Google may be the dominant data-finding tool out there, but a small Arlington-based company isn’t afraid to point out Google’s failings. And they have an answer of their own: Their company, Darwin Ecosystem, offers an “awareness engine,” which presents a different take on the traditional idea of an internet search or news feed.
Google presents ranked lists of articles based on popularity, a format that can often leave important information buried. Darwin, however, presents a word bank or “scan cloud,” with a cluster of 100 words correlated to a given company or search term. Users’ eyes can pick out the most important or surprising terms, and they quickly click through to find the full articles, social media mentions or blog posts.
Darwin’s creators say this can be a boon to financial services companies. Firms can not only more easily see what customers are saying about them, they can also find useful patterns in the chaos – something that may interest insurance and investment companies.
Thierry Hubert
Title: CEO, Darwin Ecosystem; Arlington
Age: 46
Experience: 23 years in social network and knowledge management technologies
Bill Ives
Title: Senior Vice President of Marketing, Darwin Ecosystem; Arlington
Age: 65
Experience: Nearly 30 years in business consulting
Q: So your screen is basically just a clump of words you can click on – very different than a list of articles that Google brings up. But if you click on these terms it brings up related articles?
A: Hubert: The reason why it’s called the scan cloud, because people scan information instead of reading it – it’s through scanning that you get your bearings. So imagine that you have keywords like your typical scan cloud would have. If you look at the keywords alone, they’re not really completely expressive of the meaning. So the idea of the scan cloud is when you mouse over those keywords, it highlights the correlated keywords, so you see the pattern and you see the concept. It’s an organic context. … all these words are connected.
Q: And you can search for mentions of your own company’s name?
A: Hubert: You can actually create an edition for your own company’s interests. Ives: It’s pure, and you can’t SEO it [search engine optimization – purposefully tailoring an article or site to get ranked higher on a search engine]. You can’t spam it, you can’t manipulate it, because the content self-organizes. … it gets around that whole issue with the problems of Google’s popularity rank, because the things at the top of the Google page are the ones that are better at SEO, not necessarily the ones with quality content … We’re not trying to let the computer figure out what’s going on, we’re trying to let the person figure out what’s going on. Hubert: You can’t trick this, because this is something that’s happening right now. The only way you would have to trick this is to create thousands of documents around the topic to elevate yourself in this environment.
Q: And companies can use this to see whether there are any social media mentions of their products?
A: Hubert: A lot of companies have an inflated sense of themselves and how important they are socially. They go as far as putting up Facebook pages in the hopes that people will somehow interact with the brand. It’s kind of wishful thinking, it’s like the new junk mail. The same thing with Twitter. Do they really think people want to register to follow Stop & Shop? I’ll give you an example: In Ireland, they’re promoting medical device companies. It’s a great place for medical device companies – terrific, OK. Put in a tracker for “medical device in Ireland.” Flatline. If there’s no one there to pick it up, if there’s no one there to create a movement around it, it goes unnoticed. So what is the Irish business department, what are they doing to promote it? What events have they done? What actions have they done to elevate that industry? … What are they doing to create some buzz around it, and who are they targeting it with? If somebody Tweets and there’s nobody there to pick it up and re-tweet it, was there really a tweet?
Q: And what does this mean for financial services companies in particular?
A: Hubert: In insurance, we dealt with a group in Canada, that, when they looked at the technology, said, “Wow there could be something really interesting for claims.” So for instance, when we have an event going on in one place, the adjusters… are actually out there on the field, and they’re taking notes, and they go into a system and they have to fill out a form, but the one thing we never really have an understanding of is the comments and the context of the situation they talk about. … Imagine that now, with this technology, we could be able to see the patterns, and create new products based on the recurring pattern. So we would know what people are talking about very quickly, and we could have our people design new products, basically a new insurance package. Ives: It’s a particular value for a very savvy investment manager – because they know what they’re looking for. … [in the basic Darwin system] we look at what happened in the last hour, the last two hours, the last 24 hours, up to the last 200 hours. However, we have the capacity in a customized version to go back in time. So let’s say an event occurs that triggered a reaction in the financial markets. Well, we can go back in time to when a similar event happened … in the time span of the web, when you have web-based content, we can say what happened last time this event occurred. You can start to understand the pattern of reactions in the financial markets to a similar event that happened before. … You can start making smart plays from an investment perspective on what’s going to happen again.
Top Five Facts About Darwin Ecosystem:
- In “stealth” research and development mode until 2008, it only debuted in May 2010.
- The company has already garnered industry awards, including KM World 100 Cos. that Matter in Knowledge Management.
- Hubert’s native France awarded a grant to the company, but ultimately France’s red-tape business environment prompted him to bring Darwin to U.S. shores.
- Darwin’s logo, a butterfly, is an homage to the signature “butterfly effect” as it relates to chaos theory.
- The company’s first customer was PBS.
