Both cities now share investment activity from Dave McClure.

Berlin-based Versus IO was Dave McClure’s first investment in a German startup. McClure invested $100,000 in December 2012 and now Versus IO has closed its first round of $2.8 million led by Earlybird Venture Capital, as well as follow in investment from McClure.

Versus IO is a comparison engine. All the information and noise on the web can make it difficult to draw conclusions from data and make intelligent purchasing decisions. Versus IO addresses this challenge using natural language processing to generate point-by-point comparisons. Users enter two things they want to compare, such as electronic products, cities, or services, and the system culls information from around the web and presents them in a list of pros and cons.

Comparing the iPhone 5 to the Samsung Galaxy S4 shows that the Galaxy has almost twice as many pros as the iPhone, including more flexible charging capabilities and a camera with more megapixels and faster max shutter speed. If you pit Mumbai against Shanghai, you see that Mumbai has a higher average temperature and cheaper Big Macs, while Shanghai has public health care and significantly more museums and sport facilities.

When Versus IO first launched, it was solely a product comparison engine. 25 million companions are now available in 18 languages and the company said traffic has increased an average of 35% a month. This financing will support Versus IO’s expansion into other modes of comparison.

Every tech startup and large company is on the hunt for a data scientist. The Harvard Business Review dubbed it the sexiest job of the 21st century.

A San Francisco-based startup called Kaggle is taking on the talent shortage, whether through its data science competitions or a new service launching today, “Kaggle Connect.” 

“We want to offer a real genuine source of work for a lot of data scientists and something to be proud of,” said Kaggle cofounder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom in an interview with VentureBeat.

Kaggle’s data scientists are usually Ph.D students that work on tricky challenges and earn cash rewards. The company is best known for its data science competitions, which companies like GE and Pfizer sponsor. One such competition involves identifying patients who will be admitted into hospital in the next year based on historic claims data. A cash prize of $3 million is up for grabs for the winning data scientist.

But not all problems are solved with a competition or by making a new hire. With Kaggle Connect, companies are directly matched with a top-tier data scientist, who takes on a temporary consulting role. Kaggle’s team of developers have built a secure cloud-based workspace and a suite of tools that incorporate the best practices they have seen in previous competitions.

Kaggle charges upward of $30,000 a month for the service (shared between the company and the data scientist), which may seem like a lot. However, Goldbloom said they are solving a problem that is causing companies’ pain. Developers are increasingly rebranding themselves as data scientists to earn a higher salary, but some don’t have the requisite skill set.

Kaggle’s secret is its network of high-performing data scientists and statisticians from around the world. Goldbloom told me that they regularly use their “Kaggle ranking” as a recognized credential when applying for a job.  

“Companies are getting bitten by hiring a data scientist who isn’t really a data scientist,” said Goldbloom. “That’s why we feel that Kaggle Connect is a good fit for the market.”

When planning a trip, it’s easy to get tangled in a mess of referrals, reviews, and recommendations. If only there was a personal assistant who could listen to your needs and find you exactly what you’re looking for. Now, for iPad owners, there is.

Desti is not just another travel app. It is a virtual tour guide that uses Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing to comprehend and respond to specific queries. The startup launched its open beta today.

The technology was developed out of SRI International, a prestigious research institute that conducts research and development for government agencies, commercial businesses, and foundations. SRI is the same organization that gave birth to Siri, a virtual personal assistant that now lives on Apple’s latest mobile devices, and Trapit, a web scraper that captures the content on the web it thinks you will like best.

Desti is built with similar technology to Siri, but it specifically caters to travel needs. You type in a request, like “wineries in Napa” or “dog friendly hotels in San Francisco,” and Desti will surface the most relevant information. The results contain information culled from sources around the web, like the company’s website, TripAdvisor, FourSquare, Zagat etc. Each entry includes images as well as an about section, features, contact numbers, and aggregated reviews.

The search engine is able to analyze context, meaning and intent, rather than just indexing keywords. Once the semantic engine understands what you’re looking for, the relevancy engine will present personalized responses. If you’re searching for romantic restaurants but don’t want Italian food, Desti will keep that in mind.

“It’s like having an expert travel agent at your fingertips,” said founder Nadav Gur. “Desti relates to people, it understands people when they ask for something, and it interacts with you to refine your queries. It is the smartest travel guide ever.”

Desti is supported by a comprehensive database with information on accommodation, activities, restaurants, and more. The search puts all the information side by side, so it’s easy to compare, and all items can be “collected” and shared. Rather than spending hours researching online, planning a trip is as simple as asking Desti. This is not only significant within the travel realm, but for the technology community as a whole.

“We are a travel company, but what we are demonstrating here is the future of search,” said Gur. Search in general is going in this direction. People don’t want to see a list of ads or links and start researching; people want to ask questions and get a response. Soon, this will happen on all platforms. Search is changing.”

Gur was recruited by SRI in 2011 to help bring this technology to market. He previously founded two travel technology companies (Worldmate and Plnnr) and has dedicated himself to designing an easy-to-use and engaging user interface for the app. It is only available for iPad at the moment, but plans for an iPhone version are in the pipeline.

“As a startup, we are geared towards the consumers,” he said. “This is not a science experiment, we are trying to make our product serve a real need. We have taken some golden nuggets from SRI, but we are using them to build a greater vision. We built this app for the Pad because we believe that is the platform people like to use when they are planning trips.”

To start, the open beta will be available for Northern California. The team wanted to focus tightly on one region before widening the scope. There were about 100 early beta users, and as more people join the platform, the more knowledge Desti will acquire. Gur hopes to extend nationwide in the next year.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At 12 years old, Nick D’Aloisio began his career as a mobile programmer when he downloaded the Apple Developer Kit. By 15, one of his hacks, an app known as “Trimit,” caught the eye of an investor in Asia offering to fund “the company’s” next project.

What company? D’Aloisio, a school boy from South London, admitted to this venture capitalist that it was merely an after-school creation.

A whizz at the programming language C, D’Aloisio had created the app to test his skills in machine-learning technology, a branch of artificial intelligence that yields trends and patterns in a mass of data, and makes smarter predictions over time.

Summly’s founder demoes the app in San Francisco

Less than a year later, the “Internet boy wonder,” as he was dubbed by the European tech media after an appearance at Le Web’s conference, had developed a keen interest in web summarization technology. It’s a simple enough problem, but the execution is tricky. How do we take a meaty piece of content and whittle it down to its bare bones?

Today, D’Aloisio is ready to take his iPhone app public. Summly, available to download for free, reduces full-blown articles into snippets, making it easier to skim the news on a mobile device.

From ESPN to VentureBeat, the app includes almost all of the major news outlets. You lightly tap the screen to browse news, and if a summarized story piques your interest, you can share it with your friends via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook, or click a link the bottom of the screen to access the original, full-length story.

The founder told me he hit on the idea for the novel way to scan the news while studying for his History “GCSE” (an exam that all British school kids sit before their junior year). He quickly became frustrated by thousands of web search results that were slow to load and sometimes impossible to access on mobile.

“There has to be a way to summarize this information into bite-size,” he said. Trimit, the app he developed, summarized content into 140, 500 or 1,000 character summaries. With a little finessing, he moved on to Summly, which can automatically break down full pages of text into bullet-points. 

Most summarization experts have yet to apply their knowledge to a mainstream market. In a highly strategic move, D’Aloisio is applying the technology to the news, since, as he said, “No one had figured out how to perfect the news-reading experience on mobile.” In many cases, it’s relatively simple: Most journalists still write in the Associated Press (AP) style, so the first paragraph contains the crux of the news.

It’s not nearly as straight-forward as cropping the first few sentences, however. In the background, the technology works by scraping content, pulling out the most important bits, categorizing each story by topic, and displaying the news in a highly visual way. The summarized stories fit comfortably on your screen (tailored to both the iPhone 4 and 5).

At a coffee shop in San Francisco, D’Aloisio led me through a demo of the app: It’s a highly intuitive with the algorithm working to recommend news stories to you based on your pre-existing set of interests. As you shift location (from the UK to the U.S., for instance), the stories will change as well.

In person, D’Aloisio is wise beyond his years. It’s hard to believe this media-savvy, sharp-talking business executive is a teenager taking a leave of absence from school. He is both a high-school student and an employer. No longer a solo coder, he now has a team of seven people working for him. In addition, half a dozen researchers at SRI, the non-profit technology research institute based in Silicon Valley, are working with D’Aloisio to perfect the algorithm.

Some major technical hurdles  remain: Magazine-style features are tougher to summarize, and are often thrown out by the algorithm. The team is currently working on auto-translation (notoriously problematic and obvious to anyone who has ever used Google Translate, BabelFish and the like), and they have plans to integrate French and Spanish into the app. If they get it right, it could be a neat language-learning tool.

The team will also butt heads with Pulse, Flipboard, and a host of other beautifully-designed news-reading apps, especially since it is in the process of designing an interface for tablet devices. To succeed, it will need to win over voracious news consumers who routinely use web-based aggregators like Google Reader. The competition for these users is heating up: Circa is experimenting with ways to re-frame the news on mobile, and NewsBlur, a Y Combinator alum, recently launched its iPad app.

Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more.

Top image: Wired UK

RAMP is hungry and has filled its belly with $15 million in new funding.

The company helps online publishers get the most out of their content, just like tossing a little olive oil on tomatoes amplifies your absorption of lycopene. RAMP is the olive oil to content’s tomato.

Its patented MediaCloud platform ingests audio, video, images and text and digests it with natural language processing technology. The result? Search engine optimization, enhanced advertising capabilities, and greater returns. And reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, if you continue with the tomato-olive oil analogy.

RAMP works with major media customers like CNBC, FOX, Comcast, Thomson Reuters, the Hearst Corporation, and PBS. With its latest meal, the company will focus on enhancing its solutions for digital video.

This is its third round of institutional financing, bringing its total capital raised to $40 million. StarVest Partners, Hearst Interactive Media, and EDBI were added to the investor roster, with existing venture firms Fairhaven Capital, Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, and Comcast Ventures throwing in again.

Read the press release.

“The dynamics of an insurgency are actually quite similar to startups disrupting an established market,” says Gourley.

Data analysis is becoming ever more important within tech companies but Quid allows corporate strategists to manipulate a data-driven “map” of an entire technology sector’s past, present and even future. The animation below, for example, shows the evolution of the cleantech ecosystem from 2000 to 2010.

The company grew out of Gourley’s Ph.D. research on the mathematics of war. He and his colleagues discovered that the sizes and timing of attacks in conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland exhibited remarkable similarities, which could be used to predict future attacks and even push a conflict towards resolution. After a particularly grueling month Gourley spent in Baghdad in 2008, investor Peter Thiel advised him to apply the same techniques to technology.

Quid uses natural language processing and semantic clustering techniques to define a set of “entities” such as companies or research groups in an emerging technology sector, and to map their relationships. Each company entity has a signature which is based on explicit events like who is it partnered with, who has it acquired, how much money has it raised. There are also the technologies with which an entity is associated, where it’s located, employee count, traffic, sentiment and many other parameters.

The data used by Quid is publicly-available text in multiple languages, which ranges from news articles and job postings to press releases and SEC or government filings. Quid’s technology map currently contains 75,000 entities and 400,000 events (partnerships, funding, law suits, executive hires, etc.). Building such a map manually, for a particular technology sector, could take months.

The typical Quid customer is a VP of strategy at a large technology company, government department or financial firm. Once the customer has a basic map of the sector, and where his own company and competitors fit in, he can look at adjacent entities and ask questions like, “Where is this space going to move?” or “Which technologies could be recombined?” For example, a particular field of cryptography could be starting to overlap with mobile if researchers are paring down the relevant cryptographic algorithms to be able to compute them on a mobile device.

Most crucially, a customer may want to identify “white spaces” in the map which indicate future growth opportunities. ”If you are a large company you tend not to want to be the first one to market in a new space,” states Gourley. “You want to use those white spaces to see external R&D. ‘What has everyone else tried? What am I most able to do myself? What are my competitors doing? Should I do it myself or just acquire someone?’ Because everything changes so quickly, this is something which you must be able to do on a daily basis rather than in a 3-month report, which is the traditional way of analyzing a space.” Tracking how a sector evolved over time and how it may develop in the future is also extremely important to customers. All data is time-stamped so that the entity map can be rolled back to some point in the past.

There seems to be an obvious overlap between Quid’s technology and the work of a venture capital fund or angel investor. Gourley laughs when I ask him if VC funds are customers. “There’s a tremendous about of overlap but they can’t, at the current pricing, afford what we can give them,” he says. The current pricing averages about a million dollars a year. ”We normally work with large multi-national companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. Even a big VC firm with a few hundred million dollars under management won’t have the cash.” Microsoft, on the other hand, has been a customer for the last year and a half.

Quid’s main rivals are Recorded Future, which deals with data available on public companies, and traditional business intelligence platforms. There is one even bigger competitor: the consultancy industry. Quid’s target customers currently spend millions and millions of dollars on consultants. “What they get out of that is a Powerpoint presentation and a 200-page strategic document. They like us because we put the decisions back in their hands. You can give this to a C-level executive and show him the world that he is dealing with.”

Quid is based in San Francisco, has 50 employees and has raised $14 million from Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and others.

In large companies, it’s all too easy for employees to duplicate work or fall out of sync with the company’s strategy. Métier‘s workforward product uses natural language processing (NLP) and semantic matching to help managers find the right employee to work on a project, speed up project planning and ensure that company strategy is actually being executed.

Let’s say that you are a manager starting a new construction project. You can search for the word “construction” using workforward and its semantic matching engine will return relevant project or task plans for construction, demolition or renovation projects that the company has completed in the past. It does this by mining unstructured text like project descriptions or task names in a project plan for words with a similar meaning. Workforward can also generate a sample project plan based on relevant previous projects.

In addition to helping with planning, wordforward identifies other employees who are starting a similar project or have just completed one, or who have the right experience and availability to work on your project.

Métier’s research has shown that it takes an experienced project manager with over 25 years of experience an average of 60 hours to create a complex project schedule.  The company claims that, during beta testing, the workforward center generated smart project plans in less than thirty seconds.

In a Big Brother twist, wordforward also lets executives track whether strategic initiatives are actually being executed. If employees are executing an initiative they will be talking about it and planning for it. So the semantic engine searches text in project plans, reports and collaboration tools to ensure that the words being used correlate with the words used in strategic initiatives.

Métier’s competitors include Microsoft, Oracle, HP, SAP, Computer Associates, Planview. The company says  wordforward differentiates itself from similar tools by being useful to employees at all levels of the organization. Employees are often merely expected to supply data to business intelligence tools, but wordforward can help them in their everyday work too. The business model is SaaS (software as a service).

Métier was founded in 1998, is based in Santa Rosa California, has 60 employees and is privately funded.

Métier is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective. 

The company’s virtual agents, or chatbots, are programmed to automate sales support for large and mid-sized businesses. By helping online shoppers resolve issues or make purchase decisions, VirtuOz helps web sites cut labor costs. The company claims that its agents, equipped with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, can provide customer service to clients for one-tenth the cost of a traditional human support team.

Still, the virtual agents don’t eliminate the need for old-fashioned NLP completely. VirtuOz’s human counterparts need to train the agents to handle frequently asked questions, and the agents have the ability to escalate issues to human reps when necessary.

Founded in 2002, VirtuOz currently provides the largest number of virtual agents to the Global 2000. The company processes more than 12 million conversations per month for clients including L’Oreal, Michelin, Chegg and H&R Block. For the latter, VirtuOz’s agents help the tax preparation company answer customer inquiries about their taxes.

The latest round of funding comes from existing investors Mohr Davidow, Inventures Group and Galileo Partners. The company last raised $11.4M from the same investors in 2009.