Google has scooped up news aggregation summary service Wavii for $30 million, according to Reuters. (Google and Wavii haven’t officially commented yet.) Wavii’s service has been influenced by expert machine learning natural language processing work, as explained by founder and CEO Adrian Aoun in our interview here. In February, a blog on the site also explained its use of classification for NLP tasks like disambiguating entities, automatically learning new entities and relationship extraction. Late last year Wavii announced its iPhone app.

Reports have it that Google and Apple were in a bidding war over acquiring the venture, which has been likened to Yahoo’s Summly buyout in March (see story here). TechCrunch says the Wavii team will join Google’s Knowledge Graph division.
When it comes to delivering personalized intelligence about what’s up in the world, Wavii aims to better understand users and what they’ll want to see in their feeds not just via explicit topic follows, but also via various signals. These include which other topics are involved in the events they comment on, how often they click into events about each topic, what topics they search for and what topic pages they visit. It also includes other attributes of stories they care about besides the topics, and their interest level in a topic to guess what the interest might be in related topics.

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Nick Vivion of Tnooz reports, “The company formerly known as Swiftrank comes back with a new name and entirely new concept. The company changed its name to TravelShark in 2011, and followed a $5 million investment back in 2011 with a period of relative quiet. The company now no longer focuses on connecting hotels to travelers – it is on an ambitious mission to redefine reviews. Moving away from the arbitrary nature of the 5-star system, TravelShark distills a place into its most commonly referenced qualities. Called its ‘Essence,’ this is a wordgraph that highlights words most often used to describe a particular place. The genius here is that words are much more qualitative than stars. They deliver a much more comprehensive and descriptive view of a particular place. The star rating system has its limitations, as it is not an objective measurement of a place.” Read more

Sherpa, the number one virtual personal assistant for the Spanish speaking world, is now available in beta for the U.S. market. Starting today, Android smartphone users will be able to enjoy the platform’s many features – including searching for information, completing transactions, managing schedules and operating the device itself.

Sherpa arrives to the U.S. market with a broader knowledge base and more proactive and predictive capabilities than current market offerings and includes transactional capabilities that are unique in the virtual personal assistant category. Read more

Note: Representatives from Lymba will be speaking at the upcoming SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco. See Intuitive Semantic Analysis of Unstructured Natural Language Data Using Visualization and Natural Language Question-Answering on Heterogenous Data Resources.

Lymba Corporation, an emerging technology leader in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Semantic Technologies, today announced that it has been named one of the “100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” by KMWorld Magazine.

“Criteria for inclusion varies, but all winning companies have things in common. Each has either helped to create a market, redefine one or enhance one, and they all share two things—the velocity of innovation and the agility to serve their customers,” says Hugh McKellar , KMWorld Editor-in-Chief. Read more

Codice Software, creators of the enterprise oriented Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) called Plastic SCM, today launched Semantic Merge, the world’s first language-aware source code merge tool. Using advanced merge technology built into Codice Software’s signature product, Plastic SCM, Semantic Merge lets software developers easily consolidate files that are heavily refactored in parallel by different developers, regardless of the code programming language. It will be first available for developers using C# and Visual Basic .NET as part of the tool’s beta launch release today, with plans to extend use of the tool for developers using Java and C++ during the summer. Read more

The Press Association (PA), UK’s leading multi-media news agency and content provider, has formed a strategic partnership with TranslateMedia, a digital language services agency, to expand the global outreach of PA’s media content and products.

The alliance will provide a one-stop-shop for semantically linked content generation, translation and distribution services in over 90 languages. Content will be delivered via a single platform allowing seamless integration with a client’s content management system. Read more

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache cTAKES has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles. Read more

A new release out of Daedalus, a company we’ve recently profiled, reports, “Daedalus, a Spanish company specializing in software for information analysis, has released the first version of Sentimentalytics, a browser plug-in that automatically analyzes social media content. Sentimentalytics applies semantic and natural language processing technologies to extract meaning and tag the timelines shown in most common social media and tools. It installs on any standard browser and operates fully integrated into the web interfaces of a variety of social networks and tools (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, TweetDeck, HootSuite and others). Read more

Tempo AI, maker of a new mobile calendar app powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence research, is announcing the launch of Tempo Smart Calendar in Canada. In its first month, Tempo has “AI’ed” over 50M unique calendar events in the U.S., and seen many Tempo Smart Calendar users replacing their default iOS calendar with Tempo.

In order to apply all of the benefits of Tempo AI’s contextual learning engine and bring the smartest possible experience to Tempo users, the company has been allowing users into the system in batches. New improvements and more steady demand are now allowing the company to double the rate at which users are being accepted, and Tempo Smart Calendar will be available to all users soon. Read more

Seen anything good on TV lately? If the answer is ‘No,’ then maybe the problem is that you and your TV just aren’t communicating as well as you could be. The same may be said of your experience across other viewing mediums, like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

Veveo wants to change the picture, so to speak. “We want the TV to be as friendly as possible so you and the TV can have a really productive relationship,” says CMO Sam Vasisht. The company, which earlier this month exhibited its Conversational Interface Technology at TV Connect 2013 in London, says there’s a need for a universal interface based on natural language capability, so that people more intuitively can grasp what is available from where in a world of fragmented content sources, including how to better search for that content and manage their viewing experiences with greater speed and ease.

“Voice is probably the most natural way for us to deliver this experience,” says Vasisht. Veveo wants to be the platform that enables service providers and OEMs and video programmers to give their audiences the power of speech. Read more