Powerset, one of the most talked about startups in Silicon Valley, launched tonight. I’m guessing they chose late Saturday to make sure the server load would initially be fairly small as there will likely be a surge of activity on Monday.
The initial Powerset search is restricted to Wikipedia pages but it gives insight into the approaches to semantic search that are driving this company.
Barney Pell, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, is considered by many to be Powerset’s key strategic advantage. He stepped down from top leadership several months ago in what the company said was restructuring More»

Labels: powerset

Web 2.0 Startup playmaker Mike Arrington was very skeptical of Powerset during the early phases, but he appears to have had a change of heart after attending a demo of the semantic search engine, scheduled to launch soon. Today in TechCrunch Arrington quotes his reaction to a demo last month and writes (with a few qualifications I’m not noting):
.. 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… More»

Labels: Microsoft, powerset

Tim Berners-Lee, the top candidate for “inventing the internet”, noted the coming power of the semantic web in a recent interview. Berners-Lee gave the following provocative example of the kind of functionality we’ll see when our online data stream starts to link with other data, and applications are built that can leverage all this new connectivity:
“Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots More»

Labels: API, powerset, semantic web, tim berners-lee, times of london