The Slater Technology Fund has invested $250,000 in [Public Display,] a new Providence start-up company [founded by Jamestown resident William O'Farrell] that’s developing software to extract specific pieces of information from Web sites [using a combination of AI and natural language-processing techniques].

The company’s technology sounds similar to that of another firm that began in Providence. Simpli.com was started in 1999 by a group of graduate students and professors at Brown University. Their technology, which used linguistics and cognitive science, was designed to improve Internet searches by sorting and displaying results according to the context in which the search terms were found. In 2000, that company was bought by NetZero, a California-based technology company, for $23.5 million in cash and stock.

The company’s long-term goal is to offer products to Internet advertising networks, helping them to place ads more effectively by putting them on Web sites that match certain demographics, he said.

O'Farrell, a local serial entrepreneur, graduated from Brown in 1984 and went to Harvard Law.  Straight out of college, he headed the Company of Science and Art; the company developed the video editing tool AfterEffects and was bought by Adobe (www.adobe.com) in 1994.  He has also co-founded SpeechWorks on speech recognition technology from MIT's Media Labs; SpeechWorks went public in 2000 and was bought by Nuance (www.nuance.com) in 2003.  Most recently, he co-founded Open Air Inc., a Boston-based provider of professional service automation systems.

The company is on Chestnut Street in Providence’s jewelry district and has nine full-time employees.

Thanks to Providence’s revitalization over the past 5 to 10 years, he said, the city has become attractive enough to keep college graduates here.