Karelia licenses Watson, will end development on Oct. 5

Karelia Software announced on Monday that it has licensed the technology in its Web utility Watson to an undisclosed “large company.” Karelia will continue to support and maintain the application until Oct. 5, at which time it expects the technology’s new owner to announce a cross-platform product to which existing Watson users can migrate. Watson will reach the end of its life cycle on that date, and Karelia expects that some of its modules will cease to function afterward because the Web sites they interact with change frequently. Karelia expects such modules as eBay Watcher, Movies, Package Tracker and Phone Listings “will likely stop functioning in the near- to mid-term,” while such modules as Epicurious, PriceGrabber, Amazon.com and VersionTracker “may indeed function for a long time (because their Web site is fairly stable or we are using XML Web Services).” The company also notes that, after Oct. 5, it “will be happy to provide Watson users with other forms of support (diagnosing crashes and conflicts, helping with lost registration codes, and so forth).”