Social Companies Digging Deeper into Data Analysis
Given the recent performance from the LinkedIn IPO, there is now an ever-growing concern on whether the social media industry is not the newest market bubble (anybody remember the dot-com bust?). While Facebook is the leader in the ad-centric tech that focuses on pouring through volumes of data to learn about people relationships, turning these findings in key insights for precision advertising, and selling ad space to corporations and organizations.
The smartest minds in the world are shifting from general-purpose technologies such as making sure that our cell phone calls don’t drop to the ad-centric technologies such as Zynga’s Farmville. Why? Because that’s where the money is at right now. Here are 2 of the hottest startups in data analysis of social data.
Cloudera
The main man behind Cloudera is Jeff Hammerbacher. According to his LinkedIn profile, Hammerbacher conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning at Facebook, as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets.
Hammerbacher used his quant skills developed at Facebook to direct the creation of Hadoop, which originally developed and employed by dominant Web companies like Facebook, it is now widely used in finance, technology, telecom, media and entertainment, government, research institutions and other markets with significant data. In simple terms, Hadoop empowers any organization to easily explore complex data using custom analyses tailored to their information and questions.
Why should you care? Among current clients of Cloudera: AOL Advertising, Comscore, Groupon, Klout and Samsung.
Kosmix
Kosmix was founded by the pioneers of online shopping analysis, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who sold their first company, Junglee, to Amazon.com back in 1998. Kosmix has the mission of finding a better way to help users understand open-ended questions that don’t have a single right answer or as the founders say “find the needle in the haystack”.
This startup earns revenue from advertising related to its categorization engine. Kosmix’s engine organizes the Internet into topic pages allowing users to explore the Web by topic and presents an interphase of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics.
Kosmix’s successful approach caught the eye of Walmart and on April 18, 2011 Walmart bought Kosmix for an undisclosed sum to expand the retail giant’s online operations. Businessweek reports that Kosmix now joins Walmar’ts newly founded @WalmartLabs unit, which explores how consumers shop using social media and mobile phones.
By Damian Davila, owner and founder of idaconcpts.com. Learn more about the latest trends in online marketing and email marketing at his blog. Follow him on Twitter at @idaconcpts.
Posted in Social Startups. Tags: anand rajaraman, cloudera, jeff hammberbacher, kosmix, LinkedIn, venky harinarayan
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