Everything about Powerset Corporation totally explained
Powerset is a company based in
San Francisco, California that's developing a
natural language search engine for the
Internet.
The company's stated desire is to build a search engine to compete with
Google and
Yahoo which would act on a user's questions, as opposed to
keywords. For instance, a user who wanted to find out which
U.S. state has the highest
income tax would enter "Which state has the highest income tax?" at Powerset, as opposed to "state income tax" at Google. The advantage to the user, aside from using questions similar to what one person would ask another verbally, is that a natural language search engine would, depending on its underlying programming, return a result that's more relevant to what the user seeks. As a side result, any context-sensitive advertising shown, similar to Google's
AdSense, would be more relevant and attractive to the user, and therefore more valuable to the advertiser. Powerset isn't currently selling or displaying any advertising.
Aside from Google and Yahoo, Powerset will compete with other search engine startups
Hakia and
Lexxe.
Currently, the company is in the process of "building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web." The company has licensed natural language technology from
PARC, the former
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching
Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords.
Powerlabs
In a form of
beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called
Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.
Business Week said, "The company hopes the site will marshal thousands of people to help build and improve its search engine before it goes public next year." Said
The New York Times: "[PowersetLabs] goes far beyond the 'alpha' or 'beta' testing involved in most software projects, when users put a new product through rigorous testing to find its flaws. Powerset doesn’t have a product yet, but rather a collection of promising natural language technologies, which are the fruit of years of research at Xerox PARC."
Powerlabs' initial search results are taken from
Wikipedia.
Founders
Barney Pell
Barney Pell (born
March 18,
1968 in
Hollywood,
California is founder and CTO of Powerset. Pell received his
bachelor of science degree in symbolic systems from
Stanford University in 1989, where he graduated
Phi Beta Kappa and was a
National Merit Scholar. Pell received a
Ph.D. in
computer science from
Cambridge University in 1993 where he was a
Marshall Scholar. He has worked at
NASA, as chief strategist and vice president of business development at StockMaster.com (acquired by
Red Herring in March, 2000) and at Whizbang! Labs. Prior to joining Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at
Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
Lorenzo Thione
Lorenzo Thione (born in
Milan, Italy) is the product architect of Powerset. Prior to joining Powerset, he worked at PARC in natural language processing and related research fields. Thione earned his
master's degree in software engineering from the
University of Texas at Austin.
Investors
Powerset has attracted a wide range of investors, many of whom have considerable experience in the
venture capital field. The company received $12.5 million in Series A funding during November of 2007, co-led by the venture capital firms Foundation Capital and The Founders Fund.
Among the better known investors:
Further Information
Get more info on 'Powerset Corporation'.
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