May 11, 2008
Powerset launched today!
Sunday 5/11/2008: Powerset has launched our first open product to the world!
Our initial product offers users a whole new way to experience Wikipedia and Freebase content, based on our unique natural language understanding technology.
A write-up about Powersets Wikipedia product is available on the Powerset blog.
I will write more over the next few days about the product and it’s role in the ecosystem of search, content, linguistics, and semantic technology, but for now I’m just incredibly excited. I’ll just note a couple highlights from the evening.
We were planning to launch at 9pm PST. But in an unusual twist for a software company, one of our eager engineers actually flipped the switch to make everything live 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Since everything was working, we just decided to go with it!
Within the next couple of hours, the first press articles came out. Pretty much across the board, the journalists and bloggers captured the essence of our initial product. They got what was special about it, and also recognized it for the initial step that this represents (finally freeing us of the Google Killer hype that is impossible for a small startup to live up to).
Within 1 hour of launch, we received a note from a VC asking about possible investment in the company.
And 2 hours after we were live, we had our first denial of service attack. An automated script sent a never-ending sequence of bizarre queries at our system. Fortunately, our own engineers had been preparing for this kind of thing already and we managed to stay up and weather the storm.
The whole company was gathered in the office. We spent time alternating between: making speeches and toasts, reading press articles, looking at the traffic and load, and watching the initial queries float by. The last part was the most exciting: real users and real queries!
Since we launched on Sunday night on Mother’s day (thanks, Mom!), we had it pretty easy with relatively light traffic. I think Monday is going to be an exciting day.
Posted by barney on May 11, 2008 at 11:59 am | No Comments
February 26, 2008
In 5 years we will search more with voice than typing
David Vogelpohl wrote an article, Will Microsoft Resurrect Natural Language Search, citing a recent AP article about Bill Gates and voice-based search. Here are some quotes from the AP article:
People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.“It’s one of the big bets we’re making,” he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company’s daily operations in July.
In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.
David conjectures, as do I, that when people speak their searches they are more likely to use natural language than to use keywordese, and that this could change the game in search.
I personally can envision Microsoft trying to integrate speech based data entry as closely as possible with our normal style of speaking. Perhaps the phrase “Where can I buy a hd tv?” would be more natural for searchers when you take away the limitations of the keyboard.Wide spread speech based data entry will almost certainly impact the way Microsoft and subsequently all other search engines deal with search queries.
It’s interesting to see Bill Gates predicting this to happen within 5 years. In the blink of an eye, an entire industry is going to change dramatically.
While on the topic of predictions about voice and language, here’s one of my predictions that I have been meaning to write up:
Within 8 years from now (2016), every category of consumer electronics will have some linguistic interface as a standard feature.
By “linguistic interface”, I mean voice interactions or text-based interaction that is linguage-based. Not that these devices won’t still have nonlinguistic interfaces too (e.g. there will still be buttons, most likely). And by “every category”, I mean you will not find a category of consumer electronics that does not have some product in that category with that feature.
For example, users will expect to be able to talk to cameras, tvs, stereos, ipods, phones, watches, microwave ovens, refrigerators, cars, etc. There will still be some cameras that aren’t language-enabled, but every category will have some products that are.
As my friends Cliff Nass and Scott Brave write in their book, Voice Activated, when people interact with devices using voice, it also invokes the rest of their social apparatus. You can’t hear a voice without ascribing some kind of personality, gender, race, social status, etc to the source of the voice. So in addition to expecting linguistic capability, we’re also going to start expecting personality within the next decade.
I’ll stop here before I get carried away to the singularity…
Posted by barney on February 26, 2008 at 8:30 pm | No Comments
February 25, 2008
LA Times on Founders Brunch and the PowerStache
My friend Jessica Guynn just wrote an article that appeared online in the LA times today entitled: Brainstorming over bagels: Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seek camaraderie and capital at brunch.
The article will appear in the LA Times print edition tomorrow morning.
The articles covers the Founders Brunch, a networking event for founders of companies that I attend regularly.
Many of my friends are quoted in the article, and there are photos of Auren Hoffman and Keith Rabois (our host this time). Peter Thiel expressed the networking aspect of this kind of event well:
Founders Brunch is important for the same reason Silicon Valley is important: There are all of these subtle network effects,” said Peter Thiel, a 40-year-old former PayPal executive now bankrolling some of the hottest Internet companies. “Otherwise why wouldn’t you start a tech company in Fresno where everything is cheaper? The advantage to being in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco area is that so many other people are doing the same thing.”
Jessica noted that I had a new beard, and I explained my recent decision on growing it:
Barney Pell, the 39-year-old co-founder of Powerset, a natural-language search engine trying to challenge Google, sported a new beard he vowed not to shave until his San Francisco start-up launched its new product.
To be more accurate, I vowed not to shave off my beard until the launch, but I didn’t vow that I wouldn’t shave at all. I made that mistake during graduate school. I thought I was ready to submit my PhD thesis in about 3 months, and vowed not to shave or cut my hair until it was done. This was partly a way to motivate myself to finish, and partly a way to let my friends stop asking about my progress as they would clearly know when was done. As it turned out, my thesis advisor thought I had more work to do, and I wound up taking a full year before finishing. So by the time I was actually ready to submit my thesis, I had really long hair and a very full beard indeed. I’m not going to do risk that again…
Anyway, you might think I’m a maverick, but it turns out that most of Powerset is in on the gig. Almost all our employees are growing moustaches and/or beards in preparation for our upcoming launch. Even women who can’t grow nearly as nice moustaches as the men have painted them on from time to time. And our folks even registered a domain name and created a website, PowerStache.com, featuring photos taken over time as people grow their beards and moustaches.
It’s pretty silly and really wasn’t initially a coordinated effort, but it’s fun and reflects the excitement inside the company as we are nearing the time when the early version of our product will be available to the general public.
Posted by barney on February 25, 2008 at 7:52 pm | No Comments