One part people, one part machine. Is that a formula for more effective decision making? A number of high-profile entrepreneurs believe it is and they are starting companies based on the idea.
In the following post we take a look at three of the most exciting startups entering this emerging market. The movement is a logical development now that millions of people are comfortable posting information online. The web’s next step is to leverage machine learning. These are three companies to watch who are doing just that – combining user input with technology that improves its performance by gathering and processing data. In this case they are doing it in order to help people make better decisions, but these are just some of the first consumer technologies that will enter the cyborg-like space that combines people and machines in order to better serve people.
Sponsor
The three services we look at are Aardvark, Hunch and Swingly. Unfortunately none of these services are wide open to the public yet. If you go to their sites and request an invite you should get one soon. You might also try asking around on other networks like Twitter or Facebook, two of the three services discussed below have invites in the wild now.
Aardvark
vark.com (Our initial review)
Premise: Ask any question by IM and your question will be routed to a tagged “expert” on the topic, among your friends and their networks.
Logic: There appears to be some semantic analysis of the tags given users by their friends and themselves, cross referenced with semantic analysis of the questions asked in order to find the right fit. We presume there is or will be some logic judging the history of successful answers from users so as to rank relative expertise.
History of one query.
An IM thread.
Editing user profile.
User experience: High coolness factor when a real person quickly answers your question. How reliable that person is regarding the topic of the question is not readily apparent. Interesting IM interface facilitates relatively sophisticated interactions based on short commands. Fun to browse through open questions, smart deference to email when people aren’t available by IM. Can be irritating to be interrupted by other peoples’ questions by IM, but not such a big deal. Web interface is quite nice but I’ve hardly ever seen it, just asking and answering questions through IM.
How It Differs From the Others: IM interface offers almost zero barrier to entry and a powerful hook to return to the service over time. Machine learning focuses on identifying human experts and search is rich with human interaction, thinly mediated by a smart system. You could call this a friend-network based semantically powered expert discovery and conversation system.
Stage: Closed beta, new users get 50 invites. Has been in the works for years and is relatively well baked.
Backing: Made up largely of ex-Googlers, the parent company is called The Mechanical Zoo and has raised $6 million from very-hip VC firm August Capital and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures.
For more info see this review on VentureBeat.
Last weekend, we attended a web demo of Wolfram Alpha, a new “computational knowledge engine” based on the work of Stephen Wolfram. Some have dubbed Alpha a “Google killer,” but, in reality, is very different from the standard search engines that we are all familiar with today.
By far the two companies I’ve written about the most recently are Apple and Twitter. This is to the delight of some people, and the absolute horror of others. And now I’ve got something that will really whip up the fanboys and enrage the haters: Me writing about Apple writing about Twitter.
