Numenta Is Imitating Your Brain

(page 2 of 2)

No wonder companies are building data centers near the cut-rate hydropowered electricity in the Pacific Northwest. Microsoft (MSFT) has even been looking into building data centers in Siberia, where fuel is cheap and air conditioning—a major expense—is a nonissue nine months of the year. According to Yahoo's (YHOO) tech research chief, Prahbakar Raghavan, the race between Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and IBM (IBM) hinges in part on which company can "turn electricity most efficiently into computing power." What's more, according to EDSA, an hour of downtime at a data center can cost as much as $6 million.

Boundless Market

Numenta is hardly alone in the market for analyzing data patterns. Vast sectors of the economy, from scientific research to marketing, are focused on finding meaningful trends in rivers of data. This is the heart of Google's business. It's crucial to the digital hunt for terrorists at the National Security Agency. Medical researchers are burrowing through patterns of genetic and health data in their hunt to conquer diseases and create new drugs. Since the basic pattern-finding challenges are similar, a breakthrough in any one of these areas could spread quickly into other industries. This means that startups like Numenta face rivals in many industries. At the same time, though, a breakthrough could open wide opportunities.

One direct rival is at IBM. Stream technology, a major initiative at IBM Research, uses supercomputers to analyze the flows of real-time data. Early customers are banks and brokerages, which are looking for patterns in financial transactions. Some might highlight inefficiencies. Others could signal changing market dynamics, giving them a chance to gird for, say, a commodity crash or a dollar movement before it occurs.

Numenta also has company in its attempts to mimic the brain. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, a pioneer in neural networking and now a vice-president for research at Fair Isaac (FIC), has designed a computing platform based upon his understanding of the neurons in the brain. He's harnessing this into an electronic butler called "Chancellor," which he says will soon be able to understand voice commands and carry out shopping and home management tasks.

If these projects take off, the market for advanced pattern recognition may be boundless. Hawkins says a horse trainer recently approached him about feeding sensors from horse's hooves into the Numenta software. Shifting patterns of the horse's weight distribution and muscle use, he says, could signal a leg injury before the animal starts to limp. That may sound like a small niche, but if using the software on hooves can prove it works, trainers could be a crucial market.

Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.