Earlier this evening I watched a video and read an article about Gravity, a Los Angeles-based start-up co-founded by three former MySpace executives including MySpace’s onetime chief operating officer, Amit Kapur. The other two co-founders are Steve Pearman (chief product officer) and Jim Benedetto (chief technology officer).
The company, which launched a beta version of this service, is essentially trying to re-invent the concept of conversations (aka message boards and eGroups) using a brand new approach and then data mine these conversations for interest analytics and essentially sell advertising or market against these interest pockets. Gravity describes itself as a “conversation engine.”
And while I have not played around with the service, and looking at it from a very surface level, one can see that the service has its work cut out. There are some questions about the potential and viability of this start-up.
To be clear, I have no comments on their technology — they seem to have some kind of a secret sauce which they haven’t really talked about. No point commenting about their user experience — they are still hoarding their beta invite. My questions are simply confined to obvious challenges they face.
Now, no one disagrees with the logic behind the company: message boards and eGroups simply suck and it is hard to monetize conversations trapped inside them. If one could solve this quandary, they could somehow make money. Gravity claims to have done this and has topped it off with some spiffy looking graphical analytical tools. And that’s the end of the good news.
Typically I get very excited about companies (and start-ups) that are doing interesting things with large data sets, but in this case I am skeptical. When I read the post, what I saw was a lot of spin garnished with a lot of fancy words. And there are many of them, for example, Interest Graph. “Hate when a company coins a new term (Interest Graph) 2 describe existing concept – ah marketing” is how someone noted on Twitter. Gravity’s spiel is sentiment analysis and perhaps that is why it was able to get a rumored $10 million, reportedly from the likes of Redpoint Ventures, an erstwhile investor in MySpace.
Now if you buy into their spin, you still have to keep in mind that mining unstructured data for near real-time sentiment analysis — essentially what they are claiming to do — is not an easy task. Let’s just assume that they do get the technology part right — why not Benedetto is totally legit and well known in the big data circles — the question is how are they going to get this service deployed and get massive traction.
Gravity executives tell Mike Arrington that the company is going to “allow people to create conversation around topics” and “the service will be available on the Gravity website as well as via widgets and an API.” In other words they are going to try and build a brand new consumer brand around conversations.
At the same, the company has to scale up its operations to a level where it has large amount of data sets to mine and reveal enough “interest” spots for them to become useful data that can be used for diverse purposes such as advertising. It is a arduous task. Ask Facebook, which is still struggling to build an “engagement” and “sentiment” based advertising engine despite having massive data sets including personal information. Mining data is a complex computing problem that needs big computing resources, but that is a topic for another day.
From the way I see it, building a rocket ship in one’s basement is perhaps easier. The conversations have moved away from message boards & groups to more realtime mediums such as Twitter and Facebook. It would be difficult for them to get to change people’s behavior.
Sooner or later the company will send me a beta invite, but up until then I am relegating them to a pile labeled “hype” for you will hear a lot about them. But as philosopher (and humorist) Dave Barry once said, “Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.”
Photo by SolidState via Flickr
No comments:
Post a Comment