Famously, Google says it's on mission to organize the world's information. And Wavii says it's on a mission to understand the world's information. So there's a certain harmony behind the reports that Google has paid $30 million to acquire the Seattle startup.
Wavii offers a service that lets people to "follow" a subject -- such as biotechnology, the Middle East or stamp collecting -- in much the same way you would follow a person on Twitter or Facebook. But when the company launched in 2012, founder Adrian Aoun had a grander version, saying he planned to expand the technology at the heart of the company's service and provide a way for machines to better understand the massive amounts of information posted to the internet with each passing minute.
Wavii was at the center of a bidding war between Apple and Google, and apparently, Google won with that $30 million offer, TechCrunch.
Aoun did to not respond to our request for comment.
Wavii analyzes blogs, tweets, and other web content and tries to organize it so that it can be readily mined for stuff that you're interested in. That's quite a challenge. Some internet is already structured with this sort of thing in mind, but there are so many different ways of structuring it, and most web data is unstructured. The dream of a the "semantic web" -- where all web content would conform to standard structures to make it easier for machines to organize information -- is still a long way from reality. Wavii attempts to overcome this limitation by using machine learning to understand natural language and automatically structure data.
Wavii might dovetail with Google Now, the search giant's alternative to Apple's Siri "virtual assistant." But the technology could be applied to any number of other Google products, including Google News and Google Alerts, which has been criticized recently for providing slow or incomplete results. Or perhaps Google just wants the talent Aoun has assembled.
Google is increasingly interested in this sort of machine learning. Last month, Google acquired DNNresearch, the company run by machine learning expert Geoffrey Hinton and two of his University of Toronto graduate students. On Tuesday, we spotted Hinton, strolling across Google's main campus in Mountain View -- another reminder that Google is serious about this burgeoning area of research.
