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February 09, 2007

Powerset and PARC join forces to revolutionize search

The NYT today covers a fundamental and very revealing piece of the Powerset story, one that we have kept close to us and under wraps for over a year now. Powerset completed an exclusive licensing deal for all PARC's technology and IP related to their developments in natural language understanding. This deal has been 15 months in the works and has involved a tremendous amount of dedication from us at Powerset and from our counterparts at PARC, and we do believe we emerged from this period with a strong, solid and mutually beneficial and ongoing relationship that will foster the success of Powerset and see the culmination of over 35 years of unwavering work and commitment by PARC, advancing the state of the art on solving the fundamental problems of Natural Language Understanding.

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November 05, 2006

Jeff Bezos and Amazon EC2

In their blogs, my two co-founders Barney and Steve, both pick up the Business Week cover story from this week (Jeff Bezos's Risky Bet), featuring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in occasion of the announcement of the latest addition to Amazon Web Services initiative: the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

EC2 is a very interesting service which allows anybody to leverage the same reliable and massively distributed computing grid that powers Amazon's own operations.

The article is a great coverage of the importance of EC2 and its sister services in Amazon's new strategy. It also mentions, amongst other things, Powerset's use of EC2 as part of our technology strategy. Steve will be coming out with a new post with more details on EC2 and Powerset, after Jeff's talk on wednesday.

From the Business Week's piece, here are the relevant sections:

Consider Powerset, the secretive search startup backed by A-list angel investors, including PayPal Inc. (EBAY) co-founder Peter Thiel and veteran tech analyst Esther Dyson. Co-founder and CEO Barney Pell harbors ambitions of out-Googling Google with technology that he says would let people use more natural language than terse keywords to do their searches. By analyzing the underlying meaning of search queries and documents on the Web, Powerset aims to produce much more relevant results than the current search king's.

Problem is, Powerset's technology eats computing power like a child munches Halloween candy. The little 22-person company would have to spend more than $1 million on computer hardware, two-thirds of that just to handle occasional spikes in visitor traffic, plus a bunch of people to staff a massive data center and write software to run it. That's when Pell heard about Elastic Compute Cloud. He was sold. Based on tests so far, using the Amazon site for part of the company's computing power could cut its first-year capital costs alone by more than half.

... Highly anticipated search upstart Powerset Inc. plans to use the Amazon computing service, even though it's still in test mode, to supplement its own computers when it launches its service sometime next year.

EC2 is a great piece of a larger story abut how Powerset is being enabled to focus its core competence - developing the technology that will bring to maret the next breakthrough in search - without reinventing the wheel. I am planning a more detailed post on this topic, but most likely it'll be after Steve's post on EC2.

 

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The all new Powerset Blog

It's going to be a week full of new announcements for Powerset and for many others, as the Web 2.0 conference opens its doors on Tuesday. During the weekend we launched a revamped company website - with much of the same content, but with a better visual dress and with lots of space for future enhancements. As my co-founder Steve Newcomb mentions on his post we decided to start a new company blog, creating a better channel for spreading the news about Powerset and to better respond to comments and questions about us.

As Steve says,

Why did we post a new web site, but not reveal very much? The main reason is that we are about to make several announcements at Web 2.0 next week (HINT: Series A) and we wanted to create our blog area so that we can have a forum to discuss various topics. 

In the last blogstorm.  Our website was not well equipped to handle the inquiries and discussions that were taking place.  We have learned from the past and now we have a better way to communicate with our audience. 

Most importantly, we created a new press area for Powerset, where we'll be posting important announcements and press releases. The first announcement was made yesterday, when we disclosed the identities of the original A-list angel investors that believed in Powerset and provided their backing and invaluable advice. To comment on that theme, our first Powerset blog post speaks of the importance of all of the people involved in our company, from employees, to investors, to advisors.

 

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October 13, 2006

We are all Natural Language Searchers...

    After my Powerset co-founders Barney Pell and Steve Newcomb, talked to Venturebeat this week, the blogosphere has breathed new life into a debate that had been out of the limelight for a while. A debate that has hardly died, judging from the number and the fervor of the comments and responses generated by Matt Marshall's first and second coverage of our approach to search. Analyzing the debate, the posts and comments that popped up pretty much everywhere had a few common themes: "natural language has been tried before and failed", "keyword search is enough for people's needs", and "it doesn't matter anyway, because users won't change their behavior". I thought it was worth expressing my own view on these themes, and to explain why natural language is the inevitable destiny of search.


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