Currently rereading Sapiens by Harari and was surprised to learn for myself that Cunei Form is cuneiform. I always thought that the name of the once-popular OCR system from the Russian company Cognitive, CuneiForm, a competitor to FineReader, was just nonsensical gibberish. And it turns out, it’s cuneiform.
Went to Google what’s up with Cognitive.
Since its foundation in 1990, a lot has happened with Cognitive Technologies. They developed text recognition algorithms, which in 1992-93 were integrated into Lotus Organizer, the graphic editor CorelDRAW, the business card scanning system BCR, and the bank form scanning software of Electronic Data Systems, while the CuneiForm application was sold through retail networks and bundled with popular scanners (Epson, HP, Xerox, and others).
Today, nothing is left of that business. Around 2014, the focus shifted to autonomous vehicles, and for a while, Olga Uskova was sharing achievements in the field of self-driving harvesters in my news feed. Essentially, this is a completely new startup, even though the name Cognitive remains the same as before.
Cognitive Technologies’ competitor, ABBYY, has long been erasing all traces of its past business in Russia, and is now headquartered in Charlotte, NC. I don’t know how they are doing, but David Yan’s company is one of the few IT companies born in the nineties that entered the global market, made a name for themselves, and are still somewhat alive to this day. The rest are either dead or nearly dead. Among them, for instance, is Kaspersky Lab, which has been losing the market rapidly for many years, not to mention as of 2023.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 