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And obviously, they tend to be a lot cheaper than behemoths like Yahoo!. On Tuesday, Microsoft acquired one of them--Powerset, which makes technology used to interpret the context of a Web search, rather than simply producing a long list of keyword matches, for a reported $100 million. And just earlier this month, seed-stage startup CongniSign came to Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus to pitch to VCs its technology for vastly improving search for photos and video. Cognisign's technology searches for images and video by analyzing the content of images, rather than just the text attached to those images. This same basic concept is being used by other startups, such as Riya Inc., and while the science behind this form of search is still a work in progress, the challenges it could address and the new markets it could potentially crack open could help usher in a new paradigm for Internet search, not to mention taking targeted advertising to a whole new, and not entirely appealing, level. Currently, when you search for a photo or a video, the search engine conducts a keyword search for the labels attached to those images. It is an inherently flawed system, since it ignores all the photos and videos that have no text attached. And, as Cognisign founder and CEO Bryan Calkins notes, this is becoming more of a proglem as more and more people post images and videos without any text labels. Now for the opportunity. Despite the enormous growth of Web 2.0 content in recent years, by most accounts the advertising for this content has not kept up. Self-publishers that sign up to display text ads provided by Google or another service are often dissatisfied by the basic matching of ad keywords to keywords on the site. In other words, just because a blog may mention the word "car" in passing doesn't mean its content is related to cars or that visitors on the site will click on automobile ads. But if the ad server could analyze the images and video as well as the text, it could better target ads. "Anyone who can't afford for humans to sell ads could benefit from our technology," Calkins says. "We're trying to be the Google of image and video." People who already squirm at the appearance of ads in their Gmail account that eerily match the content of their ostensbily confidential messages may not love the idea of their pictures, along with their words, being analyzed. This recent post on TechCrunch speculates that image search was already being incorporated on Facebook after ads appeared on some profile pages that looked suspiciously like the main profile picture itself. If Cognisign or another company were to develop a truly effective image search, it would likely bring a whole new set of privacy concerns with it. But as that long tail of online content grows ever longer it would also offer a new way for the Average Joe to cash in on his rants, words of wisdom and creative endeavors. The huge caveat here, of course, is that lots of companies, including Google, is working on this. Teaching a computer to analyze images is not an easy thing to do. Like Powerset's technology, Cognisign is also working on semantic search, which just about everyone in the search space has been talking about since the earliest days of online search. "Semantic search is the holy grail," admits Calkins. -- Andrea Orr See July 1 post on Microsoft's Powerset acquisition from Tech Confidential
Comments
From: Spanny,
Powerset had some problems. If they hadn't, the price would have been a lot higher.
Posted on:
July 10, 2008 12:48 AM
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Microsoft should forget about Yahoo.... these small acquisitions are the way to go. Cisco bought something like 160 companies in the late 90s and created real value. Microsoft needs to really jack up its acquisition game....... but for small companies.