Comments on: Why Gravity, a New Startup, Can't Defy Gravity

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:54:11 +0000

Agreed!

The company is making some major claims, and as you rightfully point out, the infrastructure involved isn't for the faint of the heart and not cheap. I think that alone puts them at a disadvantage and will make the future a challenge.

By: Tawheed Kader

Tawheed Kader — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:18:28 +0000

Their focus seems to be largely on analytics and monetizing conversations. They don’t seem to be addressing the fact that forums, wikis, email and twitter do not foster a great environment for group discussions, that is where the real innovation needs to happen.

At Ask My BrainTrust (http://askmybraintrust.com), our goal is to have meaningful conversations. We’re live, we have a business model and we didn’t need 10million dollars of funding.

By: ronald

ronald — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:22:39 +0000

"Now if you buy the spin, you still have to keep in mind that mining unstructured data for near real-time sentiment analysis — essentially what Gravity is claiming to do — is not an easy task."

Meaning = Data augmentation with [my]data

Or nothing is a random/unstructured as it looks. Only if you have no base data (like a conventional computer) is a conversation simple unstructured text. Otherwise you would not know what this means. It's basically a decomposition problem, which can be parallelized. From my experience it takes roughly a $100k trained cluster to follow and extract the meaning of any given conversation in real time. None learning clusters should be cheaper. I don't know about the advertising part, but some other folks might be interested in their stuff. Iff they get it working.

By: Shishir M K

Shishir M K — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:30:23 +0000

Some more detail about the features or the core idea of the conversation engine would have been good. Whatever you do please dont make something like public waves :)