We know that IBM’s Watson supercomputer is good at trivia. It beat two Jeopardy champions on the iconic TV game show in 2011. But IBM wants far more from this machine. It wants Watson to feed the apps on your cellphone. On Wednesday, at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty unveiled the IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge, encouraging the world’s software developers to build mobile applications that can tap into the supercomputer’s talent for data analysis and machine learning. This could yield a Siri-like voice recognition system or an app that translates text into foreign languages. Since Watson appeared on Jeopardy, Big Blue has already transformed the supercomputer into a cloud service that businesses can use to make sense of massive amounts of information, and the push for mobile apps is another way of turning Watson into a money maker.
