Online Public Relations Thoughts

You have almost certainly read, or seen the YouTube video, of IBM's computer being readied to take on the game show, Jeopardy. It was all over the news yesterday. The feat is not only great computer science but terrific publicity for IBM's computer prowess. Even if the computer fails the first time out, or the second, the news media will carry reports about the machine, the software and how IBM is developing it. At the heart of the story is IBM's goal of producing a machine that can understand natural language queries better than any other in the world today. In other words, the publicity tactic is tied directly to the business objective. What can be better PR than that? Kudos to IBM.