The European Commission has authorized the payment by France, an aid of 99 million euros in the project Quaero ( “I seek” in latin), led by top 23 companies in which we find the Thomson group. This research and development project which will benefit a total investment of 199 million euros over five years, aims to develop technologies of automatic processing of speech, language, music, image and the Video “. Achieving an Internet search engine to compete with American giants in the sector such as Google, is one of the main components of the project.” We are confident that the positive contribution of the programmed for European research will be higher than the distortion of competition induced by the aid,” said Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Competition, in a statement. In July last year, Germany had received the green light from Brussels to inject 120 million euros in a similar project, These us.
Germany and France were originally working on a joint technological research on the Internet, but differences were eventually lead to the separation between the two partners. The French, led by Thomson, had then chosen to focus on technologies for recognition of image and video within the Quaero project, while the Germans, led by Employs (entity Bertelsmann), SAP and Semens, have decided to focus on research semantics with These us.