GigaOM » twitter-firehose

Dataminr raises $30M to keep surfacing the most significant tweets

Jordan Novet — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:26:09 +0000

Twitter deserves praise for giving millions of people access to real-time information from people, companies and other organizations. But the more people you follow, the harder it is to spot the important tweets. Dataminr’s software solves this problem by cruising through hundreds of millions of tweets a day and sending alerts on the most important ones. That way, customers don’t need to spend hours keeping their eyes glued to the screen.

The model, which lets customers plug in specific information they care about in order to get tailored results, has already proven attractive to investors, and on Wednesday the company announced a new $30 million round of venture funding. Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock led the round, and Deep Fork Capital, GSV Capital and Wharton Equity Parnters also contributed. The company has now raised $46.5 million.

When the New York-based company showed its stuff last year, it had already signed up banks and hedge funds as customers. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of using social media outlets for announcing company news has only broadened adoption.

The use case is pretty clear in financial services, where getting reports as soon as they’re available could provide the justification for trades that could make plenty of money, perhaps more than what slower-informed traders might be able to make. Dataminr’s algorithms take into account factors such as a Twitter user’s location, the user’s reputation, the appearance of news from external sources, market volume and market prices. But much of these back-end calculations happen behind the scenes, so customers see just the important content when they receive alerts.

Dataminr beat major news services by 16 minutes last month following a freight-train derailment near Baltimore. The stock of the freight train company fell after media outlets reported on the incident, and that’s just the sort of thing that shows how Dataminr can come in handy.

Source: Dataminr

However, preventing the reporting of false positives is critical, and Dataminr knows that. Twitter can be self-correcting in the sense that people weigh in very quickly, and that activity informs the algorithms Dataminr looks to as it sends alerts to customers, Ted Bailey, the company’s founder and CEO, told me.

In addition to the financial-services area, Dataminr has also picked up a number of government customers. Now the company wants to get its product into more industry verticals.

Dataminr, founded in 2009, is one of a handful that process the contents of the Twitter firehose and sell services to other companies. Others in that category are DataSift, Gnip and Topsy. It’s one thing to have lots of data coming onto servers and another to get actionable insights on it in real time, and this thinking extends to the Twitterverse, where drowning in tweets doesn’t do much good. That’s why tools such as Dataminr should come in handy much more as the Twitter user count keeps climbing.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user muratart.

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How to handle a firehose: An interview with DataSift’s CTO

Derrick Harris — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 17:40:26 +0000

DataSift, best known as one of the two companies with full access to Twitter’s firehose of streaming data, has raised $15 million in Series B. The new money, which comes from Scale Ventures — along with GRP Partners, IA Ventures Northgate Capital and Daher Capital — adds to the $14.7 million DataSift has previously raised, for a total of $29.7 million.

DataSift is more than just a collector of Twitter data, however. It also takes in data streams from dozens of other web and social media sources, and can handle corporate data, as well. And the company’s real value comes in the analytics it applies to all that data, letting users filter and correlate across myriad different factors.

Here’s an interview I did with DataSift Founder and CTO Nick Halstead during our Structure: Europe conference in Amsterdam last month, in which he describes how DataSift built an infrastructure capable of handling so much real-time data and how companies can use such data effectively.

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DataSift funding shows Twitter’s firehose is worth big bucks

Colleen Taylor — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:26:08 +0000

Millions of people see Twitter as simply a fun and trendy pastime. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that underneath the company’s hood, the data streamed through the microblogging service could be worth some big bucks. And while Twitter is obviously keen to keep a lot of that money to itself, for now it seems content to share at least some of its big data monetization opportunities with a small, select group of startups.

To wit: DataSift, one of only two companies authorized to re-syndicate Twitter’s content using its “firehose,” announced a $6 million venture capital funding round on Monday. In a press release, DataSift said it plans to use the money to beef up its sales and support teams “to service the surge in demand the company is seeing for providing its real-time feed.”

The new funding round was co-led by IA Ventures and GRP Partners. According to GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, Twitter “encouraged” his firm’s investment in DataSift. The press release also quotes Twitter CEO Dick Costolo saying, “We’re delighted to see DataSift receive this funding, which is indicative of the value the venture community sees in the Twitter ecosystem as a whole.”

In Twitter’s early days, the company was notoriously uninterested in generating revenue, preferring instead to focus on expanding its user base. But the company has shifted its focus to the bottom line in recent months, and it’s clear the data streaming through its system is a hugely valuable part of Twitter’s makeup. Last week, Twitter acquired BackType, a startup with stream-processing technology that helps companies track what’s being said about their brands in real time.

However, many of Twitter’s moves toward revenue generation have had negative effects on the ecosystem that has cropped up around the company. For the moment, it seems Twitter is content to leave a lot of its big data processing work to third-party companies such as DataSift and Gnip. Meanwhile, larger companies such as IBM and the well-funded startup AVOS are actively building out their own real-time social data analysis products. As one of just two companies will full permission to re-syndicate Twitter’s purportedly very valuable content, DataSift’s latest funding could be just the tip of the iceberg for the company’s worth.

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