Straight Outta Minority Report: New “Recorded Future” Product Predicts Future Events?

VIDEO

by Jocelyn Rousey | 4:14 pm, July 30th, 2010

» 4 comments

On Wednesday, The Danger Room blogger Noah Shachtman profiled a young information services company called Recorded Future, which monitors the web in real time and, to be perfectly honest, sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi film. Recorded Future uses a collection of futuristic-sounding analytical tools like a “temporal analytics engine” and “sentiment analysis” to “find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents—both present and still-to-come.”

Of course, boasting that your system can predict future data trends (read: events) is bound to attract some attention from big name investors. Sure enough, the small Cambridge, Mass., company has signed investment deals with both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA. From The Danger Room:

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining ‘open source intelligence’—information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

Recorded Future also advertises itself as a brand marketing and personal research tool. That said, one look at the comments on Shachtman’s post reveal there’s plenty of opposition to analysis of the Internet’s publicly availably information. And as Shachtman notes, this isn’t the first time Google and the CIA have had overlapping interests and there are plenty of critics alleging a too-cozy-for-comfort relationship between the two. Moreover, some of Shachtman’s commenters clearly consider this the beginning of the end of online privacy.

Frankly, though, until Tom Cruise comes bursting through the office door to arrest our Managing Editor for the future assault of some Mediaite commenters, my inner geek is more concerned with how cool this sounds.

Recorded Future’s demo movie below:

CIA, Google, Minority Report, noah shachtman, recorded future, the danger room

http://SailRabbits.com Magister

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.
yushang

http://www.fashionshoppong.us/
fliteshare

Great, the software calculates When, Where and Who will do something. Too bad it can’t figure Why something is going to happen. Because that would be the clue to prevent that something from happening.
Freestone

Time Recorder, from Yahoo, and Zapaday, a Dutch company, http://www.zapaday.com, are both promising a view on the future.