Google May Acquire Personal News Startup Wavii

Image via Wavii/iTunes

Rumor has it that Google is on the verge of acquiring Wavii, the Seattle-based news reading startup that is revolutionizing the traditional news search. Whereas other news apps such as Summly and Prismatic sort articles based on common links or user-selected interests, Wavii uses natural language processing to sort through the infinite stream of articles, videos, tweets and other media and summarizes them based on their actual content, highlighting their facts and news events. The end result is a newsreel that mimics Facebook’s Timeline, allowing users to scroll through a list and click on items of interest to see a selection of original sources.

Wavii is freaking awesome. It tackles the biggest bitch when it comes to searching for or browsing news. The duplication problem. Apparently the average news story turns into 126 articles. That’s a shit ton of duplicate information. What sucks the worst are those sites that just give a picture that links back to an original source. Shit waste of time to click those links. But can you tell it’s not original content from Google News? Hell no.

But Wavii is like some sort of magic. Under tabs labeled My Feed, Popular, Technology, Entertainment, Sports, Political, Business and World, the app’s main feed gives a run-down of the latest headlines. If you click on one, you’re offered a list of original sources covering the topic.  If you connect your Wavii profile to your Facebook or Twitter accounts, the “Discover Topics” section will actually search the content in your own social network to suggest news topics you might find of interest. It actually places articles together by topic, not by keywords. It’s freaking awesome. But how does Wavii do it?

Wavii founder Adrian Aoun, a former Microsoft employee, spent years researching how to teach a machine to understand natural language processing, to understand content and boil it down to one theme.

Since a young age, I had been surrounded by the study of language,” Aoun told Business Insider in 2012. “My father, a linguist who studied under Chomsky at MIT, taught me plenty about how humans learn to speak. I realized I could mimic this learning with a piece of software, and in essence, get a computer to read the Web, and thus power the product that I wanted to build.

Wavii also offers a social experience. You can like, dislike, comment on and share headlines to your Wavii following, Facebook, Twitter or by email. Yes, other Wavii users, as well as your contacts, can “follow” you if they admire your views or enjoy the articles you share. Facebook friends and Twitter followers. The app sends notifications when others read an article you shared, which are fairly pointless (although they can feel like a nice happy little pat on the back that maybe you’re not such a weirdo after all).

Anyway, Wavii kicks ass, and now Google wants it. Actually, Google’s wanted it since before it even launched. One source said the 25-person startup turned down offers from Google and Microsoft back in 2011. But Aoun had been with the startup since 2009, and he must’ve wanted to see his technology through to the end, because he and Wavii’s investors rejected them both.

But now, if Wavii does indeed sell out to Google, the rumored price tag is in the $30-million range. Not too shabby for a company that started with $2 million in seed money just four years ago.

So what could Google do with Wavii’s technology? Oh, the possibilities. Obviously when a giant buys a dwarf, there’s always the chance he might just sit on it. But Google’s known for its innovation, so it’s less likely it would buy something as ingenious—and already developed—as Wavii simply to wipe it off the market. No, Google would be more likely to incorporate Wavii into its Google News format, which is OK in its present form, but kind of a snooze fest compared to the newer news apps. And Google could get its thumb over Wavii’s language processing—and prevent competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo from getting ahold of it.

Eventually, Google could incorporate the technology into its entire search engine,  which would be true genius. And it could also integrate Wavii’s interface – which Aoun designed based principles he loved about Facebook. He told Business Insider that Facebook updates are given in “short visual updates.” He wanted to provide a Web-based news in the same format. Killer doesn’t begin to describe it (killer of Facebook maybe).

Last month, Forrester published a blog by Nate Elliott in which the author describes an idea called “the database of affinity”—“a catalog of people’s tastes and preferences collected by observing their behaviors” on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has been using the principle for some time in the way it attempts to suggest friends and pages, as well as the ads it chooses to display. Elliott predicted if a network could “effectively harness the data from all the likes and shares and votes and reviews” it records, then it could “bring untold rigor discipline and success to brand advertising.

But in an April 15 Forbes piece, Elliott elaborated on the subject, foretelling that Google—not Facebook—would one day build the ultimate database of Affinity. Elliott believes Google will win the race because it possesses a broader affinity data set—even though Facebook may have more “affinity” data, Google has a ton more data overall, and the affinity data it possesses covers a much broader range of social actions. Already Google tracks the likes of 800 million YouTube users each month, as well as the social connections and shares of almost 500 million Gmail users. Plus, the Google search index covers the contents of billions of blog posts, everything on Twitter, every review and any article posted to the Web. That’s a shit ton more information that Facebook has.

Elliott didn’t know anything about the possible acquisition of Wavii yet, or if he did he sure didn’t let it show. So imagine the affinity database Google can amass if it can acquire Wavii’s genius technology and interface. That $30 million is sounding like a pretty big bargain for Google about now.