Session one as follows, including our live notes.
Powerset
Powerset is a natural language search engine that can use everyday phrases and grammer to conduct more accruate web searches by understanding the search query and the pages it indexes. Parsing phrases and grammer theoretically produces better results because the egine has a better understanding of the searches intended goal than with just keywords alone. For instance, a Powerset search for “politicians who died in office” returns information on the subset of politicians who died in office, rather than a group of pages that ranked highly with the phrase.
Powerset presentation begins: talk about semantics and search, “we parse the web”. Natural language search.
Announcement: Powerset labs, where users can explore tech demos, share ideas, feed the learning engine and “improve your search karma”.
Demonstration of natural language queries with a social voting style feature. Touches of other sites
Demonstration of Powermouse (see screen shot), information is pulled from Wikipedia into a semantic index.
TC40 attendees will be amongst first in private beta.
Overall: tough sell in the search vertical, but interesting take. Great start to TC40.
Cognitive Code
Cognitive Code makes artificially intelligent user interfaces. Their main product is the SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms) platform, which can add a human-like artificially intelligent interface to nearly any digital device. The SILVIA platform can learn and converse in natural language to carry out tasks for the user. Potential applications include children’s digital toys and personal assistants.
Flagship product: “silvia platform” Symoblically isolated linguistically variable intelligence algorithm. Laymens terms: AI.
Demonstration with AI on the screen, the AI system is having a conversation with one of the Cognitive Code. A couple of bugs in the live demo, but pretty cool.
Uses include embedding in toys, phones, websites “unlimited uses.” First major target market is “smart toys.”
Clever idea, if they can pull it off we’re seeing the future of toys.
CastTV
CastTV is trying to build one of the web’s best video search engines by creating a rich index of contextual data about videos and an easy to use interface for searching them. The engine pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. Notably, CastTV also searches paid video searches such as Apple iTunes. Their user interface allows users to sort results by shows (to weed out non-relevant stuff), host (such as itunes, CBS Innertube, etc to focus on a favorite service provider), by date, relevance, prices, etc.
Presentation begins: CastTV doesn’t host videos, they index them.
Britney Spears video search compared, Google, Yahoo and CastTV: CastTV results are pitched as being better, more accessible etc
Colts Titans next example. CastTV is using smart clustering for results, pulling video from MSM and user generated content. Nice results, even if I have no interest in American Football 
FAROO
FAROO is a peer-to-peer web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web pages visited by FAROO users, which leads to a more democratic, user centric ranking. FAROO also shares advertising revenues up to fifty percent with its users. The search engine uses privacy-protected behavioral targeting to increase conversion rates.
Interesting concept, P2P in a strict sense. Results are only pages that have been visited by users…I cant’ help but think the SEO crowd is going to love this
The presenter claims that the algorithms actually prevent manipulation: he doesn’t know the people I know. Nice results though.
Indexing via a desktop P2P client, demonstrated version on Windows. Faroo beta opens today.
Viewdle
Viewdle is a white-label platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video. The technology they are developing lets video producers algorithmically extract metadata from news, shows, movies, and Internet video. This is much more effective than the old method of text-based metadata indexing. Viewdle’s most notable feature is their facial-recognition technology that can create a create a “real-time index of true on-screen appearances”. They plan on building one of the largest databases of people-in-video references. Reuters is currently testing out Viewdle’s technology with their videos news inventory by letting people search their catalog for specific people.
Demo starts with 2 minute demo video. Slick, we’ll see if we can get a copy.
The facial recognition is always an interesting concept, but I’m remind of Riya. More Britney Spears examples, although they are pulling data from others in the video as well, it looks a step from previous tech, particularly give it’s video they are scanning, not just pics.
Product: Top Chance, scans on criteria, including date. Popularity search includes total video time and when. Platform (presuming API) will also be released shortly to plugin widgets etc.
Expert Panel: Ryan Block Chris Anderson, Marc Andreessen, Om Malik, and Marissa Mayer
First question Marc Andreessen to Powerset, great question, how do you break out, API’s etc. Good response.
Chris Anderson: what are the advantages of the various products to the user
Faroo responds first: we are by the user, for the user, it’s good because “they are doing the search together”
Om Malik to Faroo: most P2P systems people turn off, how do you overcome that, also how do you seed the network?
Faroo: it’s not a problem…not a particularly good response.
Marissa Meyer wants to know about the video search startups, scaling etc…classic
CastTV: we’re scaling, focus. Viewdle “we reference a point” hence can scale to billions, using “fusion engine”
Discussion continues around AI and natural language tools.
Jason asks Om: which one is the most viable. Om: CastTV. One to last: Cognitive Code. Middle of the road pick: Powerset. Faroo is “interesting,” Viewdle will be “acquired soon”
Jason Calacanis to Marissa Mayer: will people switch away from Google. Reply: most people use more than one search engine according to stats. Google’s advantage is being a one stop shop. JC: what did you think of CastTV, MM: nice interface, clustering for duplicate issues is good tech.
Marc Andreessen: I don’t want to be obsessed with distribution…but I am, how do companies deal with it
Powerset: we’re very aware of this…uploading to users (???), embeding on external sites (Google custom search style I’d think).
Conclusion: speaking to Nick and we agree that CastTV was the winner in a very competitive group, good tech which just works with a practical use. Cognitive Code had the coolest product, but the demo wasn’t great which lost it for them.
Wow. What a way to send across information on participating companies. Live from the floor. Good work ya fellas at Techcrunch.
Hold it there. Not to be unfair to the other search companies (I’ll definitely check them out), but following the buzz, does this mean Powerset will be available to the public today? As of right now the only box in their home page is the one asking for your email, and the quote “TC40 attendees will be amongst first in private beta” doesn’t sound like it will launch today, which I thought it was a requirement to present at TC40.
Powerset looks cool, but I think an average Internet user might find it difficult to use.
It seems like p0rn will be ranked high on FAROO.
I didn’t know that the search-engine field was considered so wide-open.
Not convinced on Powerset not its market potential. This looks like an academic experiment.
Here is my take:
Anything around search - Done!!
Artificial Intelligence - Good luck (we are in cave world still as far as AR is concerned)
I was looking more form Game perspective and bringing Game and Real Life together. As I speak, some one must be working on this and I am waiting for it to see.
We wanted to hear more from the Technology perspective as well:
Like, we used Java/SOLR/Lucene, LAMP with heavy MySQL clustering
Anyway I am enjoying and Breakfast was good, hopefully Party will be great this evening.
I wish I had been there to rub elbows with some of the elite!
Ken
you would be rubbing elbows, the room is packed
I’m not sure if I get the Cognitive Code “coolest” proposal.
AI engine with Rules Creation Studio, and Natural Language Processing. I’ve seen quite a few, even open source.
What I found interesting though, is to be able to deploy in different platforms and LUA integration…
Anyone else has any information on how SILVIA differs from all other NLP+Rules(AIML?) applications?
Thanks.
The problem with Natural language search is… It could cause technology meltdown and product failure. When you look at HAKIA ratings on Alexa data. You can see Hype’s hype went up and than it falls down.
If Powerset’s hype takes too long to release… Ratings will go up and falls down rapidly. Users would switch to Google. Powerset could fall the same catalogy as Hakia.
Powerset’s hype took too long. I totally give up… I don’t find powerset hype anymore.
Lucas
as a child of the 80’s I find AI cool (think Max Headroom etc)…but unfortunately the product, at least in the demo, didn’t work as well as it would needed to, but embedding say into a toy it would be cool…for my 5 year old anyway
I wish we were there presenting.. See you at FOWA in two weeks.
Way over my technical clearance level, but down here from where I observe, wouldn’t a simple Spell Check on PowerSet theoretically parse “grammar” instead of “grammer” and that would certainly allow the “engine” instead of the “egine” to better understand the “searches’” instead of “searches” intended goal.
More Macs on stage? You couldn’t cover the logos with duct tape or something? You didn’t invite me?
This means war ….
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Well…have you actually had a REAL conversation with a computer? I don’t think so.
Most of the time, you need to communicate with computers using a specific set of words, say, something like, “Take me to billing.” Or simply saying “billing”. If you try to say it any other way, the computer balks, or worse yet, spits out gibberish.
What makes SILVIA different is that you can say it any ole way you want. And she understands. And she even makes jokes.
Now THAT’s something.
Remember that for YEARS, there have been TEAMS of people working on solving the conversational problem at every single major institution. And none of them have done it yet otherwise, we’d have been talking to computers naturally already.
Interesting stuff. I’ll have to disagree with Prakash - I think search still has a lot of juice in it, esp in the way these guys are moving - specialisation.
I’d like to know what people think about a site in private beta I’m part of - LocateTV, which hopes to be the Google of film and TV. It basically lets you search for when an actor, programme or film is next showing on TV, online and DVD - specific to your region and channels.
Obviously there’s a different emphasis to these web-video-specific sites - LocateTV covers all legal, professional content, but like CastTV it does not host stuff, just find it, quickly and accurately and tailored to you.
If anyone wants to try it and give their opinion you can request an invite from me at lottie@locatetvblog.com.
I originally heard about Powerset almost a year ago. In today’s technology space, a year = 20 years. I think by the time this technology actually comes out, there will be the Subliminal language search
Anyway, I think people have learned the current, search by keyword query, method of searching and it will be an extra effort trying to forget and re-learn the search function.
Hey Ask.com got this going a long time ago, and most of the search engines have put smarts to parse that type of a natural language query anyway. I guess it would be good if it analyzes the pages it is indexing, ahead of time and uses that method to narrow down your “Natural Language Search” lingo.
I am yet to be convinced of the value this product can bring. I may be mistaken. But it will be some time before actors on TV will say, “I Powerset-ed it” instead of “I Googled it”. This is just my opinion, I welcome yours. Powersetted it !?!#? Just doesn’t sound right.
D.A.
The most essential thing that Powerset is accomplishing is developing interest and recognition for natural language search and technology.
The semantic web is within our reach, even though still years away, and the hype that Powerset is developing, with the development of its natural language search engine and Power Labs, is allowing people to begin to contemplate it, even without knowing what it will be.
Another natural language technology company to look out for that will facilitate the development of the semantic web is Linguistic Agents - http://www.linguisticagents.com
딸국질은 횡경막의 경련에 의해서 일어 나는 것으로 쇼크를
준다거나 잠시 호흡을 멈추면 낫는다.
하지만 경우에 따라정신적 부담감으로 빨리 멎지 않을 때가 있다.
멈추게 하는제일 좋은 방법은 심호흡을 한 뒤 견딜 수 있는데까지
숨을 쉬지 않는 것이다.
또는 숨을 멈춘채 찬물을 조금씩 마셔도효과가 있다.
그래도 가라 앉지 않으면 조용히 숨을 내쉬면
서 아랫배를 들이밀거나 때때로 배에 힘을 가득 준 뒤 호흡
을 멈추는 복식호흡도 좋다.
출처: http://cafe.daum.net/lifebean