IBM pushes mobile developers to utilize the Watson platform

IBM CEO Ginny Rometty pitched mobile developers on Watson and launched a global competition to promote apps for the cognitive computing platform. In a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Rometty outlined IBM’s mobile strategy for Watson. Big Blue recently formed a Watson business group to focus on monetizing cognitive computing. Rometty said that the IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge will run three months to court applications that leverage Watson’s technology. 

At the Mobile World Congress event today, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty laid down the gauntlet for mobile developers. Over the next three months, IBM will host its Watson Mobile Developer Challenge to find the best ideas for mobile apps that can take advantage of Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities. Three winners will join the IBM Ecosystem program and receive assistance from Big Blue to turn their ideas into commercial applications. But IBM stands to gain just as much from this as the winners do. The contest is IBM’s latest step in its quest to make Watson a $10 billion business, and to use the cloud to get it there. As it stands today, most mobile or desktop applications don’t have the computing power to handle the types of natural language processing and artificial intelligence models that Watson uses. Hosting Watson as a cloud service that applications can access via API changes this.