblr, or Lijit. You can find more details on the Indiigo release here and here. Check it out and tell us what you think.

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AdaptiveBlue has announced that their SmartLink Feeds for books, music, movies, and stocks are now “viral.”

The new SmartLink Feeds from the companies flagship Blue Organizer Firefox Add-on now include a “Grab Me” button that allows anyone to copy a list of favorites and place it on their web sites and social networking profiles. SmartLink Feeds can also be customized in appearance, content and users can also plug in their personal affiliate ID to monetize traffic to participating sites.

AdaptiveBlue will also now publish and update popular SmartLink Feeds to enable anyone to paste them into their own sites without having to be a regular user. SmartLink Feeds include the New York Times Bestsellers, Netflix Top Rentals, Amazon Hot Gadgets, iTunes Top Albums, and Wine.com Top Wines.

See our previous coverage of AdaptiveBlue Smartlink here.

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At Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session, 12 young startups (well, 13 if you count the fake one planted to keep the audience on their toes), pitched their products to an audience at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with punditry by Kevin Werbach and Michael Arrington and supporting color from Josh Kopelman, Julia Hanna Farris and Paul Kedrosky. Here’s a look at the 13 companies:

adap.tv	AdaptiveBlue	Aggregate Knowledge
CastTV	Critical Metrics	Jangl
Pando Networks	SodaHead	Spock
Wize	ZapMeals	ZenZui
	Zing

Adap.tv - They’re like adsense for video, tying contextual text ads based on the content of a video. When videos play, Adap.tv digs up relevant Amazon products and Looksmart ads to populate an ad bar on the bottom of the video at key moments. They use tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations to find out what the video is about.

AdaptiveBlue - Makers of the Blue Organizer, a Firefox bookmarking and tagging add-on that parses web pages, adding contextual information where appropriate. For instance, if you go to a web page about a band, Blue Organizer’s right-click menu will show you more info about the band drawn from sites like Odeo or Wikipedia. The plugin also has smart links that let you easily push the link to services like Digg or LibraryThing. More coverage of the recent feature additions here.

Aggregate Knowledge - One of the more established companies at the event, they work with online commerce sites to provide personalized recommendations by looking at user’s collective behavior. They just closed a large round of financing and are rumored to be profitable after a little over a year in operation.

CastTV - A video search engine that pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. The service performed well in our earlier review. They recently raised a $3.1 million round of financing from DFJ.

Critical Metrics - A music recommendation service that aggregates music reviews from around the web. Each song includes an audio and optional Youtube sample and purchasing options from services like Yahoo Music, iTunes, or Rhapsody.

Jangl - They specialize in anonymous phone communication. A Jangl is a real phone number lets people call you with knowing your real number. The first time someone calls you they have to leave a message and request permission to connect to you directly. You can ban a number at any time as well. They just recently launched a service that lets you generate a Jangl number for any email address and leave a voicemail for that user and number for a callback. Calls are served over a VOIP bridge, so it also makes long distance calls cheaper.

Pando Networks - Desktop peer to peer file sharing service Pando speeds up file transfers by torrenting files and buffering them over their higher speed network of servers. At Supernova they’ve announced their Pando Publishing Platform that lets users easily publish to the web with the cost savings of peer to peer. The platform gives publishers the benefits of P2P video streaming amongst their users and CDN peering service. P2P streaming lets users view video incrementally instead of after a lengthy download. Their CDN peering service will let turn a regular CDN server into a supernode that will save on bandwidth by balancing load between users and the main servers. They’ve already lined up content partners NextNewNetworks, Blip.tv, and Rever.

SodaHead - A polling destination site that lets users poll their friends, SodaHead experts, or strangers. Polls are embeddable widgets that can be voted on at the destination site or any page featuring the code. Polls also feature comments so users can express opinions that don’t fit into any of the options.

Spock - A people search engine that automatically aggregates information linked to a person along with support for updating contacts.

Wize - Wize is a site that tracks expert and user product reviews across the Internet and churns them through an algorithm to create a single, 1-100 “WizeRank.” Earlier this year they got a $4 million round. We have a review of other review services here.

ZapMeals - Adding a little levity to the event, Zapmeals is a startup spoof (e.g. the fake) that aims to be a marketplace for meals, hooking up hungry stomachs with nearby home cooked meals or caterers. You choose your cook based on a member rating system and their fleet of couriers would deliver the meals to your home.

ZenZui - A new way of surfing the web on your mobile phone browser, Zenzui economizes on your phone’s screen space by displaying sites and services as icons on a grid display. You can scan the 36 slot grid using your numbered keypad and zoom in for more detail on a specific service. We covered their launch here.

Zing - Zing enables mobile music players to connect to music libraries over WiFi. They’re currently powering the SanDisk devices for Yahoo Music and Pandora.
You can see a Wink powered group for the event here.

The 12 real start-ups were hand-chosen from more than 130 applications. StumbleUpon, one of the 2006 Connected Innovators, has already enjoyed great success as a newly acquired eBay business. We have high hopes for more great success stories from this year’s crop of Connected Innovators.

Disclosure: While these companies were selected from 130+ applications, they were required to pay a fee to participate once selected. As a partner to the conference, TechCrunch received a percentage of that fee.

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The Union Square Ventures funded Adaptive Blue has released a new version of their well regarded Blue Organizer Firefox add-on. The new version has a range of additional features that provide an improved semantic web experience.

We’ve covered Adaptive Blue previously. Blue Organizer has grown since we last wrote about it to 600,000 downloads with what Michael Arrington called a very impressive add-on. The new version builds on what is already a quality product and delivers an even more compelling user experience.

The biggest change in the new version of Blue Organizer is “smart links”. Toolbar and in-page pull down menus are supported with an improved contextual engine that delivers results based on data pulled from the page being viewed. The options provided have evolved; where as previous versions provided only static lists of external links, the latest version of Blue Organizer dynamically personalizes link options based on browsing history. For example if you used Facebook and De.licio.us regularly but didn’t use Newsvine, Newsvine would not be listed.

Adaptive Blue also enters the widget market. The new “sharing links” feature allows users to embed semantic links into any webpage, include bookmark style lists in a sidebar or just embed a traditional widget. Affiliate programs are fully supported with no revenue sharing; if a user includes their affiliate code for programs such as eBay and Amazon they keep 100% of any associated revenue.

The new version of Blue Organizer is an appealing package. Power users are supported through right-click support. The semantic engine provides one click dynamic short cuts to useful information that is bound to be a time saver. I installed the new version of Blue Organizer in preparation for this post and I can’t see myself uninstalling it any time soon.

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