Google's Acquisition of Wavii is a Good Move

Alexia Tsotsis, in a post for TechCrunch:​

Google has finally closed the deal on Wavii, a natural language processing startup, for a price that is more than $30 million, we’re hearing from a legitimate source. Both Apple and Google were competing for the Seattle-based startup, and Google eventually won.

If you're not familiar with Wavii, it is a startup that has produced some very cool ​natural language processing and machine learning technology that aggregates news and summarizes it in meaningful ways. Wavii has a blog post on its site that explains, in general, how its technology works. The short summary of it is that Wavii creates news feeds for news topics, so (for example) it can take information from different news sources such as "Kanye and Kim K Expecting" and "Kim Kardashian: Baby Bump" and aggregate and summarize that information into something such as "Kanye West and Kim Kardashian expecting a child". Perhaps the best part is that Wavii also maintains the original source links it used to generate the summarized information so users can dig into additional details.

Anyone who suffers from a deluge of articles about the same exact news topic will appreciate what Wavii can do for users. This acquisition is a good move for Google since it will help Google to add interesting features to its search technology as well as products such as Google Now.

"Google and the World Brain"

Casey Newton wrote an article for CNET describing "Google and the World Brain," a documentary by filmmaker Ben Lewis.  Lewis' film covers the topic of Google's efforts to digitize books from libraries spanning the globe.  As far as I can tell from the article, the film seems to be heavily slanted:

The trouble, as writer William Gibson is quoted as saying in the film: "Google is not ours." Sure, the company may make millions of books searchable today, critics say. But what would stop Google from later deciding to restrict that information in a severe way, or to charge for access?

I'm not sure why this is considered to be such a problem. It isn't as if Google is destroying the books after they scan them; the original copies of the books remain intact. If Google decided to restrict the information in any way, it would still be possible for the information to be obtained via alternate means.  Charging for access, likewise, should not be an issue since Google is providing an archival and curation service.

Not every venture is evil, folks.