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.

Startup discovers 80% of Facebook ad clicks coming from bots

A small startup known as Limited Run has publically decided to withdraw their presence from Facebook over concerns about the social network’s advertising practices. According to Limited Run, only 20 percent of ad clicks actually come from real people; the remaining 80 percent are all bot-generated.

The company became suspicious while testing Facebook’s ad system for the launch of their new brand. During these tests, they noticed that the social network was charging them for clicks but they could only verify that 20 percent of those clicks were actually showing up on their site. They tried multiple analytics services which all showed the same results.

Limited Run even went so far as to develop their own analytics software. Data from this program showed that JavaScript was disabled on 80 percent of clicks originating from Facebook. According to a post on their Facebook page (which will soon be deleted), if a person clicking an ad doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, it’s very difficult to verify the click. In their years of experience, only 1-2 percent of users surf without JavaScript, not 80 percent.

To further back up these claims, they built a page logger to keep track of each click coming into their site from Facebook. This data indeed showed that 80 percent of the clicks they were paying for were from bots.

Limited Run co-founder Tom Mango told TechCrunch that his company reached out to Facebook but all they received were canned responses. He further noted that they spent nearly a month testing and confirming all of their data just to be sure but he doesn’t blame the social network for what happened.

Mango says it could just as easily be a competitor running a DOS attack to drive up their advertising rates but he wishes Facebook would at least acknowledge the situation or attempt to do something to stop it.