Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Yesterday I posted about the fate of Watson. I thank all of the readers of this weblog (There appear to be more than the three that I previously estimated!) who posted or sent comments.

Now that Watson's life span is coming to an end, I thought I'd mention a little bit about what is going on at Karelia. Things were pretty quiet around here while I was working with Sun for a few months on the Java port of Watson, aside from the occasional support update to Watson. But lately, I'm working on a new program.

This time, however, I'm working a little differently. I've partnered up with Terrence Talbot, a talented developer whose whose work you've seen in Watson. He wrote the Epicurious tool originally as a third-party contributor (along with the now-defunct NewsBlaster). Later he wrote the Amazon.com and the Weather tools for Watson, and add some other functionality to the application as well. Anyhow, this time we are building an application together.

Of course, I can't tell you what the new application is. It's too early in the game. What I can tell you is that it will (a) be very cool, and (b) be very useful to a wide number of people (I think), and (c) have lots of opportunities for plug-ins. And because of "once bitten, twice shy", the plans are to build this program initially for the Mac, but then build a Windows version shortly afterwards. If this program gets "sherlocked", we need a backup plan.

One thing that is very important for me is to try to come up with a way to thank Karelia's loyal Watson users. So we are brainstorming ways (logistical and technical) for holders of Watson licenses to get a sweet deal on this new application, when it comes out down the road. More on that later.