Reports of Wavii’s acquisition by Google surfaced earlier this week, and now that’s been confirmed. But in a more interesting piece of news coming today, Seattle-based Wavii announced that it will be shutting down its news aggregation service as part of the deal.
Wavii, which helps you find personalized feeds of the news, confirmed the deal on its website this morning. CEO Adrian Aoun wrote that “we won’t continue to offer this particular service”:
You probably know us best for our app that takes the deluge of information streaming across the web and condenses it into fast, fun updates. While we won’t continue to offer this particular service, we’ll be using our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world.
To all of our loyal Wavii users, we owe you a big thanks for all of your feedback and involvement throughout this journey. We look forward to taking our technology to the next level and delighting you with what we come up with next!
Wavii is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s top angel investors and led by Aoun, a former Microsoftie. The company uses natural language processing to help give you a healthy package of news — think about it as an automated news service that helps de-clutter your daily intake of digital content, helping to solve the problem of information overload.
There are tons of possibilities the search giant could incorporate Wavii’s technology, from search to apps to social media to mobile. We reached out to Google to find out more, but they only offered this:
“We’re impressed by the Wavii team’s progress in understanding natural language and we look forward to working with them at Google.”
For more about Wavii’s technology, check out the video below, which explains the company like this:
“Wavii is kind of like having your own team of people whose only job is to work 24-7 to find the most relevant news, photos and videos about your interests, and summarize them into updates for your feed.”
Editor’s Note: Post updated at 8:55 a.m. with comment from Google.
