<\/p>\n
Few computing and technological achievements rival IBM\u2019s Watson<\/a>. Its impressive accomplishments to this point include high-profile victories in chess and Jeopardy! <\/em><\/p>\n Few computing and technological achievements rival IBM\u2019s Watson<\/a>. Its impressive accomplishments to this point include high-profile victories in chess and Jeopardy! <\/em><\/p>\n Turns out that we ain\u2019t seen nothin\u2019 yet. Its next incarnation will be much more developer-friendly. From a recent GigaOM piece<\/a>:<\/p>\n Developers who want to incorporate Watson\u2019s ability to understand natural language and provide answers need only have their applications make a REST API call<\/a> to IBM\u2019s new Watson Developers Cloud. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t require that you understand anything about machine learning other than the need to provide training data,\u201d Rob High, IBM\u2019s CTO for Watson, said in a recent interview about the new platform.<\/p>\n The rationale to embrace platform thinking is as follows: As impressive as Watson is, even an organization as large as IBM (with over 400,000 employees) does not hold a monopoly on smart people. Platforms and ecosystems<\/a> can take Watson in myriad directions, many of which you and I can\u2019t even anticipate. Innovation is externalized to some extent. (If you\u2019re a developer curious to get started, knock yourself out<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Continue reading the article and you\u2019ll see that Watson 2.0 \u201cships\u201d not only with an API, but an SDK<\/a>, an app store, and a data marketplace. That is, the more data Watson has, the more it can learn. Can someone say network effect<\/em>?<\/p>\n Think about it for a minute. A data marketplace? Really? Doesn\u2019t information really want to be free<\/a>?<\/p>\n Well, yes and no. There\u2019s no dearth of open data on the Internet, a trend that shows no signs of abating. But let\u2019s not overdo it. The success of Kaggle<\/a> has shown that thousands of organizations are willing to pay handsomely for data that solves important business problems, especially<\/em> if that data is timely, accurate, and aggregated well<\/em>. As a result, data marketplaces are becoming increasingly important and profitable.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Data Marketplaces<\/h2>\n
Simon Says: Embrace Data and Platform Thinking<\/h2>\n