Update:
The much-rumoured Microsoft acquisition of “natural-language search” startup Powerset is now official, with a statement from MSFT and one from Powerset. Mike Arrington says that sources close to the deal tell him the rumoured $100-million asking price is in the ball park. Not bad for a company that has virtually no actual operating business.
Original post:
Matt [...]
Matt Marshall over at VentureBeat says he has it on good authority that Microsoft is planning to make an offer for Powerset, the “semantic search” startup that has been in stealth mode for quite awhile now, popping up only long enough for a party or two, and recently poked its head out with a small-scale [...]
Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch has taken another run at Powerset, which has been hitting the headlines in the blogosphere because the company continues to raise giant sums of money and get all sorts of attention with very little to show for it. Mike figures that the “natural language” search startup could be a “house [...]
Human beings are funny. If you’re the underdog, the plucky startup going head-to-head with a big player, people will root for you regardless of whether you have a hope in hell of actually succeeding — but as soon as you become the dominant player, they will dump you in a heartbeat and start rooting for [...]
It’s interesting to see the spectrum of opinion on Powerset, the search startup that just raised a bunch of cash from some high-profile Silicon Valley types including Peter “PayPal” Thiel and Esther “Release 1.0″ Dyson (daughter of legendary astrophysicist Freeman Dyson).
Some critics, including Danny Sullivan of Searchenginewatch — who posted a comment on Matt [...]