[The following article was written by Thematix partner Larry Smith and first appeared in Tnooz on December 8, 2011] It took me about 15 years from when I started travelling for business and pleasure to appreciate the value of a professional travel agent.  In 1979 as a junior MadMan. I relied upon secretaries and expense accounts for guidance, while personal travel was collaboration between an advertised special, a travel agency storefront, and my girlfriend. By 1996 my prospering Internet development company was flying people around the globe and Ann Marie, our independent travel agent, made several dozen bookings a week …

Steve Rubel is "Director of Insights" at Edelman Digital. (Now, that’s an interesting job title!) It appears that Steve’s job is to track ideas as they come to the surface in the ordinary world of commerce. Watch his eyes light up as he cites the Semantic Web as an instance of a truly transformational technology. My only criticisms are that a) it’s bigger and more fundamental in its impact than even Steve recognizes in his examples and b) there’s no sense waiting "3 to 5 years " when it’s already begun to arrive.

Thematix’s own Elisa Kendall was interviewed by SemanticWeb.com in anticipation of the upcoming Semtech conference in San Francisco,where Elisa and Robert Kost (also of Thematix) will both be speaking.   The SemanticWeb article has much to say, but the bottom line was expressed well by Elisa: “There really is a lot happening, not only at OMG but generally, and what’s nice to see is that [semantic technologies are] becoming much more accessible to a really broad range of people and application domains.”  There is, I believe, a sense that the world has finally begun to catch up with semantic technologies …