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Persuadio: Finding plankton in an ocean of data
“I cannot stress strongly enough how early we are in all this,” technology writer and
analyst Mitch Ratcliffe says at the end of a conversation about Persuadio, the company
he founded. Indeed, there isn’t enough room to describe it all here, but these are
highlights. At PC Forum Persuadio will launch MyDensity, a free Java-based tool
that creates a visualization of a Technorati-style “link cosmos” (SEE RELEASE 1.0, JULY
2003) – all the website/weblog links to a particular site. “We hope people use it as a
tool to browse their maps and discover connections,” says Ratcliffe. But that’s just the
start. The company is in the process of building an enterprise edition that can track
memes as they spread across the Net. First, Persuadio’s configurable Web crawler
gathers the location and timestamp (from blogs) of all the instances of a particular
phrase – say, “PC Forum.” Then Persuadio can visualize that data and show the
spread of an idea through a network over time. Finally, the software will include analytical
tools to map traffic levels as well as the “social” relationships among the various
sites that mentioned an idea: Who reads which sites? How did the idea get
passed on? “You’ll be able to see strong social ties, weak links, well-worn paths
between entities…” says Ratcliffe. In addition to its own Web crawler, Persuadio uses
a Google commercial license to gather data, and may partner with blog-indexing
sites such as Feedster or Technorati, says Ratcliffe. But he’s got another idea as well:
“Instead of SETI@home, you could have Google@home. We will open-source our
Web crawler so that anyone can make an index about themselves or their interests.
We just ask that people give that data back to us. It’ll offer a much more granular
view of the world,” and without the need for Google’s huge data center. “We’re still
only able to describe the first few feet of this ocean of data,” says Ratcliffe. “We want
to get to a point where we can see plankton instead of just looking for whales.”
Send Word Now: Lack of communication breakdown
“I started researching group communication before 9/11,” says Send Word Now
founder Sandy Cohen. “Everyone was going to be reachable with one identifier, but
no one knew if it’d be a phone number, e-mail, text messaging ID, or something else.
After 9/11, I heard hundreds of stories about communication breakdown. It was a
question of the reliability of public communication systems.” So he built Send Word
Now, which allows an individual to broadcast a message to a group of people, from
any device (landline, mobile phone, computer) and over any communication network
(phone, cell-phone network, the Web). It also allows users to ask poll-like
questions and gather responses. He first started selling the service to companies and
government agencies preparing emergency response and business continuity plans.
“But as we worked with customers, we noticed that people used it more frequently –
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