Lone Canadian Startup Reaches TechCrunch Disrupt’s Battlefield

Waterloo’s Maluuba launched yesterday on the Battlefield of TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

Maluuba is the equivalent of Apple’s Siri but on Android. Self-labeled the “do-engine,” Maluuba helps you find exactly what you want, helps you organize life, and lets you share interesting results with your friends.

In his Disrupt coverage TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois wrotethat Maluuba is actually more reminiscent of Siri before Apple bought it.

Maluuba isn’t shy about comparing itself to Siri and as the company’s co-founder Sam Pasupalak told me last week, the team believes that its solution is actually superior to Siri. Maluuba, says Pasupalak, sees it as its mission to make it really easy for you to find what you want. In his view, the next evolution of search has to do away with ten blue links and just allow users to get to “do” as fast as possible.

At this point, Maluuba focuses on 18 domains that the service currently “understands.” Restaurants, movies, and general knowledge questions are powered by Wolfram Alpha’s answer engine and Yelp, Eventful, Rotten Tomatoes, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Calendar, and Wikipedia are among the other APIs used by the service.

Maluuba received a $2 million Series A investment from Samsung Ventures in February and currently employees 22 people.

Yesterday’s TechCrunch coverage hints that Samsung could pre-install the app on some of its devices in the future. According to Pasupalak, the company is also talking to other Android OEMs and “there is a good chance we’ll see the service pre-installed on a number of Android phones in about six months or so.”