Session 1: Search & Discovery

Video

Presenting Companies

Powerset

Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: Series A, $12.50M
CEO: Barney Pell

Powerset is a search engine that focuses on natural language processing. The technology is based on breakthrough technologies licensed from PARC and developed internally, natural language processing allows users to express their intent in plain English. Using technology that understands of the structure and nuance of ordinary language, Powerset's index is built by carefully reading and encoding the meaning of each sentence on the Web. By matching the meaning of a user's query to the meaning in our index, Powerset is aiming to change the way we search online.

Learn more about Powerset

Cognitive Code

Location: United States

Cognitive Code makes tools and systems for enabling practical conversational artificial intelligence applications, so users can interact better with their computers and mobile devices.

Their SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms) platform is a complete system for the development and deployment of intelligent applications to almost any platform, with a technological core that allows humans to interact with computers in completely natural and intuitive ways. The platform helps derive context and meaning from user inputs, via speech, text, or other methods, so you can communicate with the platform as if it were another person.

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CastTV

Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: Series A, $3.10M

CastTV is trying to build one of the web's best video search engines. CastTV lets users find all their favorite online videos, from TV shows to movies to the latest celebrity, sports, news, and viral Internet videos. The company's proprietary technology addresses two main video search challenges: finding and cataloging videos from the web and delivering relevant video results to users.

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FAROO

Location: Germany
CEO: Malgorzata Garbe

FAROO is a peer-to-peer web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web pages visited by FAROO users, which leads to a more democratic, user centric ranking.

FAROO also shares advertising revenues up to fifty percent with its users. The search engine uses privacy-protected behavioral targeting to increase conversion rates.

Learn more about FAROO

Viewdle

Location: New York, NY
CEO: Yuri Frayman

Viewdle is a media platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video. The technology they are developing will let video content owners extract metadata from news, shows, movies, and Internet video. Content owners can leverage both their new and old content with Viewdle's internal and white-label search and indexing capabilities to maximize relevance, usage, audience and monetization. This is much more effective than the old method of text-based metadata indexing. Viewdle has a killer feature in its facial-recognition technology. It is able to index video frame-by-frame and create a "real-time index of true on-screen appearances with unrivaled accuracy and relevance." They plan on building one of the largest databases of people-in-video references. Reuters is currently testing out Viewdle's technology with their videos news inventory by letting people search their catalogue for specific people.

Learn more about Viewdle