Early stage private investor group Octopus Ventures has put around £600,000 into True Knowledge Ltd, a UK startup which claims to have a revolutionary search product.
Currently in private beta, True Knowledge says their product is capable of intelligently answering – in plain English – questions posed on any topic, and dramatically improves the quality and accuracy of results compared to any search technology currently in existence.
The site accepts questions phrased in natural language and produces its answers in standard English. An open beta is planned later.
AI software developer and entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe is the founder of True Knowledge. As his site attests, he previously developed a technology that can solve a commercially published crossword clues but also explain how the clues work in plain English. See the connection?
Octopus itself has 100 private individual investor members and since starting in 2000 has invested over £14 million in 25 companies.
Errr, first thing I do is to subscribe to their mailing list and I get an Unhandled exception on the code that access the database with a complete trace… not too good
I’ve just tried it and it seems to work now.
yep, it’s working now
Might have been a hitch cup due to traffic. Nevertheless they should wrap their db code in a try catch block just in case.
I was pretty taken back by the claims that the “product is capable of intelligently answering – in plain English – questions posed on any topic, and dramatically improves the quality and accuracy of results compared to any search technology currently in existence.”
So I dug in a little deeper into this genius (no really, another of his companies is called ‘genius 2000′) and his CV is stellar…
http://www.williamtp.com/cv.html
Some prize snippets,
“My work history can be summarised as the ongoing development and entrepreneurial exploitation of several large, extremely complicated and unusual software products which break new ground in artificial intelligence. I also have an extremely diverse range of experience relating to software development and the internet both from a technical and business perspective.”
“I was successful academically and my almost perfect exam results placed me in the top fifty students in the country.”
And lets not overlook his experience, “I have had an email address since 1982, been on the internet since it was invented and have a very broad knowledge of the network and many of the associated issues including business (I was using it for commerce long before the web was invented).”
Well, it’s caught my attention enough to comment… he can probably add “genius marketer” to his list of achievements!