아마존의 역습?! [애플편]

앞서 올려드린 포스팅에서 아마존이 안드로이드 기반의 앱스토어 시장에 진입한다는 내용의 기사가 있었는데요. 오늘은 아무래도 아마존 스페셜이 될 것 같습니다. 하기기사는 아마존에서 Siri와 유사한 음성검색엔진 회사를 인수했다는 소문에 관한 내용입니다.

 

이러한 최근 아마존의 행보에 따라 아마존이 스마트폰을 출시하려는 것이 아닌가하는 예측이 제기되고 있는 상황입니다. 기존 전자상거래 기반의 유저층을 활용한 정보 기반도 탄탄함을 가지고 있는 아마존인데다가 이미 미국에서의 태블릿 시장은 아마존의 킨들파이어가 점유하고 있는 상황에서 당연하게 생각해볼 수 있는 문제입니다. 아마존의 앱스토어 전세계 시장의 진출도 이와 연관지어 생각해 볼 수 있겠네요.

 

또한 미국의 태블릿 시장에서 강세를 보이는 아마존이 애플과 같이 하드웨어와 소프트웨어의 연계성을 가지고 콘텐츠측면에서도 강화를 하고자하는 의도를 이번 행보에서 엿볼 수 있습니다. 이에 따라 이번 음성검색엔진 회사 인수는 차후 모바일 소프트웨어 회사의 인수로도 이어질 수 있을 것으로 예상해볼 수 있을 것입니다. 아마존의 이러한 역습!! 애플과 구글 모두 긴장해야겠네요.

 

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Sources Say Amazon Acquired Siri-Like Evi App For $26M – Is A Smartphone Coming?

When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S it seemed like a magic piece of software. The future had arrived. But it wasn’t alone. True Knowledge, a British startup with a natural language search engine developed in university labs, had been working out what to do next. Siri was the ‘boom’ moment. They licensed Nuance’s voice recognition technology and created an app based on the True Knowledge engine, called Evi, which worked on any iPhone and Android.

 

That clever move looks like it paid off. TechCrunch understands from sources that the company has been sold to Amazon for $26 million. However, calls to Amazon PR, backers Octopus Ventures and the founders of Evi have ben met with a stoney silence. A spokesperson for Octopus told us: “On this occasion Octopus will decline to comment on this specific portfolio company.”

 

Evi had a controversial birth, being threatened with being pulled from the Apple App store for being too similar to Siri, then being allowed to stay.

 

Will Amazon combine Evi with the voice recognition company they bought in January called Ivona? It’s hard to say. But smart observers might speculate that all these moves point towards Amazon developing a mobile handset/smartphone.

 

But the evidence that Amazon purchased Evi late last year is incontrovertible.

 

At UK Companies House all the Evi Technologies Ltd directors have been replaced by Amazon’s UK legal representative, and this is confirmed by the Octopus Ventures annual report. The annual reports of all Octopus Ventuers’ funds all refer to the disposing of their shares in Evi Technologies.

 

Companies House records show all directors at Evi have been replaced and loans paid off, while a small loss of £19,000 was recognised.

 

The new Company Secretary for Evi Technologies is also Amazon’s: Mitre Secretaries Ltd are the corporate secretary for Amazon.co.uk (and Amazon’s London software development company).

 

Evi is an iOS and Android app and runs on any Android or iPhone. The app couples Nuance’s voice recognition technology and True Knowledge’s search engine.

 

It uses natural language text to ‘understand’ what the user means, as well as their intent. Evi does all three of these together and has been described as being capable of ‘learning’. It has an ontology of tens of thousands of classes and almost a billion ‘facts’ (machine understandable bits of knowledge) and, says True Knowledge, can infer trillions more when needed. It also pulls in Yelp for local searches, external mobile friendly websites, APIs, traditional search, etc.

 

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/sources-say-amazon-acquired-siri-like-evi-app-for-26m-is-a-smartphone-coming/