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...

It’s been some time since Charles Dickens and William Thackeray became famous with serialized novels, but the concept — making the reader wait for the next chapter — is being given a modern twist with an e-book on IBM’s effort to build a computer smart enough to beat the world’s best Jeopardy players.

Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of Stephen Baker’s Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything, has released the e-book exclusively through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. However, the e-book will be missing the last chapter — until mid-February. Once the final pre-taped Jeopardy contest between Watson, the IBM computer, and “Jeopardy” champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter has been broadcast, the final chapter will be released to the e-book's buyers. 

The winner is already known, so the fact that readers will have to wait for the ending won’t be a draw for them to buy the book.Continue reading...