Artificial Intelligence at your service

Intel has quietly scooped up natural language recognition firm Indisys just two months after purchasing gesture-based specialist Omek. It wasn’t revealed how much Intel paid for the 10-year-old Spanish start-up but reports peg the value at just north of €20 million ($26 million).

An Intel spokesperson confirmed the acquisition with multiple publications, noting that the agreement to acquire the company was signed on May 31 and has now officially closed. It’s a bit interesting that news of the acquisition didn’t come down sooner as Chipzilla just wrapped up their annual IDF conference.

The spokesperson further pointed out Indisys has a deep background in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and machine learning.

Intel said they aren’t disclosing any details about how they might use the technologies but based on the list of attributes mentioned above, the chip maker will likely get a lot of mileage for their money. The majority of Indisys employees have since joined Intel including CEO Pilar Manchon who is now working in Intel’s R&D department.

News of the acquisition wasn’t terribly surprising as the chip maker’s venture capital arm, Intel Capital, led a $5 million Series A investment in Indisys back in November 2002 to help bolster international efforts.

Indisys’s dialog-based technology has earned a solid reputation among Spanish companies like El Corte, banking giant BBVA, Boeing and insurance group Mapfre. The company specializes in natural language technology and intelligent assistant services like Siri.

Beats Audio acquires steaming music service MOG

Beats Audio has acquired streaming music provider MOG, finally putting to rest rumors that such a deal was in the works. The companies revealed the news to USA Today although terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

Beats reportedly spoke with several music services but ultimately selected MOG based on their commitment to fidelity. Beats President and COO Luke Wood told the newspaper MOG was the first service to offer their entire catalog in 320Kbps. He also noted they were committed early on to being accessible through multiple access points as evident by their deals with LG, Samsung and BMW.

MOG currently offers streaming music through their website and on Facebook for free. An unlimited ad-free version is available for $4.99 each month while unlimited portable downloads can be had for $9.99 per month. Their service is similar in function and pricing to competitors Rdio and Spotify.

There’s no word yet on what exactly Beats has planned for MOG but the most obvious first step would be to offer an extended trial or discount of MOG service to Beats customers. MOG founder and CEO David Hyman said the acquisition will provide a true end-to-end music experience.

GigaOm reported in May that the deal was valued around $14 million. A source close to MOG came forward to the publication after their story ran, saying the final value was significantly higher but keep in mind that this all happened two months ago. The price could easily have gone up or down since then.

Microsoft purchases corporate social network Yammer for $1.2 billion

Microsoft has pulled the trigger on a deal that will see them acquire corporate social network Yammer in an effort to keep pace with other similar offerings. Asrumors earlier this month suggested, Microsoft has agreed to pay $1.2 billion for the four-year-old start-up founded by former PayPal chief operating officer David Sacks, who will remain with the company as chief executive officer.

Yammer, sometimes referred to as the Facebook or Twitter of the business world, was originally conceived with the idea that employees could post a short description of a project they were working on for others in the company to follow and offer ideas. It has since evolved to include a wider range of social networking features to facilitate file sharing, knowledge exchange and team efficiency. The service boasts around 5 million users spanning more than 200,000 companies worldwide.

Salesforce.com, Google, Oracle and SAP all have extensive corporate social network offerings and it’s clear that Microsoft wants to compete. Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research believes that Microsoft is too late to the social party, noting that it’s impossible to get into a leadership position by imitating the leaders. He feels that Redmond will have a tough time trying to catch Salesforce.com and Oracle, both of which have beefed up their offerings in recent years.

Regardless, Jive CEO Tony Zingale feels that the acquisition solidifies the idea of corporate social networking and will likely lead to it becoming a must-have business tool.

Facebook buys facial recognition technology company Face.com

Facebook has acquired facial recognition technology company Face.com for an undisclosed amount of money. Such a deal was rumored to be in the works last month for around $100 million, making Face.com the first post-IPO acquisition by the social networking giant.


Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Face.com was created in 2007 and specializes in facial recognition using photos. The company’s KLIK app for smartphones allows users to automatically tag their friends in photos uploaded to Facebook. Third-party tracking software AppData reports that KLIK has 40,000 active monthly Facebook users.


Face.com claims to be serious when it comes to user privacy as they require customers to feed information before they can use the software to recognize faces. Furthermore, only contacts that are on a person’s friends list can be recognized and tagged.


“We love building products, and like our friends at Facebook, we think that mobile is a critical part of people’s lives as they both create and consume content, and share content with their social graph,” said Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch. “By working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we’ll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers — that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do.”


Since Face.com already works closely with Facebook, some feel that the purchase was more of a staff acquisition than anything else. What still remains unclear is how this will affect Yandex, the Moscow-based search engine that purchased an 18.4 percent share of Face.com for $4.3 million in late 2010. They weren’t mentioned in the blog post on Face.com regarding the buyout.


Stock in the social networking company is up $1.54 as of writing and nearly $3 since opening trades on Friday. The deal is still pending but is expected to close in the coming weeks.

AT&T talks to sell assets go cold, merger with T-Mobile looking less likely

Talks to sell some T-Mobile USA assets as a precondition to closing a merger deal with AT&T have "gone cold,"according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Citing people familiar with the matter, the newspaper says the companies no longer believe such a deal would help persuade regulators into letting the merger go forward. They are not ruling out an acquisition yet, but AT&T is apparently already looking at other options, such as a partial takeover or a joint venture with the Deutsche Telekom-owned carrier.

Companies involved in the talks reportedly included small wireless operator Leap and Dish Network, which has shown serious interest in diversifying their business beyond pay television in the last year.

AT&T is currently the second largest wireless operator in the U.S. Should its planned $39 billion cash-and-stock acquisition of T-Mobile USA  go through it would add around 34 million customers and effectively vault them into the leading position in the U.S. wireless market, overtaking Verizon Wireless.

But the companies are having a hard time convincing the FCC and the Department of Justice that a merger will not hinder competition for wireless services across the country. AT&T withdrew its merger application with the FCC in late November just days after the latter hinted it would not back the planned acquisition. They subsequently recorded a $4 billion charge against earnings this quarter to cover the $3 billion in cash and $1 billion in spectrum licenses it agreed to turn over to Deutsche Telekom if the deal faltered.

Nokia begins work on first Windows phones, dismisses Microsoft acquisition rumors

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has confirmed that his company has starting working on the first Nokia smartphones powered by Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. At the same time, he has also denied rumors that Microsoft wants to buy Nokia outright. The agreement between Nokia and Microsoft, which was announced last month, still has to be finalized; this will occur sometime in the next couple of months.

"I'm not aware of a strategic interest that Microsoft would have in the rest of the business," Elop told Reuters. "To the extent that a partnership has been formed around what they're really interested in, then what would an acquisition bring other than a good year of anti-trust investigation, huge turmoil, delays? We're right now, today, having people work on the first Windows Phone devices from Nokia. That work is already under way. If this was an acquisition scenario, that wouldn't be possible. Now what happens is accountability. If someone's not succeeding they need to be helped or they need to be moved along. In my context, that will absolutely be the case. So there's a team in place. It's now a new team of my new leadership, newly minted in terms of their new roles. Now they have to perform."

We've been debating on when Nokia will release its first Windows Phone device; will it be in 2011 or in 2012? Nokia's chairman has said Windows-based Nokia phones will be on sale next year, but Elop has said he is aiming to produce a Windows phone by the end of this year. Nokia's transition from Symbian to Windows Phone is, however, expected to take at least two years.

As we've already underlined before, Windows Phone 7 is not mentioned anywhere in the Nokia-Microsoft announcement: the two companies simply refer to the OS as Windows Phone. It's thus quite possible that Nokia will start by pushing out Windows Phone 8 on its higher-end devices.