<p> <i> 20.07 pm </i> International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) Acquires Alchemy API To Boost Watson’s Capabilities
After acquiring Cognea, an AI startup, IBM adds another artificial intelligence research company to its portfolio

The multinational technology and consulting corporation, International Business Machines Corp (NYSE:IBM), announced on Wednesday that it had acquired AlchemyAPI, which is a burgeoning new software that analyzes raw text and data and generates results which publishers, advertisers, and huge corporations may find useful. IBM is planning to use this newly acquired software to fix-up their artificial intelligence computing unit, Watson, which is capable of sieving through huge amounts of data and then learning from the sifted data on its own. You may remember Watson from its appearance on the famous game show, Jeopardy from 2011, where the AI managed to beat two of the reigning champions.

Developers have had limited access to Watson for a while now for research purposes, however, IBM has only recently started to make the AI mainstream, with much of the recognition accredited to Jeopardy. The AlchemyAPI is pretty established as well, with over 40,000 developers building tools which use the technology, however, this acquisition will give it access to a much larger user base. "They (AlchemyAPI) bring a very substantial development community and following," said Steve Gold, VP of IBM's Watson department. "Plus, they have a very talented group of technologists," he added.

Founded in 2005, AlchemyAPI employs 188 full time workers. The company has a very decent client portfolio as well, managing to score big names such as Shutterstock and HearstCorp. AlchemyAPI basically works by gathering raw data from a variety of sources such as twitter posts, text messages, blog posts and trending online images, sorting it and then learning to differentiate between the different types of data. After it’s done creating the structure, it forms intelligent connections between the structured data which would take much longer using conventional methods, thus saving a lot of time and resources.

The self-learning software is also beneficial to online advertisers as it can help them group together information on a certain topic, like the product they’re advertising and find related articles or information sources so that the ads can be published where most of the target audience is.

Mr. Gold further went on to say that he believes this acquisition will catapult Watson’s capabilities and create opportunities for its implementation in multiple new fields, such as healthcare, insurance or law; basically, wherever large volumes of data have to be analyzed to detect trends or linkages.</p>