

SemanticHacker - nextmoveone
http://www.semantichacker.com/

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Xichekolas
_3\. ASSIGNMENT OF RIGHTS: Upon entry into the Challenge, Entrant shall grant
TextWise an irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive worldwide
right and license under its intellectual property (including without
limitation patent) rights to use the entry for all uses throughout the world.
If Entrant is selected by Sponsor to receive the award, Entrant will
irrevocably assign and transfer all rights, title and interest in their entry,
including but not limited to their copyrights, patent(s) rights and all other
proprietary or intellectual property rights to the Sponsor._

So is this the Publishers Clearing House of business plan competitions? String
along a bunch of people, pay one that happens to be 78, then run with hundreds
of good ideas?

Interesting ploy, but seems a bit spammy and underhanded.

~~~
paulsb
Exactly my thoughts as well. I am surprised they don't ask you to sign over
your soul too! They don't even have to select a winner:

 _TextWise does not claim or promise to select any Entrant or dispense any
money if, in the Sponsor’s sole discretion, none of the entries meet the
Sponsor’s Challenge criteria._

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pg
This looks very dubious. Basically, if you start a startup for them, they'll
pay you $100k in salary, plus up to $900k more. But that is an _upper bound._
It's only a million dollar contest in the sense that no matter how valuable
your work, they will not pay you more than a million dollars.

~~~
zearles
Also, the $900K can only come from the first year's revenues. How many
sites/products will make that much in the first year? Sounds like a real
ripoff.

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cousin_it
One of my favorite texts about the SemWeb:

[http://blahsploitation.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-always-
figured...](http://blahsploitation.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-always-figured-that-
at-least-rdf-was.html)

 _Computers are symbol processing machines. All the hits of computing. All the
mega-applications. All the applications that have actually made a difference
in the world. They are all examples of this same principle : identify an
interesting syntactic commonality and create a tool to support working with
it. Without worrying what the data means... Relational databases? The web?
Blogging tools? PhotoShop? Java? All of them are widely adopted, generic
solutions, because they make interesting syntactic generalizations but are
semantically uncommited._

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bct
The Semantic Signatures® demo they have on there is pretty crummy, judging by
the few test passages I pasted in.

I have yet to see NLP that isn't more trouble than it's worth.

