July 3, 2008

Microsoft to acquire Powerset

On Monday, Microsoft and Powerset announced that Powerset is being acquired by Microsoft.

In terms of timing, the companies announced that the deal was signed. There is still the customary period before the deal is officially closed (at which point, I expect we're going to have a great party).

I'm including, below, the text of the announcements from the blogs of Powerset andMicrosoft.
I think these sum up pretty well the logic behind the acquisition on both sides.

It took a lot of work by many people to make this happen. Most significant, of course, was the entire team at Powerset, who executed so well to build and launch a wonderful product that showed the world what is now possible.

Immediately following the announcement, we had a day of calls with members of the press, which resulted in a lot of coverage. I'll try to post a collection of links next week.

One press meeting that I really enjoyed was a podcast with me, Ramez Naam (Group Program Manager for Microsoft Live Search), and Mike Arrington for TechCrunch. That link provides an article, transcript, and the full audio of the interview.

There is a lot more to say about Powerset, Microsoft, the acquisition, and what it means for the future of search, linguistic technology, semantic web, etc. I am excited to be staying on with Microsoft in a strategy and evangelist role and I am looking forward to the chance to talk and write a lot more about this, and from a whole new perspective, soon.

Here is the text of Powerset's blog announcement:

We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset.

Powerset has always been a small company with big dreams, with the ultimate goal of changing the way humans interact with computers through language. We set out to improve search by indexing Web pages based on the meaning expressed in them rather than just the literal words. Powerset licensed breakthrough technology from PARC, hired world-renowned computational linguists and search engineers, and recently released a search and discovery experience for Wikipedia articles. Our technology helps to improve search results and also makes new features possible, such as Factz, which aggregates information from many articles to summarize a topic.

With any startup, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company. At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale.

Microsoft shares our goal to improve search through deeper analysis of queries and documents, and understands that our technology and expertise will play a key role in the evolution of search. With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale. When we launched our first product, we heard: this is great, but when and how will we get Powerset to go beyond Wikpiedia? Microsoft accelerates our ability to move Powerset to the entire Web faster than anyone could have imagined.

Powerset will continue to operate much as we currently do, working in the same building, with the same organizational structure, and with the same uniquely talented and growing team (apply on our jobs page). We’ll continue to tackle the hardest problems in parsing, semantics, ranking, indexing, scalable computing, user experience and all of our other specialties. But now we’ll do it with the support of Microsoft and the vast resources of the entire Live Search team.

Over the past couple of years Powerset has made amazing progress. Starting with just a big idea, we licensed the best linguistic technology, recruited a top-notch team, built out our datacenter, engineered a world-class semantic search platform, tackled deep natural language issues, improved relevance, innovated an interface and launched a great product. So few start-ups ever tackle such deep, scientific problems successfully and create the kind of value we’ve delivered in such short order.

For now, Powerset.com will continue to host our Wikipedia Search & Discovery and we’ll be continuing to experiment with our product, based on user feedback. But, expect many announcements from us in the coming months about how we’re integrating our technology and features into Live Search.

And here's the text of Microsoft's blog announcement:

Powerset joins Live Search

We're excited to announce that we've reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.

That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.

We know today that roughly a third of searches don't get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this:

* Differences in phrasing or context between a user's search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages. Search engines don't understand today that "shrub" and "tree" are similar concepts. We don't understand that "cancer" sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which.
* Lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results. Sometimes a result looks relevant from its short description on the results page but turns out to be not so relevant when you visit the actual page. As a result, searchers frequently click results and then rapidly click back when they realize they aren't what they're looking for.

These problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a webpage. We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage. Doing so, we can innovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience. We will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better.

Working with our existing Search team and other Microsoft teams that focus on natural language, Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities.

We're looking to add even more talented engineers to the San Francisco team to accelerate our shared progress. If you're interested in joining the team, drop us a line.

We'll have more to say about the things we're doing in understanding searches and webpages through natural language technology in the coming months. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Powerset to Microsoft!

Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising

Posted by barney at 3:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 25, 2008

Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies - ReadWriteWeb

Alex Iskold wrote a nice article that provides an overview and categorization of semantic web approaches, technologies, and companies.

Here are a few key points from the article, interspersed with some of my own perspectives.

I highly recommend this article to people interested in semantic technologies and search. For my own perspective on the relationship between natural language, search, and the semantic web, you can see the video and presentation of my Keynote Talk at the 2007 International Semantic Web Conference, entitled Natural Language and the Semantic Web.

Posted by barney at 9:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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...

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February 25, 2008

Powerset in Forbes article on the Language of Search

Forbes.com has a special issue on language, including interesting articles and interviews by some of my favorite writers on Language.

I'm happy that natural language and semantic search was included in the special issue. Andy Greenberg from Forbes.com published his piece on language and search engines devoting a good portion of the article to Powerset and Hakia, featuring interviews with me and with Hakia's founder Riza Berkan. The article, entitled "Language Web-lish" starts off with Andy using Powerset's metaphor comparing people's current use of search engines to communicating like cavemen:

A question in English, like "What year was Hillary Clinton born?" becomes what he calls a primitive "keywordese": "Hillary Clinton born year."

"We have this great gift of human intelligence based around language," says Pell, "and now we have to translate it into a grunting pidgin language to interact with machines."

Andy described an example I showed him from Powerset:

When a user enters the question, "In what year was Hillary Clinton born?," Powerset's algorithm doesn't simply scour the Web for this collection of words in close proximity. Instead, it looks at pages with an eye for their meaning. Reading the sentence "Born to Dorothy and Hugh Rodham in 1947, Hillary Clinton is a New York senator," Powerset will disassemble the sentence's grammar and extract the fact of Hillary Clinton's birth date. That fact is then connected with the user's question, even if the word order of the result and the query didn't originally match.

Andy also went through an example from Hakia:

Taking the question "What drug is best for treating a urinary tract infection?" Riza Berkan points to the word "drug." Hakia's algorithm, he says, understands that the word contains a massive subset of concepts including synonyms and specific names of medicines. When it spots a term that falls into that subset, like "Amoxicillin," Hakia can substitute the medicine's name for the word "drug" in the result.

"You don't want the word 'drug,' you want the name of the drug," says Berkan. "That's a hidden failure in search engines, and people don't even know what they're missing."

Other natural language and semantic search companies mentioned included Cognition Search and Lexxe.

As is typical, my friend Peter Norvig at Google gets the last word in the article:

Google's Peter Norvig, the search giant's director of research, knows just how complex semantic algorithms can be: His Berkeley Ph.D. thesis tried to develop one in 1978. Every sentence of text, he says, took weeks to analyze. "The result was kind of like a dancing bear," he says. "It was amazing that it could dance at all, but we didn't expect it to star in the Moscow Ballet."

But that doesn't mean Google's engineers are idly watching semantic search from a distance, says Norvig. The company's thousands of engineers are looking at how to incorporate semantic analysis into a search algorithm. But semantic analysis is just one of many directions that Google's teams are exploring... "Basically, we just do whatever works," says Norvig. "Instead of trying to understand everything, we're trying to understand something about billions of pages a week."

But does that pragmatic approach leave Google vulnerable to an innovative start-up willing to risk its fate on building meaning-based search from scratch?

"It's unlikely," says Norvig. "But even car companies have to worry about anti-gravity machines."

I think that analogy is quite a stretch. It's more like big car companies having to worry about smaller companies focused on electric cars. They don't have to worry about this immediately but, at some point, this is going to be the future of their industry.


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November 19, 2007

Natural Language and the Semantic Web: ISWC Keynote talk

I gave an invited keynote talk last week at The 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, 2007. The abstract for the talk is below. The image below links to the original video and presentation slides.

The live presentation (and video) contains technical demos that aren't in the slides. Some of the demos are already available inside Powerlabs (e.g. Powermouse, which lets you browse and query our semantic database of facts extracted from Wikipedia), while some of these are still internal (e.g. an open search box, and output of our natural language system on full sentences). I also gave some detailed walk-through showing how Powerset takes advantage of external semantic resources like Wordnet and Freebase.

For me, the most fun part of the talk was toward the end, where I got to speculate on how ecosystem effects can make natural language search and the semantic web become deeper and more powerful more quickly than people might expect. For example, advertisers, publishers, and vertical search sites will be able to contribute ontologies that enable them to get more users, better internal search, and more revenue, while having as a side effect that the broad search engines get more knowledgeable about different domains. The questions afterward were also challenging and interesting.





POWERSET - Natural Language and the Semantic Web

Continue reading "Natural Language and the Semantic Web: ISWC Keynote talk"

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September 12, 2007

Tim Converse on Proximity is a Hack

Powerset's Tim Converse wrote a great article entitled: Proximity is a Hack.

In the article, Tim says that the two biggest improvements in web search were the use of links (including anchor text) and term proximity. The article explores the benefits of term proximity and argues that works to the extent that it approximates linguistic relationships in the text.
He concludes that natural language processing of the documents should have the ability to more accurately capture linguistic relationships even if the query itself is in keywordese (as opposed to a natural language query with internal linguistic structure).

To recap: proximity is both a wonderfully powerful relevance feature, and a total hack. It helps enormously, but it’s not what you really want, it’s just sorta somewhat correlated with what you really want. What you need for what you really want is the underlying structure of all that web content: the real syntactic structure of the sentences, how the sentences connect to each other, how the facts relate, and (maybe) how the discourse flows and the topics connect. We’ve squeezed all the juice we can out of webpages considered as word-vectors; now it’s time to parse this stuff and get at the real structure.

Can that be done? A couple of years ago I would have said no, but I hadn’t seen the PARC natural language technology then, and didn’t know that an effort this concerted and well-funded was on the way. Now, do I think that Powerset will do it? I still don’t know, frankly - there’s so much more to do to make it real and debugged and scaled the way it needs to be. But it’s clear to me that the next big thing in web search is either this or something a whole lot like this, and I think we have the best shot of anyone. And that’s why I’m at Powerset.

The article is definitely good reading for people interested in search and the potential benefits of NLP.

Posted by barney at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 9, 2007

Technology Review on Building a Better Search Engine

Technology Review recently had an article featuring Powerset: Building a Better Search Engine, by Michael Reisman. In addition to Powerset, the article also mentions Hakia and Cognition Search, and closes with a discussion of a semantic search project inside IBM.

I am an avid reader of Technology Review and am really excited to have an article about us in this great publication.

The full article is worth reading.

Here are just a few excerpts about natural language search and Powerset's technology:

The company claims that the engine finds the best answer by considering the meaning and context of the question and related Web pages. "Powerset extracts deep concepts and relationships from the texts, and the users query and match them efficiently to deliver a better search," Powerset CEO Barney Pell says.

Powerset chief technology officer Ron Kaplan has led PARC's XLE team since the 1970s and is the author of much of the technology behind XLE that has been licensed to the company. Kaplan says that he and Pell began to collaborate on the idea about two years ago. Current methods of searching used by more traditional engines focus on isolated keywords and broad but shallow content coverage. This leaves a lot of room for improvement, Kaplan says.

"They are really not getting at relationships," he notes. "The best that they do to approximate relationships are words that are close to other words." He adds that a much deeper level of analysis is required.

The article came in time to announce the upcoming launch of Powerlabs, our early user community:

The company plans to release demo versions of the search engine on its Powerlabs website, where consumers can test-drive the product beginning in September. User feedback will be taken into consideration as Powerset makes the final product, which is slated for release next year.

"The key challenge is to get the system to the point where people can understand how to use it and get real value out of these systems even though they are not perfect," Pell says. "We are finally at the point where we are going to cross that threshold."

Posted by barney at 8:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Information Week on The Ultimate Search Engine

An article in Information Week this week, The Ultimate Search Engine, by Nick Hoover, gives an overview of many approaches and providers of next-generation search.

The article begins with a statistic about search frustration that I have heard several times but have not been able to find the data:

People search for 11 minutes on average before finding what they're looking for, and half abandon searches without getting that far, according to Microsoft. By Gartner's estimate, half of potential Web sales are lost because visitors simply can't find what they want.

The article covers the following ideas being explored for next-generation search:

The discussion on natural language and semantic search features Powerset and Hakia.
Here are a few relevant excerpts:

Continue reading "Information Week on The Ultimate Search Engine"

Posted by barney at 7:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 7, 2007

When is Natural Language useful?

In talking about Powerset and natural language search, I am frequently asked "When is Natural Language search useful?". The idea here is that maybe there are some specific situations where you really want natural language search. My general response is that this is like asking "When is Natural Language useful?" to talk to other people? The very question assumes that there are some particular situations where you want to use natural language, and others where you would prefer to just grunt out a few words.

I am aware of a number of situations where it is really clear that you want the power and usability of natural language for search, including:

Continue reading "When is Natural Language useful?"

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February 13, 2007

Barney interviewed by Bambi Francisco on Marketwatch about PARC/Powerset deal

Bambi Francisco, from Marketwatch, interviewed me last Friday about the PARC/Powerset strategic deal announcement. The video is now available.

We discussed the following questions:

The interview was brief and to the point, and I think we shared some useful perspective on the significance of this deal.

I still need to post an entry to an earlier video interview with Bambi last November. It's hard keeping a blog up to date when so much is happening with your startup company.

Posted by barney at 9:07 PM | TrackBack

January 1, 2007

Happy New Year: Powerset in the New York Times

Powerset was featured in the New York Times today in an article by Miguel Helft entitled: "In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google". The article talks about the wave of startups going after aspects of the search market. I originally thought the article was going to be titled: "What are they thinking?", as the emphasis is on the mindset of the entrepreneurs and the investors going after a large market in the presence of such formidable players. The article begins and ends with a discussion of Powerset. In between, the search startups discussed in the article include Powerset, Hakia, Snap, A9, ChaCha, and Wikia.

Continue reading "Happy New Year: Powerset in the New York Times"

Posted by barney at 4:34 PM | TrackBack

November 19, 2006

Google and Powerset in the Sunday Times

Powerset was mentioned today in The Sunday Times in an article entitled: Quest for last word in search, by Paul Durman.

The article interviews my friend Peter Norvig, now director of research at Google, and discusses natural language search. Here are some relevant excerpts:

Continue reading "Google and Powerset in the Sunday Times"

Posted by barney at 10:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 9, 2006

John Battelle interviews Yahoo's David Filo and Bradley Horowitz at Web2.0

Here are my raw notes from the talk just now. It came right after a fascinating panel with teens and parents, in which almost everyone knew and used Google and Myspace, with Yahoo receding in the distance. In contrast, David and Bradley seemed very positive about Yahoo's situation and prospects for the future. They have had competitors over the last 12 years, and this isn't much different from the past.

At least we had a promise from David Filo that there wouldn't be any announcement about Microsoft acquiring Yahoo tomorrow.

Continue reading "John Battelle interviews Yahoo's David Filo and Bradley Horowitz at Web2.0"

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November 4, 2006

Amazon Web Services and Powerset in Business Week article

Jeff Bezos Cover of Business Week

Rob Hof at Business Week just came out with an article called Jeff Bezos's Risky Bet. The article talks about Amazon's Web Services initiative, in which Amazon is enabling other companies to take advantage of the massive technology infrastructure Amazon has developed to power its own operations:

Amazon has spent 12 years and $2 billion perfecting many of the pieces behind its online store. By most accounts, those operations are now among the biggest and most reliable in the world. "All the kinds of things you need to build great Web-scale applications are already in the guts of Amazon," says Bezos. "The only difference is, we're now exposing the guts, making [them] available to others."

This article was the first to announce that Powerset is one of the major early customers for Amazon's new Electric Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. Here are the relevant paragraphs, which mention Powerset and some of our key angel investors:

Continue reading "Amazon Web Services and Powerset in Business Week article"

Posted by barney at 2:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2006

We are all natural language searchers

My Powerset CoFounder, Lorenzo Thione has written a nice article on his blog, in which he argues that we are all natural language searchers. He surveyed the underlying themes in much of the criticism in the current blogstorm about Powerset and natural language search. Lorenzo groups the arguments in support of keyword search into three clusters:

Lorenzo's article addresses each of these points in turn, and it is good reading so I won't summarize all the key points here. I particularly like his response to the "most queries today are short" critique. He introduces the idea of the long tail of failed queries, in which users initially try more natural queries stating what they want, but eventually learn that it doesn't help with the search, so they shorten the queries, which leads to the observation that most queries today are short. It's a bit like looking at the fact that all Model-T cars were black, after Henry Ford decided that's all he would give them, and concluding that there was no market for colorful cars. As Lorenzo says:

The data so far about short queries and past failures of natural language attempts is no indication about what users will really do or not do, as users have never yet been presented with the possibilities of true natural language search.
Combining this with my previous post on my vision of natural language search, this gives a good view of our perspectives on what we think is obvious: that users will ultimately want to interact with search engines in natural language, not just keywordese.

Posted by barney at 2:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Powerset Blogstorm: 1 week later

I wrote a week ago about how Powerset had become the subject of a blog storm, and shared my vision of natural language search. Little did I realize that the storm had barely started. One week later, there are now about 400 blog articles about Powerset, according to Technorati (over 100 with some authority). We got covered by many of the leading writers on search and internet technology. Below are a few comments on some of the articles by high-authority bloggers.

Continue reading "The Powerset Blogstorm: 1 week later"

Posted by barney at 1:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 4, 2006

Powerset and Natural Language Search

Ever since I stated that Powerset was in "semi-stealth" mode about a year ago, I have been pretty quiet about the company on my blog. A few months ago we realized, after going through a fundraising process with a great set of angel investors, that much of Silicon Valley already knew that Powerset was building a natural language search engine. So we finally put some content up on the Powerset website and agreed to let some of our friends write about us. Some of the first articles about Powerset are those by:

But I have been so busy with the company that I just didn't take the time to write up the vision on my own blog.

Powerset has now unexpectedly become the subject of a recent blogstorm, initiated by an article posted yesterday by Matt Marshall on VentureBeat. Since Matt wrote his initial version of the article before he was able to contact us, he expressed skepticism about what he inferred we are trying to do. (Update: Matt Marshall has just written a new article about Powerset, after meeting with me and Steve yesterday.) This article started a debate in the blogosphere, with people coming down on both sides of the "search is great, nobody can compete with Google" vs. "search is broken, go for it" divide (for the former, see Steve Bryant's article, and for the latter, see this article by Richard Koman).

Given all the attention, I want to take time out to share my vision of natural language as the future of search. To start with, I will characterize the conventional thinking as expressed by various critics.

Continue reading "Powerset and Natural Language Search"

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April 8, 2006

Quaero: Europe-funded multimedia search engine

Quaero is a large-scale government-funded effort to create a European competitor to the American search hegemony of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Exalead, a French-based search engine that many people think is cool, is one of the partners and is likely providing the backbone of the text search.

The main innovative focus is on multi-media search. One piece that caught my attention is based on finding similar images.
Users can enter a query to get similar images. And pages that have unlabeled images will inherit labels from similar images on other pages.

The government has not announced (or determined?) how much money it will allocate to the project. Given the number of players and the history of European projects, I have very low expectations for this project to create a successful new consumer search engine. But I think it's great that Europe is being visionary and recognizes the importance of search. I also hope they produce some great new technology that Powerset can license when we're ready!

Posted by barney at 6:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

In-Car information from the Web: Siemens and SmartWeb project

This press release describes the SmartWeb system. The new system is being developed by experts from the Siemens Corporate Technology Division in Munich and engineers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Device Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) in Berlin. The vehicle prototype from the SmartWeb project will be on display for the first time at the CeBIT computer trade show March 9-15 in Hanover.

Examples of the use of such a system include finding the lowest gas prices on your route, finding sports scores, or any other internet information that normally resides in tables on web pages.

I found two aspects of the system description interesting:

Siemens is targetting such a system to reach market in 10 years. Ajay Juneja, founder of Speak With Me, (see my previous post on Speak With Me) who pointed me to this announcement, says he can likely have such technology in cars within the next 2 years. I expect the data transmission parts could take longer than the voice technology.

Posted by barney at 3:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 10, 2006

Visual Image Search

I just came across Tiltomo, a new visual search engine (thanks to a posting on Silicon Beat). Most visual search methods are based on color histograms, so they are good for finding similar color schemes to a reference image (eg roses, sunsets). This one also lets you constrain the search by the "theme" of a reference image (without having to specify the theme yourself). The homepage has a nice demo using images from Flickr. I did a search for the tag "spider" and got lots of great spider images. Then I selected one of them, with a close-up of a spider in a web, and got many more similar ones to that. For other searches, I found it easy to get collections of photos of people's eyes, stuffed animals wearing stripey costumes, and of course, swimming suits.

I did find myself wondering about how much human effort was involved in preparing the data for use with the service, and how that would scale up. The system seemed almost too good at knowing which photos were of people vs. animals, men vs. women, and using this information to find related photos.

While I'm writing about visual search, check out AHOP2, which lets you do find websites based on aesthetic style. It's a good way to look for furniture that might go well in a modern house, for example.

Down the line, I know of several companies that will be bringing visual object recognition into search. That's a topic for a later post.

Posted by barney at 6:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 9, 2005

Barney moderating panel on "Venturing in Online Search, Advertising and Sales" at Caltech

I'll be moderating a panel on OPPORTUNITIES FOR INNOVATORS: Venturing in Online Search, Advertising & Sales at the December Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum, December 10th.

The abstract for the event:

In 2005 acquisitions of online companies involved with sales, search and allied technologies have been striking: IAC/Interactive bought Ask Jeeves; Scripps paid $560 million (cash) for ShopZilla; E-Bay swallowed Shopping.com; Yahoo! bought tiny Konfabulator; AOL grabbed Weblogs; and Rupert Murdoch is on the prowl with billions of dollars. All this activity testifies to entrepreneurial opportunities for ventures that improve technology, and enhance e-commerce success: the big guys are hungry for innovation to help them compete with each other. Moreover, with its renewed vigor e-com has diversified, as both online companies that grew in situ and traditional media giants are snapping up even the smallest of enterprises.

In this context - today's keynote speaker, entrepreneurs and panelists will share their perspectives on future trends and opportunities in online advertising and sales, search, blogs and other e-phenomena, as well as what makes a company a likely target for acquisition.

Keynote Speaker: Farhad Mohit, Co-founder and Chief Strategist, ShopZilla (now a Scripps Company)

Moderator: Barney Pell, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Mayfield Venture Capital
Panelists/Entrepreneurs:

  • David Hughes, CEO, The Search Agency (former Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, United Online)
  • Craig Ogg, Co-founder, ThisNext (former Vice President of Research & Development, Stamps.com)
  • Joel Toledano, Director of Business Development--Search, Yahoo!
Producers: Michael M. Krieger, Willenken, Wilson, Loh & Stris LLP, and Richard C. Hsu, Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP

While we planned this event a few months ago, the topic is perfectly timed, in light of even more recent string of acquisitions in this space (Brainboost acquired by Answers.com and Del.icio.us acquired by Yahoo, to name just two in the last week) and coverage in the media of the topic of search acquisitions in general.

The recent article in Business Week on Googling For Gold points out the new trend for large search companies to try to acquire companies early on, preferably before they even raise VC funding. One reason: the work that companies do after raising VC funding is largely about building a brand and an audience, including sales and marketing teams. Since the large search engines already have all of those, they don't view that as adding value. Far better to just acquire the company when they have the first promising product and a strong team that can easily integrate into the new parent company. The incumbents get the company at a low price, and the entrepreneurs get a great return much earlier and with less work.

At Mayfield, we met with a team from Yahoo! Search and discussed exactly this topic. They were interested in companies that we liked but didn't want to invest in because the market opportunities were too small, or it was too easy for someone like Yahoo to compete.
That's where I met Joel Toledano, who I invited to be one of the panelists for this event. It will be interesting to hear his take, and perhaps he will talk about Yahoo's acquisition today of Del.icio.us.

The "acquire before VC funding" logic raises two related questions:


I expect these quetions to generate interesting discussion at the paen, and perhaps in the blogosphere at large.

Posted by barney at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 30, 2005

MSN Toolbar Features Watson Contextual information agent

Watson 2.0 is a new product by Intellext, a company founded by AI researcher Kristian Hammond and team at Northwestern University.

It is highly reminiscent of Purple Yogi, the original product of the company that now is Stratify (where several of my friends have worked). The idea is that the system watches everything you do on your desktop (preserving privacy!) and suggets information from desktop, corporate, and external sources that is likely to be of interest to your current context, based on understanding of the text you are working on and your history.

Here's the text from their website:

Intelligence in Context. This statement forges the foundation of Intellext, a visionary company that takes information retrieval out of the search box. We have a vision - that wherever you are, whatever you are doing - indeed whatever you are thinking - your computer should be bringing relevant information to you.

Intellext is delivering on this vision with Watson, the company's flagship product that transcends the boundaries of contemporary search and information access. The product of research conducted by Intellext co-founders Dr. Jay Budzik and Dr. Kristian Hammond at Northwestern University, Watson removes the burden of search from the shoulders of computer users. By reading and understanding what people are working on and using that knowledge to proactively find and deliver useful information to the user, Watson is able to find information the user didn't know existed - in places they otherwise might not have looked.

While there have been several attempts at this in the past, this one might actually work. I haven't tried it yet, but the UI, services interface, and integration with search all look well designed and usable. In addition, Microsoft is now promoting this on their MSN Search Toolbar, which will give the product (and company) great visibility.

Here's an article about Watson on PC World.

Posted by barney at 6:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 20, 2005

Highlights from tonight's vertical search panel

This evening's event on business models in vertical search (see my previous post ) was fun. I estimate about 150 people attended. Half the audience raised their hands claiming to be working in a vertical search startup.

Since I was the moderator, I was unable to take careful notes (I hope someone in the audience will post their notes to the blogosphere). Below are some points that I did note down or remember.