metaLayer

Startup Showcase at #StrataConf!

gosdot — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:56:43 -0500

metaLayer has been selected as one of the 10 startups picked for the Startup Showcase at Strata 2012 in Santa Clara. This is in addition to our keynote “Democratizing Data Platforms” which we’ll be giving at the conference as well.

Data Driven Infographics Made Easy

gosdot — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 06:44:00 -0500

The problem with infographics is that they are hard to create, time-consuming to design, or expensive to outsource. Not too mention that most infographics are static, meaning that they don’t update in real time. Now this is great if you’ve got data that changes rather infrequently. But what if you want to create compelling visualizations that are driven by real-time data?

The mission of metaLayer is to make the creation of such data-driven visuals easy for anyone (not just expert data scientists and hackers).

We want to offer our users an ‘insight engine’ that allows them to do more than search for answers, rather they can compute their own or discover what others have done. More importantly, they can ask questions of the data created.

We aim to make data on the web more transparent, more interactive, and subsequently easier to understand and share.

In metaLayer users can easily create and share infographics like one below, styled to match the channel that it’s delivered on (their blog, website, etc.)

…however, what’s really cool is that their audience has the option of diving into the data that was used to create said graphic:

metaLayer comes out of private beta in February after some very big announcements at Strata. We’re looking forward to showing you exactly what we’ve been working on!

Our Strata Keynote: Democratizing Access to Data Platforms

gosdot — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:10:56 -0500

metaLayer is excited to give a keynote talk at Strata 2012 in a few weeks. We’ll share our vision on why data platforms need to be made accessible. Check out the schedule and some of the other talks here.

Democratization of Data Platforms

Jonathan Gosier (metaLayer Inc.)

8:50am Thursday, 03/01/2012

Keynote

Location: Mission City Ballroom

Big data isn’t just an abstract problem for corporations, financial firms, and tech companies. To your mother, a ‘big data’ problem might simply be too much email, or a lost file on her computer.

We need to democratize access to the tools used for understanding information by taking the hard-work out of drawing insight from excessive quantities of information. To help humans process content more efficiently and to help them capture more of their world.

Tools to effectively do this need to be visual, intuitive, and quick. This talk looks at some of the data visualization platforms that are helping to solve big data problems for normal people.

The New Challenge of Data Inflation

gosdot — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:30:33 -0500

The online chatter of individuals, networks of friends or professionals, and the data being created by networked devices is growing exponentially, although our time to consume it remains depressingly finite. There are a plethora of solutions that approach this problem in different ways. But what are the methodologies that have worked at scale and how are they being used in the field?

This is an excerpt from an article we contributed to InQTel Quarterly earlier this month. You can read it in it’s entirety at the the link below.

Read the Article

Free T-Shirts for Cool Uses of Our APIs

gosdot — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:12:00 -0500

Are you a data hacker, data journalist, or just a programmer looking for something new? Use our imgLayer and dataLayer APIs for your next project and we’ll send you an awesome metaLayer T-Shirt…just for letting us know! You can find details at wiki.metalayer.com.

You do not need an API key to get started but you will be rate limited to 100 calls a day for text data and 10 calls per day for image dat. Get in touch with us if you want those rates raised.

Here’s a recent example of a cool project powered by our APIs and a few open source products.

Visualizing Online Chatter During Hurricane Irene

gosdot — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:21:54 -0500

Our friends at a firm called GeoSprocket gave a great breakdown yesterday of how they used a combination of technologies to discover trends in online conversations during and after Hurricane Irene. Their challenge, though, is that most Twitter messages don’t carry location data and to get all this content on a map might prove incredibly time consuming for a human.

Our dataLayer API aims to make this a far simpler process through a technique called location disambiguation (also known as place finding). This is done by using the other contextual clues that follow online communication, for instance the language someone might used can be combed for words that might appear to be places. ’50 Broadway’ may exist in 100 places in the world, but if it appears next to the word ‘New York’ the algorithm assumes that it’s 50 Broadway, New York, NY which has the Latitude and Longitude coordinate of 40.7061622, -74.0128389. Since this is done algorithmically, it gives the appearance of messages with no location elements, being mapped somewhat magically.

It’s important to note that neither location disambiguation nor sentiment analysis are perfect sciences but the method can greatly increase the percentage of online chatter that can be mapped in the absence of all other information. Here’s what GeoSprocket Director Bill Morris had to say about his project…

This is where new developments in “Big Data” analytics come in handy. With some computational heavy lifting from Kate Starbird at the University of Colorado and Chris Danforth at the University of Vermont, Geosprocket was able to bank millions of Twitter posts from the days surrounding the storm. Then the assistance of metaLayer Inc. was instrumental in putting Irene-related tweets on the map. Using a series of digital sifting processes, they were able to mine the archived Twitter data for placenames and keywords. Where a town or street name was included in a post, that post could be placed at a set of geographic coordinates. Were words like “washout” and “devastated” were used, fine-tuned algorithms could assign a scaled value for the sentiment of the post.

Add a bit of cartographic styling and serving with the open-source MapBox toolkit, and we’ve got an interactive mapped timeline of Hurricane Irene, as told by Twitter.

We’re really excited we were able to contribute to GeoSprocket’s project and look forward to what they come up with in the future! Check out the interactive map of Hurricane Irene tweets made using the dataset here.

New Visualizations coming to metaLayer

gosdot — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 03:10:52 -0500

For those of you wondering why there are so few charts and visualizations in our product, it’s because we’re building our own visualization libraries. So that the data you’re mashing up and analyzing can be quickly summarized in unique ways that are also nice to look at. Here is a sneak peak at things to come.

The stacked area graph is a common chart in many programs. The concept is simple, the columns represent periods of time, while the colors represent one measure of value, and the area of the stacked shapes represents another.

Each stack (column) could be thought of as a phase of a project, while the horizontal stripes are some value being measured in that time.

One that harkens back to my days as an audio engineer (because it looks like a sine wave). Using the same concepts illustrated above, this densely packed visualization can allow you to look at a set of information, a subset of that information, and compare it against a completely disparate type of information (the line in the background). It’s best when used with excessive datasets to spot trends over time.

The Venn diagram is common as a static graphic, but by scaling the area of the common and uncommon space along with the position of the circles, we aim to make this dynamic. An example, if you hav a real-time dataset of two keywords, Circle 1 might represent one dataset, Circle 2 might represent the other, and the overlap would represent anything in the stream containing both keywords. What’s being measured would be a variable.

This one is based on an infographic I created back in 2009. Statisticians hate it, because its been established that they hate circles. However, if you just want a quick comparison this is, in my opinion, almost as effective as a pie chart and more interesting visually.

#DCWeek Redux

gosdot — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 06:14:00 -0500

We had a great time this week at what more than one person referred to as ‘the SXSW of the beltway’.

The venue for the events we attended, the Artisphere in Arlington, VA, was impressive with winding corridors and a creative floorplan. I learned that it used to be the old home of the Newseum before it relocated to where it is now in D.C.

The wizardry of iStrategy Labs was on display for any marketing or data nerd to geek out on…

I was on panel with Dan Morrison (Citizen Effect), Kate Stahnke (Causecast), and Justin Wredberg (Razoo).

The only let down was that I left wondering who this year’s corporate sponsor was…

…it shall remain a mystery.

From Data to Action

gosdot — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 05:50:52 -0500

We’re excited to be in Dakar, Senegal this weekend, presenting on the subject of big data to regional Civil Society and Governments. The event, organized by UNDP (the United Nation’s global development network), explores scalable solutions for holding governments accountable through data platforms:

Over the past decade, governance assessments have become increasingly important tools in Africa for monitoring whether governments are failing or succeeding in their commitments in legislation, government policies and international law. A workshop gathering civil society, development practitioners and research institutes will focus on civil society’s involvement in governance assessments and explore how these tools can better influence governance and policy processes, and hold governments accountable.

The three-day workshop in Dakar, Senegal, seeks to demonstrate, with specific tools and country experiences, how a more effective involvement by civil society in governance assessments, both as “producers” and “users” of governance data, can promote democratic governance through increased accountability and more inclusive participation.

We’ll be discussing our data visualization technologies as well as our APIs for mining text and imagery. We’re excited for the possibilities as well as to be among such esteemed company.

OpenSEAS uses metaLayer APIs to Counter Extremism

gosdot — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:15:22 -0500

Our partner, Navanti Group, have taken our dataLayer API to scale, using it as part of an internal dashboard for monitoring emerging trends across social media conversations. Navanti specializes in providing analytical, programmatic, and technological services in various capacities. Their ambitious goal is to offer a system that identifies potential extremist actors and networks across public social media channels.

To do this effectively, Navanti’s team have to monitor hundreds of online feeds and websites, store that data, and make sense of it. metaLayer’s APIs help with this process by allowing their teams to contextualize, visualize and surface the most urgent patterns emerging from the dataset. Navanti’s OpenSEAS platform takes this information and makes it easy for their clients to dive in to the collected data easily.

Their platform is highly sophisticated, using dataLayer’s sentiment analysis and data structuring features in powerful ways. We’re extremely excited to see metaLayer APIs being tested at scale and for such a noble purpose.

metaLayer Day at DCWeek

gosdot — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 09:46:00 -0500

Come see us tomorrow at Digital Capital Week! Here’s our schedule:

Jon is giving a Keynote on Thursday morning
10:30am “Disruptive Entrepreneurs”

Jon will also be on panel Thursday afternoon
4:00pm “Tools to Activate Social Good”

Matt will demo metaLayer Dashboard Thursday evening
7:00pm “Tech Cocktail: Startup Mixer”

Add Us to Your Circles!

gosdot — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:11:27 -0500

With the roll out of Google+ Pages, you can now add our company to the list of sources you follow. There’s a lot of places to follow us online Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, here on Tumblr, pick the one that adds the most value for you, or pick them all!

Face detection and segmentation of image archives. This short...

gosdot — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:06:05 -0500

Face detection and segmentation of image archives. This short video shows how users can quickly create rules for visual search using Flickr as the data source. They can then use metaLayer Dashboard to separate images that have people in them from those that do not.

For API users, this technology can be optimized to look for, index, and parse specific objects. You can find out more about using the imgLayer API here.

Sentiment analysis for your inbox. Have you ever wanted to know...

gosdot — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:59:27 -0500

Sentiment analysis for your inbox. Have you ever wanted to know what the overall tone of an email discussion you’re having is? Perhaps a discussion has escalated, and you want to quickly spot and visualize the trends of when and why.

With metaLayer’s Email data modules this is easy, users can apply sentiment analysis to conversations with customers and colleagues.

This short video walks users through how to accomplish this.

This quick video shows those of you in our private beta how to...

gosdot — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 11:52:00 -0400

This quick video shows those of you in our private beta how to get started with the metaLayer Dashboard. If you aren’t in the private beta, no worries, we’re only a month away from public beta (signup at metalayer.com).

Simplexity: Making Algorithms Easy to Use

gosdot — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 10:31:22 -0400

Yesterday we had the pleasure of speaking at the World Bank’s “Putting Aid Data to Work” conference in Washington, D.C. The panel I was on was entitled “Closing the Feedback Loop: Innovations in Grassroots Monitoring of Aid and Public Service Delivery”.

Speakers included myself, Shanta Devarajan (World Bank Chief Economist, Africa Region), Sahr Kpundeh (Senior Public Sector Specialist, World Bank), Britt Lake (Director of Programs, GlobalGiving), Dan Nielson (Bringham Young University) and it was moderated by Brad Parks (Co-Executive Director, AidData).

Brad did a great job of making the panel a journey that defined the challenge and put forth solutions. It began with an explanation of the challenges and need for quality data both on the service delivery side as well as the in-country recipient side. Then we moved into Britt’s presentation about story collection, and moved into mine about taking some of the pain out of data analysis through simplexity, taking really complicated tech and adding elements of visualization and design.

Simplexity: Making Data Analysis Tools Simple to Use

The challenge is easy to understand, there’s simply too much data to make use of without extending the research phase of projects. The mass migration to open data and public data only compounds this problem as none of this information is easy to consume, largely because none of it shares the same structure. Even beyond the research phase of a project, once findings exist, sometimes even more time is spent validating those findings.

We can’t eliminate that process but we can compound the time it takes to collect, structure, visualize and make data actionable for service delivery organizations. It doesn’t matter if it’s historic or real-time data, email or a spreadsheet, we create products that make dealing with it all accessible to more. Our goal is to take the pain out of the lives data analysis and while making it easier for people who aren’t skilled in that area of research to be able to come to conclusions about faster.

metaLayer went into private beta yesterday and we’d love to share what we’re working on with you. Email me at jg@metalayer.com

We're at TechCocktail's Startup Extravaganza 11/10!

gosdot — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:25:21 -0400

Team Meta will be at Tech Cocktail next week! We’ve got a Panel presentation at DCWEEK as well as a space at Tech Cocktail’s Expo where we’ll have a display for people who aren’t in our private beta to demo our Dashboard app.

Tech Cocktail is a media company focused on better connecting, educating and amplifying the start-up technology community and showcasing the latest tech innovations.

Many thanks to the Tech Cocktail folks!

Private Beta Cometh!

gosdot — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:26:10 -0400

Just a heads up for all of you out there waiting to get your hands on metaLayer Dashboard, on Friday we’ll be opening our private beta up to anyone who has signed up at relaunch.metalayer.com! After that there will be a different waiting list for those interested in the public beta.

Our Open Source Projects

gosdot — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 08:48:36 -0400

A lot of people seem to appreciate the fact that they can utilize our open APIs for small projects for no to low cost. Well, good news, we’ve got a few open source goodies that we’re contributing to. You’ll find these products and more in our gitHub repo.

MovableCite is the latest. It’s a simple solution for creating self-updating blockquotes, which allow you to quote articles and auto-synchronize your citation if the remote website should change or edit the quoted text.

This problem affects the news industry in a big way as journalists, bloggers, and other media groups can end up inadvertently propagating outdated information. So the idea with the MovableCite project is to create an easy, open way for one website to communicate to another, to check for updates to specific portions of text that may have been quoted.

You can find our contributions to open-source projects like MovableCite on GitHub.com.

Future For Sale

gosdot — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 13:30:06 -0400

The following is an excerpt from my talk at Tech4Africa in Johannesberg last week. You can read the full text here.

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson

This is a favorite quote of mine. It sums up much about the post-60’s world we live in. Why the 60’s? Because that was the last time, as far as I can tell (because I wasn’t alive then), that man’s wildest dreams were more sci-fi than possibile. In 1960, even astronauts still dreamed of one day walking on the moon like it was fantasy. By 1970 it was history. But I digress…

I want to update this quote to read…

“The future is here…and you can buy it!” - me.

What I’m actually talking about is predictive technologies, algorithms that take massive amounts of historic data and analyze it for trends that can be projected outwards. This is not new science, it’s statistics, but it’s statistics applied to prediction that is the exploding business.

How effective are predictive technologies? Well, if you want to see this type of technology in action, go to Google.com right now. Activate Google Instant and type one or two letters, Google will offer suggestions based upon previous searches by all the people using their search engine and what they type after those two letters. This increases Google’s ability to make an educated guess about what you will type next. There’s real science behind all of this. It’s not magic. It only works so well, but it does work.

So the future is available for sale from a few companies like Recorded Futures, Palantir, PAX.

Recorded Futures is a good example. They offer their future as a service. That’s right, The future is for sale as a restful API! You can use this API to get your future hand delivered as JSON or XML for the low price of $150 a month! Power your app with the future!

All kidding aside, how does this relate to business?

Well, I can tell you as someone who’s company does work for Governments, Defense contractors, NGOs large and small, these technologies are in use to try to enhance decision making. These predictive technologies are being used all over the world. To predict conflict & uprisings, crime, the affects of climate change, to decide where to spend budgets, enact military action, where to distribute medical resources…it goes on and on.

The CDC has been in the business of predicting the future for decades. For them, spotting an outbreak before it spreads is essential. More and more businesses from marketers, to law enforcement, to medical facilities have grown to appreciate these methodologies.

Heritage Provider Network is offering a $3 million dollar prize to any team who can develop an algorithm that can accurately detect within a year, using only patient and public data, when a patient will need to return to a medical facility. It’s like the Netflix Prize for medicine.

This is all fascinating, but what happens when prediction goes wrong?

Right now, in Italy, six scientists (seismologists) and one elected official are on trial for not being able to sufficiently predict the future. You read that correctly.

In this case, the public wanted fair warning to prepare for the forthcoming quake. Given their resources, their expertise, and sufficient historic data, the expectation is that something more could, or should, have been done by these scientists to protect the public.

That’s the precedent being set here. It’s not good enough to be an expert, you also now have to be a genie.

If this sounds strangely like the premise of the Minority Report, then you would be correct. This is William Gibson’s future that we’re living in.

My Slides…