The IBM supercomputer and human player, Brad Rutter, each had $5,000 on the scoreboard, while Ken Jennings, who had bested Watson in the much-publicized practice match, ended with $2,000.

Watson missed some questions and in interesting ways. At one point Watson repeated a wrong answer, the “1920s,” which Jennings had just said. Host Alex Trebeck referred to these as “weird little moments.”

Watson sprang to a huge lead early. By the first commercial break, Watson had $5,200 to Rutter’s $1,000, and $200 for Jennings. It began a serious run interestingly enough after hitting the Daily Double and making a bet. This is interesting in that Watson, in the practice match which it ultimately lost, showed a weakness in situations where betting was called for. This was a weakness that Jennings exploited to his benefit. This made it a surprise when Watson threw down and bet $1,000, more than it had on the board at the time.

I asked Stephen Baker (pictured), author of the forthcoming book on the match, “Final Jeopardy,” to call me after the episode aired for a little color commentary from the point of view of someone who was in the studio to witness it. Our conversation, which I recorded on Google Voice, is below.

Steve Baker Talks about The IBM Jeopardy Challenge, Day 1 by ahess247

ON THE CREEPY LINE
“There is what I call the creepy line.The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
–October 2010

ON BRAIN IMPLANTS, WHICH WOULD CROSS THE CREEPY LINE
“I would argue that implanting something in your brain is beyond the creepy line–at least for the moment, until the technology gets better. As far as I know, we do not have a medical lab working on implants … As far as I know.”
–October 2010

ON PRIVACY:
“Streetview, we drive exactly once. So you can just move, right?”
–October 2010

ON CARS:
“It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”
–September 2010

ON THE BORG:
“What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.”
–September 2010

ON EXTENDING GOOGLE’S MISSION TO YOUR BRAIN:
“With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
–September 2010

ON YOUR FACEBOOK PHOTOS
“Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!”
–August 2010

ON FINANCE:
“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
–March 2010

ON YOUR NEEDS:
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
–August 2010

ON PRIVACY:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
–December 2009

ON M&A AND “ADULT SUPERVISION”:
“One day Larry and Sergey bought Android, and I didn’t even notice. Think about the strategic opportunities that has created. Sergey found Google Earth one day while he was surfing on the Web. And then he walked into my office and told me he bought them. “And I said, ‘for how much, Sergey?’ And it turned out to be a few million.”
–October 2009

ON ‘DON’T BE EVIL’
“‘Don’t be evil’ is misunderstood. We don’t have an ‘Evilmeter’ we can sort of apply–you know–what is good and what is evil….The rule allows for conversation. I thought when I joined the company this was crap…it must be a joke. I was sitting in a room in [the] first six months…talking about some advertising…and someone said that it is evil. It stopped the product. It’s a cultural rule, a way of forcing the conversation especially in areas that are ambiguous.”
–June 2008

ON THE ‘EVILMETER’:
“We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve [China] at all was worse evil.”
– Jan. 2006

ON EVIL:
“Evil is what Sergey says is evil.”
–-December 2002

ON IDIOTS:
“People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots.”
–Date Unknown

ON RUNNING GOOGLE:
“Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!”
–-January 2011

However, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster did say it would be helpful to know just how far out Apple plans its products.

Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook wouldn’t say whether Apple plans its products one year out or five years out.

“That’s a part of the magic of Apple,” Cook said. “I don’t want to let anyone know our magic because I don’t want anyone copying it.”

He did say the company is happy both with how it is doing now and with what is to come.

“In my opinion, Apple is doing its best work ever,” he said. “We are all very happy with the product pipeline.”

Cook noted several times how Apple is struggling to keep up with demand for the iPhone. He also said that the company has “unparalelled breadth and depth” among its employees.

“Excellence has become a habit,” Cook said. “We feel very very confident about the future of the company.”

Cook said that despite recent blowout sales, Apple still has just a tiny portion of all computer sales or all phone sales.

“It would seem like there is enormous opportunity still there,” he said.

Update, 3:02 pm PT: Apparently no one wanted to be “that guy” and ask a question related to Jobs’s health. The conference call just ended and Munster’s question was as close to the subject as any analyst was willing to veer. All the rest of the questions were directly product related.

• A lot of iSales: Apple sold 7.3 Million iPads, 16.2 Million iPhones in December Quarter
• Apple’s Earnings Insanely Great

As ZDNet reports, Watson won the round with $4,400, while Ken Jennings had $3,400 and Brad Rutter brought in $1,200.

The game has been in the planning stages for years, and has been written about several times. The New York Times covered IBM’s work in a big story in 2009.

The whole point of teaching a computer to play “Jeopardy” lies in the complex computing work that’s required to make a machine understand natural human language and detect the same subtle cues of human speech that humans learn to understand over the years. “Jeopardy” questions can involve clever turns of phrases, riddles and other tricks of speech that can confuse a computer in ways that a game of chess won’t. Computers have already defeated humans at chess, you’ll recall, and it was an IBM computer that did it.

After the “Jeopardy” match, the human players said Watson had one distinct advantage: It doesn’t get psyched out. If another player wins a string of questions, it doesn’t suffer from the emotional response of losing confidence.

I don’t usually watch “Jeopardy,” or any game show for that matter. But I’m looking forward to seeing how the real game turns out.

Below is a rough video by ZDNet’s Larry Dignan, who attended the round.

In practice, Sponge appears to be a sort of community-sourced FAQ, where both representatives of a company and users can answer questions posed by users. You can see an example here, for the venture capital firm True Ventures.

Sponge seems somewhat similar to customer service plug-in Get Satisfaction, but with a focus on creating content that will engage an audience on the company’s own site. There’s also a company called Opzi that’s working on “Quora for the enterprise,” though it seems more oriented toward internal communications.

True Ventures, incidentally, appears to have led a $500,000 seed funding round for Sponge this past spring, which also included Matt Mullenweg’s Audrey Capital.

Sponge is led by CEO Krutal Desai, who had previously been with ACS, the SEO and social media advisory company that had helped many top blogs grow their traffic significantly a couple of years back. Web developer Henry Khachatryan is also a co-founder.

According to a published bio for Desai, Sponge was founded in 2009 after he graduated from UC Berkeley, and its customers include Intuit, Eventbrite, Vespa, TechStars and the Red Cross. The company maintains an active blog about building online communities.

Here’s how Sponge describes itself:

Sponge powers question and answer communities for brands, media outlets, and topical sites. Our Q&A platform enables online communities to ask questions and share answers in a structured manner.

Sponge is a proven, successful leader in developing customized communities around Q&A. Our technology unites traditional social features with question-and-answer functionality to foster knowledge sharing, collaboration, and customer engagement.

We believe we are working on the next generation of online community software that millions of people will use everyday to exchange information.

Q&A has been a field of Web development since at least the early days of Ask Jeeves. After the success of sites like Yahoo Answers, it has surged back again, with Quora, Facebook, many start-ups and even Ask.com launching social Q&A products in the last year.

Twitter execs have often expressed a desire to improve their relevancy and discovery efforts so that the service’s constant stream of updates does not overwhelm users. Now, long after stating the priority, they’ve hired a team to make that happen.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone had served as an adviser to Fluther, which had been backed with $600,000 in funding from angel investors including Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and FF Angel. Three-year-old Fluther had launched its own site, which focused on matching people with questions to experts with answers, as well as on a white-label tool for others to offer Q&A.

Along with announcing the acquisition, Twitter made the stunning disclosure that it now has three times as many employees as it had last year. The company said more than half its team is dedicated to engineering and operations.

Twitter has for most of its existence had plenty of funding, but it started staffing up seriously only in the past year or so, despite recurring problems with uptime. The company just raised $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation in a round led by Kleiner Perkins.

It’s short, and it’s good stuff. Ev Williams and Biz Stone come off as funny, likable and confident. Like the kind of guys that could run a cool company or something.

During his introduction of Facebook’s Places geo-location offering yesterday afternoon, like any good geek on launch day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hopping excitedly onstage about the rollout and promised more to come in the months ahead.

“We have a lot of other interesting launch nights coming out this summer,” he said to the crowd of media gathered in the decked-out cafeteria of the social networking behemoth’s HQ in Palo Alto, Calif.

Since summer is ending in a few weeks, he and I had a short chat after the presentation about exactly what that meant.

“This is just the start of a lot more to come, because I think it’s important that we bring out as many features and innovations as quickly as we can,” said Zuckerberg, whose kinetic demeanor appeared to be channeling a 12-pack of energy drinks.

He talked about a start-up night, as well as one devoted to Facebook’s recently released beta Questions product, which he said he thinks could be massive.

The feature, like Yahoo Answers or Quora, gives users the ability to get answers to their questions from friends and even the larger community.

“The way we do search right now doesn’t address exactly what people might be looking for,” said Zuckerberg. “Instead of messing around on Web pages, someday, you should put a request into a phone and have it beep with the right answer.”

I don’t think Zuckerberg was meaning to delivering a specific smack upside the head to Google (GOOG)–he must like the search giant a little since he has hired so many of its employees–although that’s the market that Facebook is aiming at, of course.

And, indeed, it’s aimed changing how search is done, using a smart melding of people knowledge and deep troves of data to deliver more than the brute-force results consumers get now via search.

Zuckerberg declined to name what else was up–”We have not made that public yet”–but it’s good to see a founder so engaged, in the style of Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL), Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN) and also, of course, the Google twins, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

While Facebook was clearly riding in the wake of the innovation of others in geo-location–such as Foursquare–with its Places entry, the race might not always be to the swift.

In fact, Zuckerberg seems to be hoping it is to the pretty fast and very steady.

So here are answers to some of the most common questions I’ve received, in hopes they may help clear up any confusion. One caveat: Apple is offering a “sneak preview” on Thursday of a forthcoming revision to the iPhone operating system, which powers the iPad, so some changes might be revealed.

Can you print from an iPad? Apple (AAPL) didn’t build in a printing function, so you can’t just tap a menu button to print an email, photo or Web page. But a few third-party apps allow printing of some items from an iPad to a networked printer. One is Print Online. It costs $5 and I tested it successfully. But these apps are complicated and limited workarounds—inadequate substitutes for built-in printing.

The iPad lacks a USB port, so how do you get files into it? Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad has the familiar Apple connector port and comes with a cable that links this port to a USB port on a PC or Mac. Then, using iTunes on the PC or Mac, you can sync over to the device your songs, photos, videos, contacts, apps and more.

New to the latest version of iTunes is a function that will also transfer to the iPad files like Microsoft Office documents. But this feature only works if you’ve installed on your iPad certain programs that can edit these documents, such as Apple’s optional $10 word-processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs. Documents can be moved in the other direction, too.

You also can get some types of documents into the iPad wirelessly, if you receive them as email attachments or as downloads from the Web. For example, if you receive a Word-document attachment, and you have Apple’s Pages word processor installed, you can send it to Pages, where it can be stored and edited. Pages can then send back the edited version.

Is there a way to type on the iPad without laying it flat and using the virtual keyboard? There are several. Apple sells a $39 case that bends to angle the device in a more convenient typing position (and allows for hands-free video watching). The company also sells a $69 accessory physical keyboard that features a dock at the rear to hold the iPad upright. In addition, you can type on the iPad using Apple’s $69 wireless keyboard for the Mac, which can be held on your lap.

Can I run Windows or Mac programs on the iPad? Not unless their makers produce iPad versions of these programs. The iPad doesn’t run the Macintosh or Windows operating systems, so it can’t run programs designed for them. It runs the iPhone operating system, which is only compatible with iPhone and iPad apps, of which there are more than 150,000. There are some iPad and iPhone apps that let you remotely control Windows and Mac computers, so you could indirectly run Windows and Mac programs via the screen of an iPad, but that isn’t like running the programs locally.

I hear the iPad lacks multitasking. What are the downsides of this? First, let me clarify that the iPad (and iPhone) can technically perform multitasking, or running more than one program at once. But Apple has chosen to limit this ability to some of its own built-in apps, and deny it to third-party apps. For instance, the built-in email program will continue to receive messages while you are watching a movie on the built-in video player.

The downsides of denying multitasking to all apps are considerable. For example, you can’t listen to streaming music from the Pandora music app while checking email. And you can’t view fresh Twitter posts while on other apps. You have to close the app you’re in, then re-launch a Twitter app and wait for it to fetch the new posts. And, you can’t, say, check email or surf the Web while waiting for a complex game to load in the background, because the game stops once you change to another app.

Since the iPad’s battery is sealed in, how do I replace it? The battery isn’t designed to be replaceable by the user. Apple will replace your iPad with one containing a fresh battery for $107, including shipping. The process takes up to a week. Most important, you will lose all your personal data unless you back it up regularly to your computer and restore it on the replacement iPad. Details are at: apple.com/support/ipad/service/battery/.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free of charge, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

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More iPad Coverage »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100407/the-answers-to-your-questions-about-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100311/you-ask-jimmy-wales-answers-a-crowd-sourced-interview-with-mr-wikipedia/ http://allthingsd.com/20100311/you-ask-jimmy-wales-answers-a-crowd-sourced-interview-with-mr-wikipedia/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:51:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17263 Jimmy Wales’s Wikipedia relies almost entirely on free contributions from its users to create a mammoth Web encyclopedia.

Could an enterprising/lazy blogger use the same technique to interview Wales?

Surely someone else has thought about this stunt before. But I’ve never heard of it, so it’s new to me. I tried it out yesterday when Wales dropped by the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit: I asked my Twitter pals to suggest questions I should ask the Wikipedia co-founder, and–boom!–I got plenty of suggestions.

Some of the crowdsourced queries:

• What is Wikipedia’s funding target for 2010? What happens if it doesn’t reach it?
• Has Jimmy looked at selectable, respectable and relevant ads from big brands as a means of revenue?
• What is he doing to promote Wikipedia in schools as a tool?
• Is he warming to the idea of paying contributors?

Pretty good stuff! I don’t think I could rely entirely on reader questions to conduct an interview–Wales and I also took time to chat about other topics, like Wikipedia’s push-pull relationship with Google (GOOG). But it certainly was a useful starting point.

Which is a pretty good way to think about Wikipedia in general.

Thanks to @Albertoriva, @msmobileconverg, @kavidmathis, @ac_luke and @jasonhirschhorn (yup, that Jason Hirschhorn), among others, for their suggestions.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100311/you-ask-jimmy-wales-answers-a-crowd-sourced-interview-with-mr-wikipedia/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100201/youtube-nabs-a-sit-down-with-barack-obama/ http://allthingsd.com/20100201/youtube-nabs-a-sit-down-with-barack-obama/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:39:06 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=15721 Yet another tie-up between Google and the White House: A one-on-one interview between Barack Obama and YouTube.

Google’s (GOOG) video site says it has collected 11,000 questions from its viewers and will ask a small fraction of them during a live sit-down with the president at 1:45 Eastern. No word on who’s actually going to deliver the queries to POTUS, but YouTube insists that “neither the President nor his staff will know which questions will be asked ahead of time.”

The YouTube part aside, there’s not a ton of novelty here: Asking citizens to send in questions for a political Q&A isn’t a new idea. The fact that the Q&A will be streamed live is more interesting to me, since it signals the site’s increasing interest in real-time events (see, for instance, U2).

Today’s Q&A did prompt me to scan YouTube for something apposite, but disappointingly, clips from Bill Clinton’s MTV “choose or lose” appearance are hard to find. And I can’t find any version of Tabitha Soren’s famous “boxers or briefs” query. Did turn this one up, though:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100201/youtube-nabs-a-sit-down-with-barack-obama/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090922/yahoos-bartz-microsoft-deal-was-very-clever/ http://allthingsd.com/20090922/yahoos-bartz-microsoft-deal-was-very-clever/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:35:15 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=11225 Say this about Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz: She promised to answer any and all questions at a New York press conference today, and she delivered! The event, which was meant to highlight Yahoo’s new $100 million marketing campaign, went on for a good hour, and the Q&A covered a wide variety of topics (and a PG-rated F-bomb).

And when that finished, Bartz agreed to answer yet more questions. Video is below, but here’s a synopsis:

• Should press and investors really compare Yahoo (YHOO) to Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL unit? “We aspire higher than that.”
• Bartz explains and defends her Microsoft (MSFT) search deal yet again. Key point: “I never wanted a big upfront payment,” she says. “What I got was revenue, with my expenses covered. I think that’s actually very clever…cash doesn’t help me. But revenue helps me. Revenue without expenses really helps me.”
• Bartz says major Yahoo investors like Gordon Crawford support her tactics and strategy: “They’re fine. I meet with them a lot.”
• Yahoo is interested in M&A, but “nothing on an epic scale,” says Bartz. “Buying interesting sites and content so we can pull in users or smart people, always a great option for us.” Giant joint merger combinations? “That’s really hard. Small and medium-sized opportunities are really what make sense for us.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090922/yahoos-bartz-microsoft-deal-was-very-clever/feed/ 0