With (spoiler alert!) Watson winning the final showdown against Jeopardy! champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM has big post-TV plans to put him — er, it — to work. The exercise has been a marketing coup for IBM, as "Watson" and "IBM" have dominated search this week, along with Twitter — as the Twitter Dots tweet-tracker above illustrates.

Some real-world applications for the supercomputer, which is still being promoted on Twitter and Facebook, are in the works, including its first commercial deal.Continue reading...

Tonight is the kick-off to Jeopardy!'s three-night run of IBM's Watson supercomputer vs. Jeopardy! champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — the first man vs. machine competition in the show's history.

After seven years of research and planning, thousands of hours of testing and over 50 champion-level sparring matches, Watson — which was designed to compete on Jeopardy! — faces the two greatest champions in the show's history.

The grand prize for the competition will be $1 million with second place earning $300,000 and third place $200,000. Rutter and Jennings will donate 50% of their winnings to charity and IBM will donate 100% of its winnings to charity.Continue reading...

IBM promotes Watson, the nickname for its supercomputer, in a new campaign that plays up its semantic savvy — and last week's star turn on a special episode of Jeopardy!, where it easily beat champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, that will air Feb. 14-16.Continue reading...

IBM is hoping to build what may be the world's fastest supercomputer: "a 3-petaflop machine called the SuperMUC that will run on 14,000 Intel Xeon processors and require a specially designed cooling system."

In the meantime, it's pitting its current supercomputer, affectionately known as Watson, against Jeopardy! all-stars Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. If Watson wins the first Jeopardy! IBM Challenge (airing Feb. 14-16), the $1 million prize money will go to charity.

Big Blue hopes Watson's TV debut will have a halo effect on the brand, and "reveal just how far IBM researchers have pushed the boundaries of these technologies." (Hopefully this one ends better than Kasparov vs. Deep Blue.) More on the showdown after the jump.Continue reading...