IBM's Newest Acquisition

On Wednesday 4^th March, it was announced that IBM Watson Group bought AlchemyAPI - a rapidly growing business that specialises in the collection and analysis of unstructured data - for an undisclosed amount.

The reason for this acquisition is to provide Watson with another key piece of machine learning technology. AlchemyAPI have been developing cognitive apps, which IBM have described as “systems that learn and interact naturally with people to extend what either humans or machine could do on their own.” This acquisition will now give Watson the ability to take full advantage of visual recognition technology which is not currently available on the Watson platform.

Stephen Gold, the vice president of IBM Watson Group has told techology news site TechCrunch that “from a technology perspective, AlchemyAPI’s deep learning platform will augment Watson’s ability to identify information hierarchies and understand relationships between people, places, and things across both structured and unstructured data.”

If, like myself, you’ve been wondering how exactly IBM are planning to monetise Watson, and make a profit, then look no further, as IBM have reported that before they purchased AlchemyAPI, developers have developed over a whopping 7,000 applications using Watson, thanks to the Watson Developer Cloud. Developers can also use IBM’s platform as a service (PaaS), IBM BlueMIx to access “The Watson Zone” which grants them access to 13 services while they create applications.

There seems to be big opportunities for Watson in businesses such as healthcare services, law, and any other service that has a huge amount of unstructured data. IBM’s finance chief has even given Watson working in a call centre for a financial adviser, as an example of what the super-computer is capable of! So keep an eye out, who knows what the super-computer will be doing next!

You can find more information on this subject here, here, and here.