The last decade of research in the Web field gave a great importance to the studies about the Semantic Web. The idea of a Web of Data is now becoming more and more popular also outside of the pure scientific community. The idea of linked data is thus gaining ground and demonstrating its advantages and its opportunities in the business world. Still a lot of research is there to come. In this paper, we discuss the need for linked data technologies, we illustrate two case studies from European research projects and we examine the opportunities from the business and the technological point of view.