A Million Dollar Contest

Got some spare time, a few extra brain cells, and an idea of what you could do on the web with a tool for automatically extracting meaning from web pages? Then spend a bit of time looking at the SemanticHacker challenge, announced yesterday by TextWise. TextWise has come up with technology that can analyze a bit of text and extract the concepts from it. Now they’re asking you to come up with great ideas of what to do with this technology – with three $1 million prizes for the best ideas.

Under closer inspection that million dollars is a bit less certain. The actual payout is $100,000 (for which you assign the rights to your idea to TextWise) and then 50% of first year net revenues up to a total of $1 million. Even so, they’re staking a fair chunk of up-front cash on this; it’ll be interesting to see if they do come up with a killer application from the process.

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