Apple acquired the military-technology spin-off, mobile personal assistant app called SIRI this Spring, but SIRI isn’t the only consumer startup cut from the cloth of the $200 million DARPA investment in an artificial intelligence project called CALO.
The next SRI/CALO app to launch may be TrapIt, a news feed reading and recommendation service designed to act as a “cognitive prosthetic” to “adapt to unexpected events” in situations of “intense information overload”. The US Navy has used the core technology TrapIt is based on to parse through huge quantities of information for what’s most relevant. Soon you’ll be able to use it to find the best news about your obscure interests, in the web’s otherwise overwhelming ocean of Justin Bieber references. The spin-off company has lots of high-profile backing (including Li Ka-shing), will launch later this or early next year and we’ve got the first screenshots below.
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TrapIt has raised two rounds of funding, one lead by Asia’s most powerful businessman, Li Ka-shing. Ka-shing previously invested in Facebook, Spotify and SIRI.
See today’s guest post: “The Age of Assistants”: The View From Inside SRI, by SRI’s Norman Winarsky
The company says its primary competitors include
, a tiny company
hired well-known blogger Louis Gray last night. ChatterApp says that its software learns faster than My6Sense, though, and that the already-launched My6Sense is better suited to be an API powering other apps than a consumer destination in and of itself.
I like My6Sense, but I’m excited to see if TrapIt can live up to its promise to serve both novice and power users. Most recommendation services struggle to accomplish both.
With a background story like this one, it’s sure to be a product launch worth watching closely. You can sign up to request notification of the public beta on the company’s website.
