IBM's Plan to Make Money from 'Watson' System - East Idaho News
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IBM’s Plan to Make Money from ‘Watson’ System

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Getty 010914 WatsonIBM?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1389298427436Sean Gallup/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Three years after IBM’s Watson computing system beat Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on national television, IBM announced it’s backing a new business unit with $1 billion to commercialize Watson’s cognitive developments.

One of the basic consumer-oriented applications of Watson is that it will make the number of inquiries a consumer has to make to get the answer or product they are looking for “dramatically smaller.”

That’s because Watson gets smarter and is learning to reason, otherwise known as cognitive computing. Guruduth Banavar, IBM’s vice president of cognitive computing, said a third of the IBM Research group is focused on cognitive computing.

“It is not a super search engine,” IBM CEO Virginia Marie Rometty said of Watson while announcing IBM’s new unit in New York. Rometty has said she hopes Watson will create $10 billion in annual revenue within 10 years.

The Watson Group is focused on research and development for cloud-delivered applications and commercial services. Soon iPhone developers will be able to use Watson in the next apps they develop.

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