Google Buys Wavii For North Of $30 Million

[agscala]

This one makes a lot more sense than the yahoo acquisition considering Wavii actually developed their own algorithms

[drakaal]

You could just build your own... http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/04/23/how-to-make...

[mandeepj]

from the article - "Don’t worry if your app is down most of the time. It just needs to work well enough to demo and take screenshots of." ... ha ha

They laid down the whole plan on the paper to get bought so easily. Ideally this is what it takes rest is up to us...how we execute it.

[swohns]

Looks like they're headed to the Knowledge Graph team, but I'd like to see some love for the news division, especially from NLP badasses like Wavii.

[Shooti]

Since Knowledge graph is a team, not a division that may actually be the case since it's possible the author actually meant "Google Knowledge", which is the catch all internal unit for all of Google's search-related products (of which News is a part).

[salimmadjd]

If I was google or Apple, I would have gone after Prismatic. I've used both and Prismatic seem to have much better technology.

[MojoJolo]

Yeah. I think Prismatic has the best technology in terms of machine learning and NLP. With it, maybe Prismatic is worth more than their budget.

[bshastry]

This [1] makes one feel if Google is really interested in acquisitions like these or just tossing some money around.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/02/google-closes-aardvark...

[gwern]

'Interested' is a hard to prove word. The best one can really say without statements from Google VIPs is that acquisitions frequently do not seem to lead to successful services and so they're probably better seen as either expensive acquihires or gambling on hits.

(I have an in-progress analysis of Google service/product shutdowns at http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns and one of the solider looking results so far is that even being generous and marking as 'alive' any acqusition's products which were merged into something like Maps or Google+, products which were part of an acquisition are much more likely to be shutdown than internally-developed products.)

[micheleg]

NLP is on fire at the moment...

[jreichhold]

Interesting historical point is this is the same rumored valuation for PowerSet back in 2008. Doesn't speak highly on valuation increasing for NLP.

[waterlesscloud]

Didn't Hinton say he was going to be working on NLP applications at Google?

[njohnw]

In what context?

[dfbrown]

"Try-hard" is the most confusing derogatory term I've ever come across.

[rozap]

This is a joke, right?

[brendano]

Congrats, folks!

[ttrreeww]

I'm guessing the average employee get's to cash out a little under $100k or do they get locked in? I wonder what the Google retention bonus is like?

[vabmit]

Crunchbase says Wavii only has five employees and only took ~$2MM in funding. So, I would bet it's more than $100K total. The funding is all listed as a 2010-07 seed round. I expect they raised more than that. But, given their acquisition price and business model it sounds like things worked on well for them and at least the founders were well vested. Or, did you mean actual cash excluding any GOOG options/RSUs?

My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4.