metaLayer

Fourplay and Sidewinder Win MetaLayer's API Hackathon

gosdot — Sun, 20 May 2012 19:04:00 -0400

Team Fourplay (above) and Team Sidewinder (below) took home the MetaLayer API Awards at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012. Both apps were built from concept to working product in only 48 hours!

FourPlay (previously Team Serendipity) used our Text API in combination with Foursquare to take ‘missed connection’ posts from Craigslist and matched the places where the encounter occurred with location data from Foursquare’s API. The result is a brilliant way to potentially find people you might have missed by looking at who’s checking in, or who’s been at those places recently!

Sidewinder described their app as “cliffnotes for the web”. It essentially summarizes events or topics using the tagging function of our Text API coupled with the Factual API to give greater context to a particular subject. Clicking on a specific tag remixes the page and offers greater context about whatever tag was clicked on.

We’re happy we could sponsor a prize for each team: a Kindle Touch 3G for Fourplay and an AppleTV for Sidewinder!

Video of the Announcement

Update: We thought we’d go ahead and list the other teams who built on our APIs over the weekend. The numbers only represent the order they presented in at Disrupt.

72 - Serendipity/Fourplay - matches foursquare to missed connections on Craigslist
6 - Tipsters - social Q&A (uses the metaLayer API)
81 - Sidewinder - Cliffsnotes for the web, iPad App
17 - Dedic8d - Sentiment streams about anything you care about
25 - Tweet2Tracks - search twitter for beautiful images + sentiment
34 - Sentimental Diary - views how mood changes throughout the day
60 - What’s Around - figure out what to do in your neighborhood based on tweets

MetaLayer API Workshop at Disrupt 2012

gosdot — Sun, 20 May 2012 08:34:18 -0400

Slides from our workshop at TC Disrupt in NY on basic features and use of our APIs.

Integration with InfoChimps Platform & Hadoop

gosdot — Sat, 19 May 2012 14:51:00 -0400

Today at the TechCrunch: Disrupt Hackathon, metaLayer is happy to announce that we now support native integration with the Infochimps Platform and Hadoop. Through integration with the Infochimps Platform, metaLayer Dashboard users not only get access to Hadoop, but Infochimp’s analytic product Dashpot, managed database hosting, and easy Hadoop cluster management.

And that’s just where it all starts! Combined with metaLayer’s Dashboard you get the ability to work with big data with drag and drop ease, sophisticated third-party API integration and flexible visualizations for the information you care about.

Find at more at metalayer.com or follow us on Twitter @metalayer

Giveaways for #NYCDisrupt

gosdot — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:25:42 -0400

What you could win hacking on metaLayer APIs this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt! A Kindle Touch 3G and an AppleTV with HDMI Cable.

The Role Data plays in Participatory Democracy. This Google Big...

gosdot — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:45:54 -0400

The Role Data plays in Participatory Democracy. This Google Big Tent panel session was recorded on April 25th, 2012 in Moscow, Russia with Jeff Jarvis (author of “Public Parts” and “What Would Google Do?”), Jon Gosier (Director of Product at metaLayer), Konstantin von Eggert (Kommerstant FM) and Elena Paniflova (Head of Anti-Corruption Center Transparency) discussing the balance between technological advancement and public rights.

If you happen to speak Russian, you can watch the Russian lingua version here.

Chris Burrage discusses the metaLayer platform at The Paley...

gosdot — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:03:09 -0400

Chris Burrage discusses the metaLayer platform at The Paley Center in New York.

"The opportunity from Big Data (of which social data is a part) is gigantic. Even that doesn’t do it..."

gosdot — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:14:25 -0400

“The opportunity from Big Data (of which social data is a part) is gigantic. Even that doesn’t do it justice. But Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it.”

- Sameer Patel, “Tiny Insights. Big Data.”

We’re proud to be supporters of the VibrantData.org...

gosdot — Tue, 08 May 2012 06:02:08 -0400

We’re proud to be supporters of the VibrantData.org project lead by our good friends Juliette Powell and Eric Burlow!

The goal of the Vibrant Data Project (#vdat) is to enable a massive democratization in our collective ability to convert data into personal and social good. How can we enrich a Vibrant Data Ecosystem that increases access to economic opportunity, protects civil and political rights, improves environmental sustainability, increases human health and wellness, and sparks radical advances in science and education?

Ultimately what matters is how data is used, not simply the data itself. This project is a good reminder to us all.

MetaLayer Presents at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC

gosdot — Mon, 07 May 2012 09:33:21 -0400

MetaLayer will present at TechCrunch Disrupt at Pier94 in a few days! Come to our API workshop session at 3:00pm to learn how to use our Text and Image APIs in your projects. Best use of our APIs will win you a Kindle (for text hackers) or an Apple TV (for photo hackers) as well as a free metaLayer T-Shirt and Hoodie.

This will be the second Hackathon TechCrunch has organized at Pier 94 in NYC. Last years event had over 300 developers and 100 teams present, and this years event promises to be even bigger and better.

But enough about the past, let’s chat about the future.

We’ve got a lot of really great sponsored API’s, prizes and contests including AT&T, Hatch, Mashery, City Grid, Spotify, The Echo Nest, Knodes, Mobli & more!

Date: May 19, 2012

Time: 3:00pm

Presenter: Jon Gosier, Founder and Director of Product at metaLayer.

Contextual disambiguation using metaLayer’s Text and Image analysis REST APIs. metaLayer’s APIs allow users to process streams of text or images to extract contextual features where they don’t exist. For instance, extracting place names from tweets or articles using NLP to attempt to geolocate content makes it possible to then visualize where content is coming from or referencing on geospatial maps. With images, extracting text makes it possible to search words in photos or auto-categorize them based on the objects they contain.

Details regarding the metaLayer API can be found at: http://api.metalayer.com

If you’d like your API rate limits raised for your Disrupt projects, just email us at developers@metalayer.com and let us know you’re participating.

APIs for Data Science

gosdot — Mon, 07 May 2012 08:00:00 -0400

If you’re a programmer or data scientist looking for APIs to utilize in your work, look no further than api.metalayer.com!

With our various APIs you’re able to extract contextual features from streams of imagery and text. For instance take an archive millions of long form articles and auto-categorize them using our Text API or do the same for an archive of photos based on the objects they contain using our Image API.

You’ll also find new documentation pages that explain exactly what’s possible.

New Website, Check it Out!

gosdot — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:36:16 -0400

This weekend we relaunched metaLayer.com. The first thing you’ll notice is that our social community for data enthusiasts, deLv, is no longer the the landing page. You can now register for deLv at the url deLv.co. There you’ll be able to explore all the web’s social data freely and visually.

The second thing you’ll notice is that there’s much more to do across the site. We’ve fleshed out the descriptions of all our products and updated the wiki.

You’ll also find some great tools for developers and other technical people who want to delve deeper into our technology stack and research.

Real-Time Awareness

gosdot — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:23:41 -0400

Various individuals from @TechAtState’s February “Real-Time Awareness” conference speak about the new challenges of dealing with real-time data streams. This clip includes our own Jon Gosier (metaLayer), Jack Holt (Blue Ridge Information Systems), Dave Weinberger (author “Too Big to Know”), Patrick Scullin (Georgetown University), Andrew Turner (GeoIQ), Chris Damsen (NetVibes), Kim Rees (Periscopic) and more…

Watch the Video Here

#BigData Made Simple. Jon presents at GigaOm’s...

gosdot — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 17:22:35 -0400

#BigData Made Simple. Jon presents at GigaOm’s Structure:Data Conference in New York. Slides from this talk can be found here.

metaLayer won the Audience Choice Award in the Startup Showcase...

gosdot — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 13:57:00 -0400

metaLayer won the Audience Choice Award in the Startup Showcase at Strata 2012 where Director of Product Jon Gosier gave this keynote speech entitled “Democratizing Data Platforms”.

The slides from this presentation can be downloaded here.

What's Next in Tech for Journalism?

gosdot — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 13:47:43 -0400

Chris Burrage (Director of Biz Dev at metaLayer) presented along with a number of other emerging companies including: BiblioCrunch, Contently, NewsIT, Zeega and Engagio.

Colombia Journalism Review wrote a great summary of of the day:

This morning, The Paley Center for Media hosted a forum called “The Next Big Thing in Digital News Innovation,” with six presenters from “news and information startups.” Each speaker was given five minutes to explain their company and five minutes to answer questions.

The final presentation was from Christopher Burrage, the director of business development for MetaLayer, a platform for interpreting data, at this point mainly from Twitter, and analyzing it based on “sentiment analysis, influence detection, and optical character recognition.” Described as a “drag and drop experience,” Burrage says the tool is meant to allow journalists to be “their own data analysts.”

Can Data Visualization Augment Your Reality?

gosdot — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:56:33 -0400

So at metaLayer we’re working very hard to bring you the best selection of algorithms, visualizations, and data manipulation techniques in a simple drag and drop interface. One feature that is occasionally asked about is offering data mashups that can control augmented reality platforms like Layar and Sekai.

For those of you who’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that this would be a bit of a return home for us because we began by experimenting with AR technologies.

This would allow content publishers and developers to publish their datasets in ways that are presented on the canvas of the physical world, as opposed to the web. If you’d like to see such functionality in metaLayer or deLv, vote on our application for the Knight News Challenge!

The Next Big Thing at #PaleyNext

gosdot — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:42:21 -0400

The Paley Center for Media and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation present The Next Big Thing in Digital News Innovation, a series of forums in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles showcasing news and information startups for an audience of high-level media executives and investors.

Chris Burrage, Director of Business Development at metaLayer, will talk about our community platform deLv, the Next Big Thing in visualization and data science.

Watch the live stream right now at - http://www.paleycenter.org/mc-paley-knight-news-innovation

Calculators for Data Science

gosdot — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:04:44 -0400

The following was the keynote I delivered at STRATA 2012 entitled “Democratizing Data Platforms”. You can find the full set of accompanying slides here.

Data science should be more like art. Not everyone understands art. Not everyone appreciates art But whether you understand it or not you draw, you doodle.

 This is the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. What’s interesting about this painting is that it was commissioned. It wasn’t the artist who approached the church with his idea for doing it, rather the church sought out the artist to fulfill a need.

In the 15th century this was common practice - a working relationship with a wealthy patron or institution was the most an artist could hope to achieve. Artistry belonged to the elite.

Science and technology has followed a similar trend over hundreds of years. Initially belonging only to the educated, which usually meant the wealthy, before later finding it’s way into the hands of the public. The sheer costs of education is what prevented studying maths and the sciences from spreading more widely. It wasn’t until simple tools like the abacus and the calculator were developed, followed by the spread of public education, that math became accessible to the general public.

Right now data science is a lot like art and math were in the 15th century. It’s a skill for those who’ve taken the time to study and specialize. It’s for professionals.

But increasingly we’ve witnessed the repercussions of outsourcing our sole understanding of complex concepts and ideas to experts.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. was partly the result of homeowners not knowing, the details associated with loans. They didn’t share the expertise required to know any better. They didn’t, nor could they have, understand the greater system that they participated in.

The impact on society was obviously profound.

On wall street algorithms outnumber, outpace, and outperform humans on a daily basis. Yet, in schools the knowledge that informs the construction of these types of systems belongs to a select few. This is not a conspiracy. The reality is, these types of careers are hard, and not everyone has the aptitude for them.

Therein lies the problem. In our lifetime, the world has shifted. Technology and the byproducts of technology have outpaced the average person’s understanding. If society is increasingly relying upon increasingly complex tools and systems, then this needs to change.

It’s no longer a luxury to be able to understand and contextualize data, especially the unstructured information that overwhelms us all. It’s a necessity.

The products we build as engineers need to cross this divide first. Tools that enable the average person to perform with the efficiency of an expert. Think of search engines. When search was introduced to the mass market it took what was once the job of specialists (information retrieval) and it made it accessible for anyone to do. much like simple tools like calculators once did for math.

We need the equivalent of the calculator for data science.

This is because great things happen when people can make use of information at their own discretion.

For example, I had the pleasure of working with the founders of Ushahidi for the past few years. Ushahidi makes open source tools for disaster response (among other things), particularly for users in developing countries. In only few years their platform become almost a standard tool deployed when faced with disaster. From the devastating earthquakes in Japan and to the floods last year in Australia.

They make text messages easier to put on maps, which in turn offers a more efficient and cost effective way for emergency responders to serve the public. With a product that can be as easily deployed by the UN as it is by a small Congolese NGO. There should be more things like Ushahidi with simple interfaces that abstract the complicated processes and technologies that power them.

So at metaLayer we feel it’s our responsibility to meet the untrained public half-way with products that echo this philosophy. We look big data solutions as a means to an end to help people solve their own problems. Not simply collecting information and sharing it, but enabling our users to ask questions of the world’s unstructured data, visualize it, and review the insights discovered by others.

This is deLv, a community that we launched at Strata. Delv helps anyone draw insights from everyday information. deLv offers a dashboard that is essentially a canvas where anyone can experiment, ask questions of, and draw insight from the world’s information. We want to make interacting with data more like art, by reducing complex technologies to gesture and simple motions.

Imagine if rather than relying upon Gallop polls, you could do your own digging to discover how people, or maybe just the people in your community feel about those political candidates.

With deLv, users can actually do this do this. Simply drag your data point to the canvas, input the term you care about or a way of filtering the content, add a data transformation like sentiment analysis, and add a visualization.

At metaLayer we love data and we love what it can do for people. But more importantly, what we aim to do is inspire, encourage, and enable a love of data by people who aren’t specialists.

If math was democratized through simple, accessible tools like the calculator, metaLayer aims to build the calculators of sorts for the world’s unstructured data.

Our Big Idea at GigaOM #DataConf

gosdot — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:17:10 -0400

Team metaLayer is at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference today presenting our big ideas for the Big Data space. You can check out the live stream here. Our talk is at 5:25pm EST.

MetaLayer Wins the Startup Showcase at Strata!

gosdot — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 01:16:00 -0500

We’re really excited to be here in San Jose at Strata 2012 and even more excited now that metaLayer’s won the Startup Showcase Audience Choice Award! As the winners, we’ll pitch in front of the Strata conference audience and a panel of esteemed judges during the keynote sessions on Day 2!