Apple Acquires Personal Assistant App Cue

petsounds said:

The one worrying thing to me is that Apple should already have a focused team working on technologies like this for Siri and their web services. Either they saw one chunk of tech that they liked, they just want to bury competition, or they haven't been working on this stuff at all.

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Or they just want patents and talent.

DeathChill said:

"No, no, no! You're folding my underwear all wrong Eddy. You have to fold it so the skid-marks aren't visible."

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"You're folding it wrong.."

Another thing that will be AMAZING and GROUND BREAKING when apple puts it into the iOS system. Just like SIRI, who to be honest isn't that great anymore. Google Now has surpassed it greatly IMHO.

Just like every big company, they rarely come up with the ideas, they just buy the ideas.

dmarcoot said:

No. He may have said that, but he didn't "always maintain' that. I have read an interview with him in last decade where explicitly says Apple is a software company first.

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source?

fivedots said:

Maybe, however there is a bit of PR here too. Buying the third party developers whose ideas they like looks a heck of a lot better than ripping off their ideas and killing them off.

There is also the recruitment, i.e. acqui-hire angle.

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That's really most of it, recruitment. Maybe a small company has some interesting patents or proprietary algorithms, but mostly this sort of thing is about Apple snatching up developers they think are particularly talented, or have expertise in areas Apple wants to add to their arsenal. Apple definitely doesn't do this for PR, though, or they'd be more open about such acquisitions. Apple is notoriously quiet about this sort of thing, and if it wasn't for rumor sites and very Apple-interested tech media, we wouldn't hear anything about it.

BrianMojo said:

I love Apple products but Google Now is definitely currently out-classing Apple. This seems like a much needed catch-up in that space.

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Because unlike Apple, Google doesn't wait to announce new features once a year in a new OS. They just do it.

I don't know about every one else but I'm tired of waiting so long for so little - the iPhone 5s is extremely underwhelming and iOS 7, although beautifully redesigned, doesn't add that many new features. It took a year for them to do this? Even still, iOS 7 is still half baked with many bugs, even after how many betas? I love my iPhone and my iPad and my MacBook and wouldn't dream of switching out any of them, but I gotta say - Apple is taking their good old time on stuff that doesn't deserve it. Dare I say...they're not "innovative" enough?

They do some pretty interesting stuff over there at cue. I had been following them since the Greplin era (I have a friend from school who works there so thats a big part of it).

As far as i knew it was quite a few of ex-google employees so they got a pretty sweet team. I wouldnt be surprised if some of the acquisition was for the team.

MacRumors said:

The deal has reportedly netted Cue (formerly known as Greplin) $40 to $60 million dollars.

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So, the deal is for something between a mere 40 dollars all the way up to 60 million dollars? That's quite a spread!

(Seriously, MacRumors needs to invest $40 of its own in a journalism stylebook.)

diegogaja said:

Could they be buying it for the patents also? (I honestly didn't check to see if Cue had any patents on their product)

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Well there's this patent from Daniel Gross and Irwin Gross:

https://www.google.com/patents/US20120264404

Daniel Gross was CEO of Cue.

Interestingly, Cue was funded by Sequoia Partners.

Irwin Gross is Managing Director of Sequoia Partners:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/irwin-gross/0/72/956

Slavery is Freedom

This whole thing sounds positively Orwellian to me. I wouldn't use it.

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Rogifan said:

How ironic considering Steve Jobs always maintained Apple was a software company. Yet it seems they are behind other companies when it comes to software and cloud services.

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No, Apple is a hardware company. They only develop software in order to sell the hardware.

BrianMojo said:

I love Apple products but Google Now is definitely currently out-classing Apple. This seems like a much needed catch-up in that space.

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I don't know about that. While I like what Google Now tries to accomplish by aniticipating my needs, I think it's a WIP and find Siri to be far more useful and smarter today. For example, I just tried setting an appointment for tomorrow at 10am with Google Now but it thought I meant Saturday because it's a few minutes past midnight here. Siri is smart enough to ask if I meant 10am Friday or 10am Saturday. Also, when I told Google Now to "cancel", it brought up the definition of cancel. Siri would've canceled the appointment I just made.

The superior intelligence and usefulness of Siri extend to other things, like looking for movies, restaurants, setting reminders, navigation, reading/replying to texts, etc. making Siri more useful for my every day needs.

IMO, the main advantage of Google Now over Siri is its speed and dependability. I'm assuming Apple's new data centers in NV and OR, once they go live, will address that issue.

petsounds said:

The one worrying thing to me is that Apple should already have a focused team working on technologies like this for Siri and their web services. Either they saw one chunk of tech that they liked, they just want to bury competition, or they haven't been working on this stuff at all.

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Lol, soooo.... in the small % that has NOT used iOS 7 yet, eh?
Give it a try. The FIRST thing I noticed is how similar the new notification area is to Google Now's "Today"... or whatever they call it.