Do you remember those racks of yellow and black books in the corner of the University shop? The ones that your teacher despised and you relied on. Well, CliffsNotes does not even begin to compare with a semantic text startup that has been stirring the pot in recent weeks.

After winning multiple business plan competitions and gaining media from well-respected blogs, Topicmarks has begun to be used by the masses. Originally intended for the publishing community, individuals and businesses that need to consume massive amounts of content within a short period of time, Topicmarks summarizes your cloud documents and extracts the most important points for you.

After fine tuning their web based application for 4-years, over 20,000 engineering hours, Topicmarks “can cut up the full text within documents into sentences, assign meaning to words and pluck out relevant facts, all within minutes. Think of it as a better, machine-enabled version of CliffsNotes — but for all text documents” (Mashable).

Users can upload their own documents, email in text, grab content from across the web or just paste content they are too lazy to read for an instantaneous analysis.

Anyone can use the service by visiting Topicmarks website, but the company’s primary goal is to become integrated in many of the mainstream cloud file storing services (i.e. Evernote, DropBox, Scribd, etc). I am personally excited about its potential usefulness in analyzing data gathered from RSS feeds, popular blogs and even social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook. Imagine if the most popular topics discussed on Twitter could be taken out of the clutter and presented to me in a comprehensive format.

How will you use Topicmarks in your day-to-day?