This is part of my Series on University Entrepreneurship.
Another success story in the annals of university spin-offs hit the wires today.
Hearty congrats to MacArthur Genius Luis von Ahn and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. Their spin-off company, ReCaptcha was acquired today by Google. You can find Google’s announcement here and additional information here.
The company came up with a clever and effective variation on traditional CAPTCHAs by using words scanned from old books and archives that computers find difficult to read. In fact, more than 100,000 sites are currently using this technology. Google will go beyond this initial application however and intends to use the technology to greatly improve some of its own text and archival scanning projects, including Google Books.
For Part Fifteen in in this Series, click here