The team at First Retail is proud to announce that leading analyst firm Gartner has included First Retail in its 2012 list of Cool Vendors in Analytics and Business Intelligence. The report notes that "First Retail represents the crowded market of content analytics, but it was its machine learning that caught our attention."

We're excited to be participating in the 2011 Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco! You can catch Anne Hunt and Simon Hadley discussing Real-Time Semantic ETL today, June 7 at 2:40PM PDT, and Anne Hunt, Simon Handley, and To Kim presenting Innovation-in-a-Box during the poster session on Wednesday, June 8 from 10:45AM to 3:45PM PDT. We're also officially launching First Retail Innovation-in-a- Box™, a new service to enable companies to more effectively leverage the benefits of semantic technology, and transforming the way big enterprise works with big data... more info

To our friends old and new: those who came to the party - thank you for being there and sharing our celebration; and those who didn't make it - we missed you this time and we look forward to being able to spending time with you soon.

It's been an interesting twelve months for First Retail - starting from zero with just a smart and dedicated team - first one client, then another and now we have five great organizations whom we are proud to be working with. And above all, the support network of our friends and ex-colleagues who provided people, skills, advice and work - sometimes just in the nick of time. So to everyone who has been a part of our first year - a huge thank you. We look forward to returning the favors.

What’s the link between the trends of more and more objects and even commercial transactions on the web being described in a machine-readable, semantic format and the endless streaming of all that data? Revenue-funded startup First Retail, whose principals Anne Jude Hunt and Simon G. Handley will be speaking at the upcoming Semantic Technology Conference in June, thinks the answer is semantic ETL.

Here are a few sites we think you should check out