We know that IBM's Watson supercomputer is good at trivia. It beat two Jeopardy champions on the iconic TV game show in 2011. But IBM wants far more from this machine. It wants Watson to feed the apps on your cellphone.
On Wednesday, at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty unveiled the IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge, encouraging the world's software developers to build mobile applications that can tap into the supercomputer's talent for data analysis and machine learning. This could yield a Siri-like voice recognition system or an app that translates text into foreign languages.
Since Watson appeared on Jeopardy, Big Blue has already transformed the supercomputer into a cloud service that businesses can use to make sense of massive amounts of information, and the push for mobile apps is another way of turning Watson into a money maker. As it ramps up Watson business -- pumping $1 billion into this fledgling operation -- IBM is just one of many companies aiming to bring a new level of data-crunching to companies everywhere. Watson is based in part on an open source platform called Hadoop, which is now used by most of the large web companies and a growing list of additional businesses, and countless other "Big Data" tools are now following in Hadoop's footsteps.
Starting March 31, Rometty said, developers can submit ideas for Watson-powered mobile applications, and later in the year, IBM will select 25 finalists who can use the Watson developer API, or application programming interface, to turn their ideas into working software. Winners also get free consulting from IBM's Interactive Experience division. But he bigger perk may be that IBM will put its weight behind these new apps once they're released into the world.
For IBM, the contest is a way of drumming up interest in its new Watson business. But the pitch may not be as effective as IBM hopes. In era where development contests known as hackathons are now shelling out up to a $1 million to winners, the promise of free consulting sounds downright stingy, especially given the amount of money Big Blue is already investing in Watson. And if IBM really wants to seed a thriving software ecosystem, it needs to give everyone access to the Watson API. That's the way it works in the modern world of software development.
This may come later. But at the moment, if you're not a contest winner, you'll have to apply for access to the API via the Watson Ecosystem program, which was first announced last November.
IBM has already built a few of its own that tap into Watson. In 2012, for instance, the company said it was working with New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to create a tool that can help medical professionals answer questions about patient treatment. Now, the trick is to reach a world of other business, and though IBM is taking things step-by-step, it's goal is enormous. The company plans on turning Watson into a $10 billion business. It may get there, but this won't happen until it invites more developers to the party.
