Briefs: Galleon Systems expands into Europe; True Knowledge raises $4m
Time synchronisation specialist Galleon Systems is launching its NTP Time Servers in several countries including Spain, Poland, Germany, Italy and the United Arab Emirates.
NTP is widely used to synchronise the time on computers on the Internet and provides the ability to access time services, organise the time synchronisation subnet and adjust the local clock in each participating subnet computer. Typically, NTP provides accuracies of between 1 and 50 milliseconds depending on the time source and network paths.
The company said its technology was already used by thousands of organizations including 3M, Shell, NASDAQ, AIB Bank, Fujitsu, Buckingham Palace, Ford Credit, Rolls Royce, GlaxoSmithKline, Deutsche Bank, Bank of England, Sharp, Daimler Chrysler and Cannon.
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True Knowledge Ltd, which says it's pioneering a radically new approach to Internet search, has raised over $4m in a second round of funding.
It said its technology has achieved significant milestones towards the internet industry goal of intelligently answering, in plain English, questions asked on any topic.
The second round funding was led by existing investors Octopus Ventures and angel investors. It brings the total raised by True Knowledge in the last 12 months to $5.4m. The funding will enable the company to expand its management team, further develop its products and move to a roll-out in the next 12 months.
Traditionally, search engines use statistical relationships between the words to relevant find documents and web pages. But these systems cannot make sense of the content. Rather than try to teach computers to read and understand the thousands of text-based web pages that are produced every hour, True Knowledge side-steps this problem by structuring this knowledge in a way that computers can access.
The result is a unique online tool that is able to provide an intelligent response to questions without human intervention by applying information gathered from several sources.
Chairman William Reeve said the Cambridge-based company's technology had "impressed everybody who's seen it over the last few months and it is terrific for the team, as well as for Cambridge and the UK as a whole, that this confidence has been reflected in one of the biggest pre-revenue fundraisings in the European venture sector this year."
True Knowledge said it has run a beta trial with over 10,000 expert users that has provided proof of concept and knowledge addition complementing the in-house development of the service's encyclopaedic capabilities.
