AskMeNow Inc. was an American public corporation, specializing in

mobile search Mobile may refer to: Places * Mobile, Alabama, a U.S. port city * Mobile County, Alabama * Mobile, Arizona, a small town near Phoenix, U.S. * Mobile, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Mobile ...

and

mobile advertising Mobile advertising is a form of advertising via mobile (wireless) phones or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing, mobile advertising can take place as text ads via SMS, or banner advertisements that appear embedded in a mo ...

. The

Irvine, California Irvine () is a master-planned city in South Orange County, California, United States, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The Irvine Company started developing the area in the 1960s and the city was formally incorporated on December 28, 197 ...

based company officially launched in November 2005 and ceased operations in late 2008. AskMeNow's primary offering was a consumer mobile search product based on proprietary technology that offered a natural language based interaction and dynamic content provision platform.

AskWiki

AskMeNow signed a partnership agreement with the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

to bring natural language processing to

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is, along with the Simple English Wikipedia, one of two English-language editions of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was founded on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition, and, as of , has the most arti ...

. The beta product, AskWiki, integrated some of the semantic web and natural language features of AskMeNow into English Wikipedia searches. The AskWiki engine was able to parse natural language statements and return specific answers rather than just relevant articles. The contract between AskMeNow and Wikimedia was rescinded after Jimmy Wales announced his own for profit search engine named

Wikia Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities before 2007 and later Wikia before 2019) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e. video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). Its domain is operated by Fandom, ...

Partnerships

AskMeNow partnered with a variety of content publishers to offer mobile access to these publishers’ content. These partnerships included

National Hockey League The National Hockey League (NHL; french: Ligue nationale de hockey—LNH, ) is a professional ice hockey league in North America comprising 32 teams—25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. It is considered to be the top ranked professional ...

, Merriam-Webster,

Encyclopædia Britannica The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various t ...

, and

Guinness World Records ''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a reference book published annually, listing world ...

. AskMeNow had established distribution partnerships with

Alltel Alltel Wireless was a wireless service provider, primarily based in the United States. Before acquisitions by Verizon Wireless and AT&T, it served 34 states and had approximately 13 million subscribers. As a regulatory condition of the acquisition ...

in the US and

Rogers Wireless Rogers Wireless Inc. is a Canadian wireless telephone company headquartered in Toronto, providing service nationally throughout Canada. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rogers Communications. The company had revenues of just under $15.1 billi ...

and Bell Mobility in Canada.

References

{{reflist

External links

AskMeNow Historical SEC Filings
Defunct companies based in California Marketing companies established in 2005 Companies disestablished in 2008 Digital marketing companies of the United States SMS-based question answering services Defunct internet search engines