Microsoft to Acquire Powerset
Deal comes less than 3 weeks after
Yahoo deal falls through.
Neither company mentioned the terms of the deal in the separate blog entries where they announced the agreement. A Microsoft representative said the companies are not disclosing the financial terms. The news comes several days after a report about the deal circulated on the Web. That report set the price at about $100 million.
In a blog entry attributed to Microsoft Senior Vice President Satya Nadella, the software vendor said the Powerset team will become part of Microsoft's Search Relevance unit and remain in the start-up's San Francisco offices. Powerset has 63 employees, Microsoft said.
In a blog entry, Powerset's Mark Johnson said the company believes Microsoft will help it deliver its technology to a wider audience much more quickly than the start-up could do itself. "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," Johnson wrote. "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."
Microsoft plans to integrate Powerset's technology with
some of its own natural-language technology, which has been in development
in Microsoft Research, Nadella wrote. The company will disclose more
details on how it will use Powerset's technology in its Live Search
engine at a later date, he added.
Source:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/
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See also:
http://online.wsj.com/article/...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/...
Self-Writing To-Do Lists
to get you organized
Source: Technology Review
New online schedulers to rely on NLP techniques.
The problem with to-do lists and schedules is that you need to fill them out. Now, a new generation of free online schedulers promises to end that drudgery. These new Web applications use natural-language processing to interpret spoken commands and ordinary written sentences to build calendars and personal organizers.
Perhaps the simplest of the new generation of schedulers is Presdo, based in San Francisco, which launched in late April to help users collaborate to schedule meetings and other events. Borrowing from Google's successful bag of tricks, Presdo's home page is as simple as it gets: just a floating text box. Type in "have brunch with Margaret on Sunday," and Presdo translates your command into data, bringing you to a page where you and your guests can check and tweak the details of your event.
By taking its cues from the ways that people naturally talk about time, the software frees users to be general about dates and times, says Presdo founder Eric Ly. Imprecise phrases like "next month," which would be impossible to put on a calendar without picking a particular date and time, are allowed to stay fluid for as long as the user wants them to.
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