Tweet
Nothing like some old fashioned industrial policy -- what we call "corporate welfare" here in the States -- applied to the new economy.
Would you support your country spending tax money to compete against Yahoo! and Google?
Would you support your country spending tax money to compete against Yahoo! and Google?
Europe searching for a rival to Google
Tom Braithwaite, Paris and Tobias Bayer, Hamburg
January 17, 2006
MEDIA group Bertelsmann is close to signing up as German leader on a project to create a multimedia search engine to challenge US dominance.
Project Quaero - from the Latin "I search" - was trumpeted by French President Jacques Chirac in a new year's address as a Franco-German response to "the global challenge posed by Google and Yahoo". It is part of an attempt by French and German governments to mobilise public and private resources to close the research and development gap between Europe and the more innovative economies of the US and Japan.
Funding on the French side of up to E150 million ($240 million) will come from the new Agency for Industrial Innovation, set up on the recommendation of Jean-Louis Beffa, chairman of Saint-Gobain, the glass and ceramics group.
Thomson, the media services and equipment group, will lead the French team, along with the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
The formation of the German team was stalled by the German elections but the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology on Friday will assemble potential members to a meeting in Berlin.
Siemens chairman Heinrich von Pierer, who is close to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is playing the same co-ordinating role on the German side as Mr Beffa.
The most striking proposal seeks to create a search engine for the general public that can sort through audio, images and video as well as text.
Current multimedia search engines rely on written descriptions of audio, images and video, which lead to inaccurate results.
Quaero would incorporate techniques to transcribe audio automatically as well as image and video recognition.
As the amount of video and audio proliferates on the web - such as for podcasts - the downloadable audio that took off last year - it is becoming harder to sort through. This is also true for archives at the French National Audiovisual Institute and the German Studio Hamburg.
French sources say Bertelsmann - through its Empolis data processing subsidiary - might sign up officially as soon as Friday although an informal agreement has already been reached. Empolis would say only that it was studying the project.
Deutsche Telekom is reportedly a consortium member but is reluctant to take an active role. There are also concerns about its links with Google.
Tom Braithwaite, Paris and Tobias Bayer, Hamburg
January 17, 2006
MEDIA group Bertelsmann is close to signing up as German leader on a project to create a multimedia search engine to challenge US dominance.
Project Quaero - from the Latin "I search" - was trumpeted by French President Jacques Chirac in a new year's address as a Franco-German response to "the global challenge posed by Google and Yahoo". It is part of an attempt by French and German governments to mobilise public and private resources to close the research and development gap between Europe and the more innovative economies of the US and Japan.
Funding on the French side of up to E150 million ($240 million) will come from the new Agency for Industrial Innovation, set up on the recommendation of Jean-Louis Beffa, chairman of Saint-Gobain, the glass and ceramics group.
Thomson, the media services and equipment group, will lead the French team, along with the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
The formation of the German team was stalled by the German elections but the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology on Friday will assemble potential members to a meeting in Berlin.
Siemens chairman Heinrich von Pierer, who is close to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is playing the same co-ordinating role on the German side as Mr Beffa.
The most striking proposal seeks to create a search engine for the general public that can sort through audio, images and video as well as text.
Current multimedia search engines rely on written descriptions of audio, images and video, which lead to inaccurate results.
Quaero would incorporate techniques to transcribe audio automatically as well as image and video recognition.
As the amount of video and audio proliferates on the web - such as for podcasts - the downloadable audio that took off last year - it is becoming harder to sort through. This is also true for archives at the French National Audiovisual Institute and the German Studio Hamburg.
French sources say Bertelsmann - through its Empolis data processing subsidiary - might sign up officially as soon as Friday although an informal agreement has already been reached. Empolis would say only that it was studying the project.
Deutsche Telekom is reportedly a consortium member but is reluctant to take an active role. There are also concerns about its links with Google.
Comment