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Now the company is turning the focus to its nucleus, the business sector. The IBM Watson Group, backed in part by $1 million in VC money, will work out of New York's flatiron district— painfully nicknamed "Silicon Alley." And Watson 2.0 has a new look. The computer is 24 times faster and 90 percent smaller than when it made its television debut. It's shrunk from the size of a master bedroom to three pizza boxes stacked on top of each other.Team Watson will focus on peddling Watsons to clients in data-rich industries: healthcare, financial services, retail, travel, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and publishing. The idea is to use Watson as a tool to make it easier for businesses to capitalize on big data. The supercomputer can crunch numbers at speeds way faster than traditional machines, and it can understand human queries and respond with useful insights culled from the mass of information.IBM's outlined three ways Watson can turn tricks for cash:
- Helping accelerate research, to spare companies some of the billions of dollars they spend annually on R&D;
- Making big data analytics more digestible by presenting insights in natural language and with visualizations;
- Encouraging more businesses to develop big data initiatives (which would presumably lead to 1 and 2 down the road)