

Katango Acquired by Google - econner
https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.katango.com/announcement.html

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binarysolo
Prolly an acqui-hire? I vaguely remember they had a friend sorting product for
Facebook that was dead in the water once FB itself pushed features that were
exactly like it.

Grats to the exit though.

Edit: Ah, more info here [http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/google-acquires-
katango-the...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/google-acquires-katango-the-
automatic-friend-sorter/)

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friggeri
Shameless plug: <http://fellows-exp.com> We're a team of scientists from INRIA
working on automatic community detection and we launched this experiment at
the beginning of the year, already seeing great results.

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DiabloD3
I find this mildly ironic that url is being hosted on AWS.

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angryasian
was auto grouping based on your friends information ever really that hard. You
look at your friends info.. i see they have set location as "cityxyz" put them
in list "cityxyz". These friends have employer "wxy" create list "wxy" and
place people in this list. I mean with the amount of structured data that
people provided on Facebook.. didn't seem like it was that complicated to me.

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lien
what katango is undertaking is an extremely complex task. they're using
machine learning and AI. what you are saying is just classifying people based
on heuristics, not AI and this is not what katango is doing. Basically think
of AI as putting a bunch of characteristics of each person in a 2 dimensional
matrix and optimizing their characteristics based on AI algorithms.

I bet the reason why google bought them is to apply their work to google+ and
to compete with Facebook, which is where FB is lacking.

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angryasian
well what you are describing is hardly what katango was doing in their
product. You are probably describing their big vision, which all companies use
to sell their product (Color described themselves as the all eyes watching
tool from Batman movie, far from reality). They did the standard lists of ,
location, work , school etc. Nothing as abstract that requires the AI you are
talking about.

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lien
How do you know how they came up with those lists by simply grouping them into
location, work, etc?

Look at the lists closely. Not everyone who went to your school is included in
those lists

What you are seeing is what they want to show you. The AI happening in the
backend is really complex. But of course, you don't have to believe everything
I say. You should check out the background of those 3 co-founders. They are
all AI guys, and they are not likely to want to solve simple problems.

