Barney Pell

Former Powerset CEO Leaves Microsoft After Natural Language Job Search

John Paczkowski in News on September 7, 2011 at 8:00 am PT

Another departure at Microsoft.

Salesforce Buys Small Contact Management Start-Up Etacts

Liz Gannes in Social on December 21, 2010 at 11:59 am PT

Salesforce has bought Etacts, the contacts management tool, according to a source familiar with the matter. Etacts informed users today that it will shut down as of January 31 in order to “pursue other opportunities.”

A Sneak Peek Look at Microsoft's New Kumo: A Spidery Cloud? A Cloudy Spider?

Kara Swisher in News on March 2, 2009 at 5:07 pm PT

Here are three screenshots of Microsoft’s internal test of a new search product called Kumo. The long expected upgrade to Live Search from Microsoft is being tested for a public rollout later this year. Sources at Microsoft said the company has not yet decided whether it will keep the Kumo name, which sounds a little too much like that crazy dog from the Stephen King novel. Maybe that’s the point, at least related to Google. (Chomp!) In Japanese, actually, Kumo has two definitions–cloud and spider.