Meshin brings semantic smarts to organizing your email (video)

Chris Holmes is the general manager of Meshin, a startup that is being incubated inside Xerox PARC.

Meshin uses semantic technology, or artificial intelligence techniques that allow a computer to parse natural language and understand it. The semantic web has a lot of promise for simplifying our lives; semantic search, for instance, could be much smarter about delivering the results we want when we ask for something.

Holmes said that Meshin, which is still a part of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and could be spun out in the future, is applying semantic technology to email. It helps you find what you are looking for in your inbox. Then it files them into folders and other places in your email client that makes them easier to locate. Meshin works with Microsoft’s Outlook software now. It competes with rivals such as Xobni or Yolink.

I caught up with him at the 40th anniversary celebration of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center on Thursday. PARC is the birthplace of the PC and many other important inventions in tech history. The research center is being more aggressive about commercializing its technology, and Meshin is an example of that. Meshin will also be showing off its technology at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco this week. Check out our video with Holmes below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMVsOegrRIk&w=640&h=390]