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Yahoo's latest buy: Natural language data startup SkyPhrase

One of Yahoo's most popular products is fantasy sports leagues, so it's quite possible we could see SkyPhrase's AI technology piped in there.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor
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Maybe Cyber Monday isn't all about online deals for consumers.

Yahoo's ongoing shopping spree of startups for picking up both talent and new technologies is well known already. Nevertheless, it's somewhat appropriate that the Internet giant confirmed yet another deal on the biggest day of the year for e-commerce.

The latest target is SkyPhrase, a startup that develops natural language processing technology for data analytics.

According to the company's CrunchBase profile, so far the analytics developments have only reached as far as "web analytics and football statistics." However, one of Yahoo's most popular products is fantasy sports leagues, so it's quite possible we could see SkyPhrase's AI technology piped in there.

The team will be joining the Yahoo Labs department in New York.

That was all that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-headquartered operation had to say about it, leaving the SkyPhrase team to handle the rest of the announcement on Monday.

Here's more from the SkyPhrase team, summing up the company's mission-to-date in a nutshell while offering the tiniest glimpse at how it will be integrated at Yahoo:

At SkyPhrase, we believe online information and services would be much more powerful and user friendly if people could tell computers what they want to accomplish using natural language. The technology we developed enables computers to understand more complex and precise human language than ever before.

In Yahoo, we have found a company that not only shares our vision, but delivers a rich collection of information and services to a massive user base.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

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