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Google drops cash on soothsayers

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Predicts company will predict the future

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 6th May 2010 07:02 GMT

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The word "impossible" is apparently absent from the Googlonian lexicon. Mountain View's investment arm has just sunk a chunk of coin into a company whose goal is to predict the future.

According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report, Google Ventures has invested an "undisclosed sum" in Recorded Futures, which GV says "extracts time and event information from the Web," and "offers customers new ways to analyze the past, present and the predicted future".

Recorded Future seems a natural fit with Google: it's data fueled, analytically driven, and not afraid to make overarching, überconfident statements such as "Recorded Future brings a paradigm shift to analytics," which it declares in a 3,000-word white paper on "Temporal Analytics" that includes quotes from Shakespeare, Sun Tzu, and Virgil.

While Google may or may not incorporate Recorded Future's analytics into its own proprietary algorithmical stew, it seems to have acquired a team that treats each and every iota of data seriously, and takes as a self-evident truth the old US Army slogan: "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer." ®

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