Magister says:

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One of the simplest, kind of interesting, trivial things to note is though Google bought into the company last year, their databases are still hosted on Amazon’s servers.

Otherwise, the following jumped out at me from the linked post;

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public.

Offhand, I’m not seeing a path to Google-like monetization. Sure, the system could be used to monitor and if tuned correctly, it could possibly predict, but the then they’re stuck selling reports or subscriptions to the interface, neither of which is going to produce unlimited income.

For example, say they go with selling reports; a company may request fashion trends among the American tween t-shirt market. They may be able to get tens of thousands for the results, but then they’d only really be able to sell it once or when a limited market asks for an analysis.

And if they were to sell access to the interface, once again, they may be able to get tens of thousands from each company for an annual contract, but it too would have a limited market.

Based on nothing but the video and the blogpost, I believe Google and the CIA probably bought in for the technology and if it proves useful, then I’d lean toward them buying the rest of the company with Google integrating what’s useful into their engine and the CIA pointing it toward the Google database.

IOW: Neither Google nor In-Q-Tel is going to “profit handsomely” in real dollars directly from their investment, but Google’s position in search will be more firmly entrenched and the CIA will have another tool at their disposal.

Still cool, but I’m not sure that banner ads are in the company’s future.