Wavii

Wavii was a Seattle startup founded by Adrian Aoun in 2008, and was subsequently acquired by Google, Inc. in April 2013.[1] Wavii developed an iPhone app that allowed users to follow topics (e.g., a company, celebrity, politician, athlete, city, etc.) and receive short updates about them in their feed. This app was based on data produced by Wavii's proprietary technology, which used natural-language-processing and machine-learning approaches to convert content on the web (e.g., news articles and blogs) into structured summaries of the stories they contained.[2]

Wavii
Wavii Logo
Available inEnglish
OwnerAlphabet Inc.
Commercialyes
LaunchedLate 2008
Current statusActive (Integrated in Google)

Wavii's team was primarily former Last.fm, Microsoft, and Amazon engineers.[3]

Google acquisition

On April 30, 2013 it was announced that Google, Inc. had acquired Wavii for an amount that was officially undisclosed, but which industry insiders claimed was over $30 million USD. The acquisition was viewed as a way for Google to expand their ability to understand the web for search and to summarize content.[4]

Google discontinued the Wavii iPhone app and website, but the company reported that it is continuing to run Wavii's technology and produce feed content for applications within Google.[5]

Following the acquisition Wavii's team relocated from Seattle to the San Francisco Bay area.[6]

References
  1. Ingrid Lunden (2013-04-26). "Wavii Confirms Google Buy, Shuts Down Its Service To Make Natural Language Products For The Search Giant". TechCrunch.
  2. Santos, Alexis (2013-04-24). "Google reportedly acquires natural language processing startup Wavii". Engadget.com. Retrieved 2013-08-25.
  3. "Join". LinkedIn. Retrieved 2013-08-25.
  4. Efrati, Amir (2013-04-23). "Google Acquires Wavii to Beef Up Web-Search 'Knowledge Graph' - Digits - WSJ". Blogs.wsj.com. Retrieved 2013-08-25.
  5. "Wavii". Wavii. Archived from the original on 2013-08-12. Retrieved 2013-08-25.
  6. "Wavii officially acquired by Google, app shuts down". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2013-08-25.

Further reading
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