Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell

“But as I said when the product was demo’d to me a few weeks ago, it is compelling nonetheless: “When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search.””
So, you don´t have a clue about search. It´s absurd to rate an search engine on only 2 domains. If Powerset had to crawl the whole web, I assume their results would be pretty bad. So - they should sell …

Jojo - correct, I do not know much about search. But the feeling I had when i used the service, and saw how it parsed the content is was indexing, was a rare Aha moment nonetheless.

The real issue with scaling to the entire web is ranking of results, which you just can’t test on such a small scale. Ranking certainly isn’t trivial. But if they were able to get ranking right, Powerset would be the search engine I use every day.

No.. i really think powerset is on to something really big.. hold on it to it guys!

Powerset took too much risk and upset some investors. Why?!?!

They spend too much time putting vaporware-hype news. After I test the beta product. I didn’t like it either. Don’t get me wrong. My friend tried it. he didn’t like it. He didn’t find it hype. Powerset like another Joost product.

They put too many junks over there. I won’t say it. They have to fix themselves.

Hey - pretty certain Barney and the guys from FF will make the right decision. I would love to see the extension of this technology, and am looking forward to its evolution.

If they are already thinking about selling/deciding or not to sell… my guess is that they should sell. When you are already making such decisions even before you launch, it really shows how much passion you have for your product/company. In this case, very little passion

You need strong passion to build a great company. Especially when you are in the search business with giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. If you want to go heads on with them, then you don’t shrink. You want to compete with the big boys, then show the world that you are the courageous underdog that is not afraid of losing, build your winning character and show what you got. Show the world that you are not just a “business” but an idea worth spreading. If your product is really good and people likes you, they will stick with you. It will just go viral!

If you tell the world - “Ermm .. maybe I should just sell?” … perhaps you have lost the war even you before you step into the battleground. The bottom-line is - show some passion and dare to be different. That’s how great companies like Google (can’t believe I said this) and Apple (oh yeah!) make history! Be a leader!

It’s actually pretty simple nowdays to rank sites right.
I know a company that has the results much better then google, but it’s the marketing that lets a searchengine grow. It’s getting harder when people try to abuse your ranking on purpose )

Natural language search could be just the feature to get free media advertising. Who would know about google if yahoo didn’t put them on their site…

Go go go Powerset … towards Microsoft

$100M for a company that has not launched and indexes only 2 sites (both of which are well written and structured)? For serious?

Sounds like PowerSet is launching at just the right time to start a bidding war.

In the end though, it will come down to whether they are the product we are hoping for or whether they are vaporware as some comments allege.

Sell for sure…

People keep insisting on thinking that natural language search is a revolutionary thing, but it is not such a big deal, mainly for people that are accustomed with the information retrieval technologies.
Merging techniques, profile creation and analysis, etc. That’s a nice thing to do.

Steve Newcomb is most expensive guy in powerset. For… Barney Pell. Hahha. CEO party guy. He’s nothing.

I would laugh if microsoft, google, yahoo acquire powerset with Barney pell.
They should buy only powerset with Steve Newcomb. He most important silicon valley nerd than bold head party guy.

Mike - Why are you trying so hard to plug powerset? BTW, still haven’t answered my questions on your previous post. Comments #23 & #50 on http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....ing-weeks/

Search can improve.. all those SEO websites which are just capitilising on PageRank ruin the experience.

More disruptors please, don’t sell if you have intersested buyers already then why is it going to make any difference launching. The only fear is your product isn’t good enough or can scale well then sell and you bluffed your way to a big win.. but if you really have the nuts.. grab them.

to quote Techcrunch’s paraphrasing of Google’s stance: “natural-language approach is useful on the back-end to create better results, but it does not present a better user experience.”

I agree

Powerset is an irrelevant company that has made a lot of noise and has no substance whatsoever. Search is a business that demands an ability to scale to large amounts of data. For all the funding they have raised, all they to show is a toy application that runs ona couple of websites, and canned demo searches.

Buying them will be a big distraction for Microsoft. If I were Google, I’d let MSFT buy them just to screw them up a bit more.

Damn spelling is very bad there.. sorry! Let me try again:

More disruptors please! Don’t sell ,if you have interested buyers already then why is it going to make any difference if you launch? The only fear is your product isn’t good enough or can’t scale well, if so then sell and you bluffed your way to a big win.. But if you really have the nuts.. grab them.

I really feel, Mike, that your aha moment might have been due to the Eliza effect. In any case, it would be a moment of sublime absurdity if someone actually bought them for 100m without knowledge on how it scales.

The only reason Powetset is getting all these fluff attention is due to the fact that Pell was an EIR at Mayfield and had investor connections. If this was a product of someone else out of Silicon Valley, you would not have heard a peep about it.

100 million for a company that has not even launched their product? Talk about bubble 2.0.

Why would Google try to acquire Powerset when they can create technology like this in-house. Think about it. They have thousands of “Barney Pell’s” at Google.

I think the current stuff in Powerlabs rocks, and look forward to next week (Monday?), when they launch, so that people can see firsthand the impact of computational linguistics not on just on query processing, but on real understanding of content and relationships spanning multiple documents - that’s just wild and way cool, and it starts breaking up the concrete that has hardened around the search experience we have gotten used to over the past decade.

For those wanting them to fail, save your gunpowder - it is too late. They are actually delivering something that is a real step function improvement, if an imperfect mass market experience day 1. Check it out yourself next week, then opine.

I’m surprised you said a-ha the first time you used google. Lets face it, ads are what made them powerful. I don’t know anyone who loves ads.

It just shows these battles are won on sentiment, not technology.

to switch from google to somewhere else for searching, you need a better name. “powerset” is not one of them.

Excited to see this thing in action! Typo on the last line btw.

ClutterMe.com - aha moments to last a lifetime.

(v 2.0 coming soon)

MathandCheeseWiz,

How long have you been working at Powerset?

You crack me up.lol.

sell it, that is if its worth anything. its way to tough to get in search game now.

@1, @13, totally agreed.

just amazing how many people continue to fall for the powerset hype, and who don’t understand how search engines actually work. in particular @7, “It’s actually pretty simple nowdays to rank sites right.”, do you have any idea what you are talking about?

there are 3 areas that dominate search relevance today that Powerset would have to solve to get even in the web search game and NLP will not help them address any of them while MSFT, GOOG, and YHOO are spending 100s of millions of dollars, have 1000s of engineers working on these problems and have a 5+ year lead:

1. navigational searches (what PageRank solved). 12% and more than 30% of all search sessions are navigational (e.g., “tech crunch”). Google has worked now for 7+ years on the problem and still gets it wrong for some queries. Not impacted by NLP.

2. freshness / index size. The indexed part of the web is now between 50 and 100 billion documents, with google resulting to approaches like site maps and crawling dynamic sites by automatically filling in forms. For example, search for “Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell” and they have the article as the #1 result. do you have any idea how hard it is to get this done? Not impacted by NLP.

3. Spam. Everybody is complaining about how much spam Google, Yahoo, and MSN have in their results, and it is getting worse. All of the big engines have big departments that do nothing but fight spam. Not meaningfully impacted by NLP.

Now think about what Powerset is shipping as their example: a tiny demo index that does not contain spam and does not require navigation searches so that they don’t have to deal with 1-3 (which, btw will impact the vast majority of searches consumers are generating). As they scale their index, no matter how terrific the NLP relevance is, it will be overwhelmed by these factors, and unless they somehow manage to duplicate 1-3, not a chance that they will even get close in getting the right results for consumers compared to the big engines.

They very well may have a brilliant product but I can’t get past that big weird ass logo on their home page.

http://www.imageco.com

Nanny McPhee

I’ve been in the search business before at one of the big four, but am out of the space with my current job. I still love to stay connected to it. I am in the beta of all the usual suspects (Radar Networks, Hakia, Powerset, True Knowledge, Lexxe, et al), and from a hands on perspective, this is the most interesting play I have seen among the folk in this segment. Instead of comment wars, why not spend a day using the different products and come back with detailed feedback? I will be the first to admit what I use at Powerlabs in imperfect and not a 1.0 consumer offering, but it is actually interesting (and starts breaking the blue link paradigm), and useful so far in rubbing against fact bases with wikipedia and freebase.

Wow. While I am not that much of a techie, it takes only a very basic understanding of NLP to know that Powerset has pretty close to nothing of value.

The hype is incredible given the lack of substance. If Dave Wehner can get this company sold in its current state for $100M then he might be the greatest iBanker in history.

@27 I know exactly what i am talking about.
You wrote correctly about freshnes / index size problem.
When your software works fine and you realise that some of your thousends servers have hardware issues that affect the way your software works it’s hard.

But ranking the sites when you know how SE-Spammers act is easy. The problem with google results is that SE-Spammers target their index and their algorithm. Choose different methods then google and your results will be better untill you get popular and get targetted.

Hey, Tim G

I have stealth mode search engine. How much does cost to design logo & webpage?

I want something better than VC funded competitors.

If they can’t use their contextual search engine on more than 2 carefully selected domains, they have no technology to sell.

$100 million offer from Microsoft has to be a false rumor.

I really believe that Powerset can defeat Google. Yes I said it. If Powerset can live up to its hype with its general search engine, then watch out internet. This underated company could make a huge splash on the internet scence and grow faster than any internet company that we have scene since the start of the dotcom boom.

Well thanks to this blog I have been made to look like a genius. After all you all are the experts.

many moons ago when I predicted Google stock will drop by half from $800 to about $400 the guys who i told looked at me as if I was and idiot. Of course there was a massive stock slide if I may recall.

What made it sweeter was the actual value of my prediction for a take over bid without even hearing about such a bid on non blog.

Well what can I say. Cuill + Powerset + X + Y + Z = Web3.0 = Yahoo R.I.P = Google at US$225 within 2 years.

Hey I can afford to make such outlandish statements, I am not a techi or an expert you all are.

Oh Steve, if you recall in my e-mail. Yahoo is toast with or without Microsoft. So save your marbles.

Google has all the right people to launch their own NLP search product. They wouldn’t have to hire anyone new or buy a company. The reason they haven’t done this is that Powersets products are lame. They only work in the narrow domain of Wikipedia articles, which have very predictable markup that can easily be parsed. Powerset’s current technology will fail on the web. Period.

Powerset may not have much power, but the little swing it will carry once mixed the right way with the right ingredients can spell doom for many. Actually it may be sooner than you think.

If somebody going to buy it , they might as well sell it. Google is still the king no matter what advertising they do..Natural language search engine don’t click in the media, it will be a long time before you can match or kill Google.

Nat
http://www.workersinc.com

One have think beyond technology when dealing with the web. Sounds unusual does it not?

There is just…no…way.

Cuill

Google’s Evil twin

You guys are ridiculous. Barney is spreading this rumor to hype PS before the launch. Sure, he’s talked to MS — lots of companies ‘talk’, to lots of other companies, all the time. Talking and 100M are very different things. ‘We talked, no comment’ is not a lie. The one thing Barney is good at is generating hype. Which is pretty good, one must admit, most CS PhDs wish they could hype their stuff at 1/100 his level…

@Michael:
‘The real issue with scaling to the entire web is ranking of results, which you just can’t test on such a small scale. Ranking certainly isn’t trivial. But if they were able to get ranking right, Powerset would be the search engine I use every day.’

No, the actual issue is just about plain performance. According to some previous statements, Powerset’s software needed about one second to index a single sentence. No matter which hardware they used back then, this is way too slow for scaling to the entire web.
Maybe, their algorithms improved in the meantime. However, the point is that their user experience better be as breathtaking as described by you, because as for scaling their crawler / indexer they will always lose against the major competitors.

Would love to have more solid reporting on this alleged bidding war? What evidence do we have that this is not more Powerset hype? It smells like the ‘let’s see if we can get our VC bacon back’ trick.

It is pretty simple if the decision is in fact true. If you do have a transformative product then of course you don’t sell. Launch and you are worth 10X more. That has been proven to be the case time ans time again. If you don’t and you can pass due diligence muster and there is a real bona fide deal grab it!

By the way, Peter Norvig (was Dir of search quality at Google and now has some other title) has talked a lot about nlp and Google. Just Google it. Most of the time he is negative on it even though he is much more of an expert than anyone at Powerset. He was Barney’s boss at NASA and has hired more nlp machine and machine learning experts than any other company (orders of magnitude of powersets brain trust). So, don’t be surprise if Google already uses some nlp or will be doing so soon.

Powerset, keep the stache’s going… Hold out until you can sell or deliver on the PR expectations.

Parse this

Powerset searches with the Language of Nature they do. Results from the meaning of your words they find. Seeking “Plants that are not Vegetables” yields Fruits and Legumes, not mis-placed pages with those words upon them. MMMM

Every page in Wiki is encyclopedic, so the language tends to follow regular word order, but the Internet doesn’t follow those rules, so the blog run by Yoda doesn’t get indexed the right way by a Powerset.

My full response is at:
http://www.takingthebridge.com.....ould-sell/

They should sell because their search engine is horrible. I’ve seen their Preview/beta (whatever it is) and it provides results worse than google on Wikipedia site.

Sel guys… just sell. Let MS grab another dud. MS will never get this junk working.

Powerset have terrible growth. Not even public hype. Only one person that use powerset is barney pell. No one else. No even the world.

http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....werset.com

Powerset reminds me another edgeio.com and XFL.

> Powerset reminds me another edgeio.com

thats harsh !

Michael,

Do yourself and your readers a favor. You clearly know nothing about Search. It’s patently obviously to anyone that does that you’re faking it all the way.

What you saw at Powerset was a type of simulation. They have a tiny index that they’ve been tuning against for many many months. You did not see a web-wide index and you did not see automate ranking.

Stop telling people that you’ve had an “ah-ha” moment. Your moment was contrived. You saw nothing. These guys are trying to pump themselves up so they can get bought. I doubt this happens.

I bet you thought edgeio and Omnidrive were “ah-ha” moments, too.

I agree with those that say this will be a failure. I spent month building Peeplr a social search engine. I still have tons of source code and tens of millions of cached profiles from the biggest social networking sites.

Why did I leave that behind after months?

The entry level for search is too high. If Microsoft will buy the IP for 100M, take the money before they change their minds. My guess is MS will fork over the 100M, take the high level concept and flush the rest of the IP down the toilet and re-implement anyway.

Now that they put the search public on 2 domains MS can just reverse engineer the feature set for free.

That should read “I spent months”. I also have the domain uberset.com if any germans out there want to run up against this with their own sauce. I know wealthy Germans love to do that as we saw with facebook so I’m offering. It’s just a novelty domain to me.

“That probably won’t be enough to convince Powerset and their investors to sell. The big question is whether Google will step in to try and keep Powerset out of Microsoft’s hands, and start a real bidding war.”

What a joke Arrington. The IP is probably practically worthless to both Goog and MSFT. Like a small team at a startup can out engineer the people at Google?

Maybe in 1995, but not anymore, and certainly not with search. We attacked Monster and Dice because they are lazy SOBs that never do any innovation. Google is the opposite. I must have forgotten to take my meds when I decided to try to build a search engine.

hahaha, do I have to be scared? what a joke

What kind of English language is powerset?

VentureBeat — “Powerset: Don’t call us a search engine ”
Crunchbase — “Powerset is a search engine that focuses on natural language processing.” huh?!?!

Powerset is a vaporware hype that delievers Natural Process Search.

@55,

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....tartup-ip/

They could always just donate it, and tell the investors to pound sand?

That would be the most .edu thing to do. As for 100M valuation of it, I dunno about that. I have a patent being published for opposition in August 2008 at the USPTO for a thermal feedback video game controller(as in hot in the game, hot controller, cold in the game, controller goes cold).
Patent Pending Application No. 11/675,271
Inventor: Moi

I think that’s worth way more than largely unused search R&D code. At least my invention will take video games to the next level. Sony can pay for my rent and quality forum posting time for years to come!!

No body is going to acquire powerset. Not even Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. LOL. They spend too much time with newspaper hype and video partying. This wouldn’t be good for investors relations.

Watch the movie “Startup.com”. This is explains how you lose money at end.

Powerset is orginal web 1.0 dot bomb. You don’t play investors money. They get really piss off. Sometime they do scream and phone harress founders and executives. This is fact. you have to becareful when you apply VC and NDA.

Powerset even lose one of best founder steve newcomb.

“Watch the movie “Startup.com”.”

I added this to my netflix queue. I should get to it in a couple weeks. I was disappointed that this movie is not one of the unlimited online playback ones.

Why has Powerset delayed it’s launch? Why haven’t they opened it up? If the technology is that great they should give the general public a test and let it stand the test. I think they’re worried about scaling and going beyond Wikipedia’s half-a-million documents.

If the investors, entr’pnrs and marketers (yes, Powerset has marketed itself quite well in last 2 years) behind Powerset believe in the product then they should let the consumers control their destiny.

Let M$ buy that useless crap, $100M less in their pocket

The value of Powerset is not consumer facing.

Powerset could make a killing licensing it’s search to large businesses who are swimming in data, especially pre-digital data. Applying a natural language program to these archives can associate relevant information and tie it to other piles of data. There’s real (non ad-supported!) growth potential for Powerset as a B2B.

Mike you really seem to have had a change of heart after being critical of Powerset during the earlier hype phase of last year. For you to be impressed with their demo is a sign they are starting to get things right, and if they get *most* of the search equation going well they’ll be huge and a threat to Google which I think is really suffering these days from throwing out a lot of pages in an effort to keep out spammy ones. Powersets real test can’t come until they have a measure of success and start getting hit by major SEO players, but semantic holds a lot of promise for fighting spam.

LOL. You are all right of course, all true as far as I have known and seen it, but you all keep thinking linear.

if they go it alone the problem changes to powerset as a BUSINESS. how much hardware do they need to do their deeper analytics? how much do they need to charge for ads to support this? is it doable? my guess is no.

powerset is not a business, it is a technology. sell.

No offense to my friends at Powerset, but one sentence per second with a fairly high error rate is far from the state of art of NLP. Google’s internal statistical language model that powers their translation engine is way more powerful and scalable than the outdated Xerox PARC stuff.

If Microsoft offers $100m, take it.

Chris,

I too love responding to my own comments . . . please stop spamming techcrunch. . . please . . .

@Drew.

That’s just the point. There are private, venture backed companies that have been selling enterprise NLP solutions for a while now and none of them were overwhelmingly successful.

Powerset’s technology doesn’t appear to be nearly as robust as previous enterprise versions and will most assuredly not scale to index the web.

Classic PR stunt. Intentionally leak some bidding stories to lure the other white knight. Let’s face it, Powerset is dying and they need all the luck.

True. but with if MS buys Cuill and Powerset as a token, then what.

Reason why Powerset is going deadpool.

1. Investors don’t like the product.
2. Powerset Co-founder quit; half of powerset staff quit. It’s makes harder to rise capital for future IPO.
3. All the Xerox IP will go back to Xerox PARC.
4. Losing percentage ownership. None execs will become millionaire.
5. people waiting for 2 years, waste people’s time, and driving people nerves.
6. Powerset is another example webvan.com, pet.com, edgeio.com
7. Asking too much money… Creating too much risk
8. Half of Journalists lost their job for no yet existing product.
9. Making investors really mad. They saw party video… Oooch.
Not good way to show IPO.
10. Annoying powerset news appear everywhere in news source. Hype… hype… hype… You being childish startup. Come on man. You are not 20 year oldish.

Microsoft, Google, Yahoo is not that stupid to buy powerset. It’s all wikipedia search engine. Anyone can make wikipedia search engine and rename “Natural Language Search”. It’s silly to have companies to buy freebase, wikipedia, and Xerox technology with $12 million.

This will go down as one of the worst posts ever my Michael Arrington. Why?

Because it proves that he doesn’t understand technology, search or reality for companies that aren’t doing well. Perhaps this is why he invests in so many bad start-ups. His failure rate seems quite high to me.

How can anyone that understands search ever read what he writes again? It’s painful to read this drivel.

“Perhaps this is why he invests in so many bad start-ups. ”

From my understanding, he gets other people to do it for him.

I tried the beta and didn’t like it at all. All it did was keyword searches on Wikipedia. Search for “Who has a birthday today” and you get results that have nothing to do with that, but have the word birthday in them. If I wanted those kind of results I would have searched on Wikipedia itself. Nevermind revolutionary, Powerset is not even up to the level of current search engines. If someone is dumb enough to buy them.. they’d be stupid not to sell and get out.

“Word on the street” is that Cognition’s NLP technology is better than Powerset’s and it actually works. http://www.cognition.com

It’s my understanding that Michael Arrington invested in Edgeio (failed) and OmniDrive (soon to fail). The main point is that Michael Arrington wrote a post that supports the notion that Powerset is a good product. My point is that it is supposed to be a search engine yet it only indexes 1 or 2 web sites, and they’ve been at this for nearly two years. Anyone that understands the basics of algo search knows that what Powerset has now is completely meaningless. As such, no credible person could write a post claiming they had an “ah-ha” moment. This is why Michael Arrington’s judgement is in question IMHO.

Powerset may be a revolution in search (I really hope it’d be - search really needs to improve), but I agree with 27 - they’re sidestepping all the hard bits with their preview, so it won’t actually tell anyone much about the real quality of what they’ve got. Anyone can do fantastic search on a small, limited corpus.

Edgeio may have got a lot of things wrong, but one of the things we got right was avoiding to hardcode rules wherever possible, because we knew we could do well on a small set of data if we hardcoded rules but also that it would _never_ scale if we did.

Those of us without detailed inside knowledge of Powerset can’t know whether they’ve made the right choices, and if their stuff will work on the full web, or if they’ve made too many assumptions that breaks when they start scaling their index. Until we actually see what they can do with an index that is many magnitudes larger than just Wikipedia and Freebase, that won’t change.

Personally I’ll be withholding judgement until then. I’ll be crossing my fingers, though, Google isn’t good enough.

I try very hard not to criticize startups but this seems just a bit out there. Is Microsoft so afraid of Google getting the next upper hand that it will toss money down the drawn to avoid that? I’ve used Powerset on many occasions and I can say it’s just bad. It’s really no different than any first year developer applying a series of rule sets based on pre set search request, there is no real logic or value and frankly I am surprised that Mr. Arrington would even suggest otherwise.

Microsoft, you should get your act together, this is a very bad deal. Mr. Arrington, the fact that you would find any value in Powerset really makes me question your intelligence as a technologist or more so your real independence in this situation. Powerset, you blew through a lot of money and the end result was nothing more than a tool that will never reach any mass appeal. You would have been much better off releasing it a long time ago and building on consumer feedback instead of waiting this long just to be concerned of how the public will really value Powerset.

God help us all if this is the state of the technology world in America.

Unbelievable amount of mis-information and lousy analysis on this post.

I hate them, I hate them, I hate them!!!!

I’m sorry, who were we talking about? I just had to get that out of my system.

Comment junkies, lay off the caffeinated products. I, as a truly enlightened human, will wait till tomorrow to see the offering live.

It is interesting to read all of the posts, with so much hatred for a pre-product company. Jesus, what did these guys to to you to piss you off so much, other that maybe being accused of hyping themselves too much (truly a mortal sin, followed by the sin of hyping yourself too little).

As startups, we should be encouraging anything that screws with the balance of power - that opens up opportunities for us.

Michael Arrington owes us an explanation for this crap. Everyone knows that Powerset is full of BS. I hear that they are running out of cash and can’t get another infusion because the product isn’t there. Who knows what’s true. Let’s just look at the facts: they still haven’t launched a product.

I did research for a company that introduced a top-down server-based tool using NLP to parse meaning back in 2000. There were 30 competitive technologies at the time, including PARC. The linguistics were impressive in providing precise data that was far more useful in search capability, but the technology was science-based with few wanting to commercialize it as a search engine. Eventually the technology failed to find enough traction for an IPO. This technology is not new — however, there is now a need for refined search on a well established platform. Powerset is smart — trial market research in an incubator type setting, racking up the interest before launch — letting the users define the outcomes.

Cognition’s Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies add word and phrase meaning and understanding to computer applications, providing a technology and/or end-user with actionable content based upon semantic knowledge. This understanding results in simultaneously much higher precision and recall of salient data within the universe of possible results. Cognition’s Semantic NLPTM makes technologies and applications more human-like in their understanding of language, thereby resulting in more robust applications, greater user satisfaction and new capabilities available for exploitation. On the Web in particular, powering applications with Cognition’s semantic understanding technology drives these applications ever closer to Web 3.0 (the semantic Web).

Cognition - Giving technologies new meaning.TM

Introduction
Cognition Technologies, Inc. (”Cognition”) is a next generation Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) company, based in Culver City, CA.

What is Semantic NLP?

Semantics is the sub-field of linguistics that is devoted to the study of meaning, as expressed by words, phrases, sentences, and even larger units of speech or text.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a sub-field of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. It studies the problems of automated generation and understanding of natural human languages by computers.
Cognition’s Semantic NLPTM is technology that “understands” word and phrase meanings within context in modern computer applications. Cognition’s mission is to make its clients’ technologies and applications more human-like in the understanding of language and more profitable.
Cognition’s Semantic NLP has been in development for over 23 years by Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren, Cognition’s co-founder and CTO, and a team of linguists and computer scientists. Cognition’s technology employs a mix of linguistics and mathematical algorithms which has, in effect, taught the computer the meanings of virtually all the words and frequent phrases within the common English language. Semantic Natural Language Processing is superior to common pattern matching that is found in most search engines and text-interaction tools because it focuses on the understanding of word and phrase meanings within context. No other commercially available natural language processing technology comes close to Cognition in its breadth and depth of understanding the English language.

Statistics
Cognition’s Semantic NLP technology contains one of the world’s largest computational dictionaries. It includes:

506,000 Word Stems (the base forms of a word)
536,000 Concepts
17,000 Ambiguous Words - the most frequently used words in English language
191,000 Phrases
Over 4 million semantic contexts
76,000 synonym sets
Cognition’s place in the world related to the “Semantic Web” (Web 3.0) and Google
Cognition employs semantic technology to delve into the meaning of words and phrases, and unlike others who are trying to make the Semantic Web a reality through hand-tagging, such as Web Search, Cognition applies its Semantic NLP to other technologies to give these products and services a differentiation and competitive edge.

“We look at what we’re doing as a significant component to the Semantic Web,” said Scott Jarus, Cognition’s CEO, “Our focus on semantically enhancing other technologies means we’re not competing with Google, Yahoo! or other consumer Search engines. Indexing the entire World Wide Web ourselves is not currently on our business roadmap. However, we might become a semantic component of someone else’s application which may index deep content on the Web similar to the examples you can see on our Website.”

Management
Scott Jarus
Chief Executive Officer

Scott joined Cognition Technologies in 2006 as an investor and then as its CEO. Mr. Jarus has more than 25 years of management experience in the telecommunications and Internet industries, beginning with a company that built one of the world’s first public packet-data switching networks. Prior to joining the Cognition, Scott was President and chief executive of j2 Global Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: JCOM), a profitable billion dollar market cap company whose signature product, eFax®, served more than 9.5 million customers with a local presence in more than 1,500 cities in 25 countries on 5 continents. Preceding j2 Global, Mr. Jarus was President and Chief Operating Officer for OnSite Access, the premier building-centric Integrated Communications Provider (voice, data, Internet and enhanced services) serving businesses in 22 markets throughout North America. In addition, he served in various senior management positions at RCN Telecom, Multimedia Medical Systems (which he co-founded) and Metromedia Communications.

Mr. Jarus serves on the Board of Directors of FreeConference.com and Ironclad Performance Wear [ICPW.OB]. In 2005, Mr. Jarus was named the National Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year for Media/Entertainment/Communications (and Los Angeles Entrepreneur Of The Year for Technology in 2004). He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Kansas.

Kathleen Dahlgren, PhD
CTO / Founder

Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Cognition Technologies. She began her career as a professor of computational linguistics at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges and then worked for IBM at their Los Angeles Scientific Center, focusing on building a “natural language understanding system.” Dr. Dahlgren has a Ph.D. in Linguistics and a post-doctorate in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published a number of scholarly articles on the subjects of linguistics and computer science, and is the author of Naive Semantics for Natural Language Understanding. She is the co-author of Cognition’s seminal patent (1998), and she received the Small Business Innovation Award from the U.S. Army in 1995. Currently, she is also an adjunct professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

All I can say is it would be the greatest travesty if Anti Trust and Anti Competition Keepers of the Keep could not see it or SMELL it a mile away as a suffocating and clobbering of competition, if they let any of the BIG FAT FISH”ES” that have been eating up small fish”es” anywhere near it with a 10 foot pole!!!

I would like to see this grow to be head to head with Google. That will bring about others to innovate at a fair clip.

Any preemptive PETITION support for this view out there?? … this will be presented to FTC or EU or such for Anti Trust action should it become necessary?