True Knowledge goes live with its API
True Knowledge unveiled its API last week to anyone who wants to try it out. This means that anybody out there wanting to ask general questions of the web and get direct answers is in luck. The release got a reasonable amount of coverage in the so called ‘blogosphere’ with articles on GigaOm, webworker, ZDNet and Venture Beat which was good for us as almost all the coverage was positive. Recently with the speculation surrounding wolfram alpha we’ve been getting a bit more interest in the area that we’re working in which is also good news for us.
I’ve been working at True Knowledge for 15 months now and we’ve moved the product forward in many different ways but this is quite a milestone as it means we’re open to the public and we’re starting to get real usage through our public API. We still have a lot of work before us but we’re getting there! We’re all hard at work still on the system amongst other things we’re trying to make it faster and improve the APIs capabilities at the same time. True Knowledge is also still one of the few companies out there in the UK still hiring at the moment so if you’re interested get over to the jobs page. At True Knowledge I work on the C++ backend which actually does the knowledge processing, this is the heart of the technology and our team is working hard on parallelisation and scaling at the moment to make the system even faster. We’ve got loads of ideas of how to make the technology better and we’re trying to find the time to get them all done - if you’ve got any ideas of ways to make the system better then get in touch with the True Knowledge community, there’s the forums on the main site at www.trueknowledge.com along with blogs and a facebook group, there’s even a twitter feed if you’re into that so there’s no excuse.
As an example of the types of questions that you can ask of True Knowledge - try these out
Who was prime minister when Micheal Schumacher was a teenager?
Is Fernando Alonso older than Rob Stacey?
To help people out I’ve written a wordpress widget that can be added to any wordpress blog (the current version can be seen on this page) it lets your users ask true knowledge questions. It’s only at version 0.2 at the moment but hopefully I can improve it over the next few weeks, comments welcome!
Good Hunting
Sun and Oracle
It was announced the other day that Oracle were to aquire Sun Microsystems. This seems to make sense for both companies given the economic situation and the relative technologies that they both develop but it does beg the question - What does this mean for MySQL?
Sun bought MySQL last year and promised continued development of the worlds most loved open source database server but will the new owners who develop perhaps the biggest database engine in world feel the same way. Or will MySQL benefit from some Oracle development and code? It’s not like it couldn’t do with it! Replication for a start. Only the future will tell, might we see MySQL getting sold on?
To be fair they do solve different problems and so we might see that the migration path from MySQL to Oracle is made simpler for companies that want to move that way. Almost at the same time MySQL/Sun made the announcement that MySQL 5.4 is on its way and it looks on the face of it that serious development of the MySQL engine has been taking place since Sun took control.
Good Hunting
New location…
I’ve moved the blog again so the picture links probably won’t work once the old site goes offline!
I’m still alive and working hard on sooo many things at the moment, I’ll try to keep this more upto date though.
Good Hunting