David McCoy

Met with Wordster people today. Small company that will deliver in November. No VC money. 4th start up for the founder: Dr. Anindya Datta. “We will do to the dictionary what Wiikipedia did to the encyclopedia!” Sounded kind of audacious. I saw the demo: ontology-backed corpus scrapped from the web and crowd-source input. Visual/spatial representation of interesting lexical dynamics of the corpus. Put in a word, get a definition and a network of cognates, representative sentences, antonyms, etc. Put in a definition and get a word – “that’s hard” says Datta. He’s right. You know I love visualization and grammar. This was sweet combo. This was impressive. Imagine a student being able to see a word in its ultimate complexity and full semantic relationship to other words. I like, I like. Private equity group was pumping in some cash. I can see why. Revenue model is the classic ads bucks, “white label,” and some partnership opps. Target audience is young adults, writers, schools, etc. The good wordy people and the not so good wordy people. Many were in the audience. Many were captivated. Nothing major out there on this that I can find. A few sites mentioning Wordster.

And, I could give Wordster the terse text above and have it parsed and scrubbed. After it vomits, Wordster would make semantically-useful recommendations for correction. In theory, it could turn that stuff into high-class chatting. I don’t research this space. This is just my personal rambling. I did pass on to my smarter folks here at Gartner and we will see what they say from a RESEARCH perspective.

Can you believe this was the lunch program at a Rotary meeting? Can you imagine the shock when you tell your guest presenter, “Hi! I’m from Gartner.” He did well. He was once a Tech man, so that was a given. This was cool stuff.