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21 pointsnextmoveone6 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of my favorite texts about the SemWeb:

http://blahsploitation.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-always-figured...

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.

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.

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