LeWeb London: Nik Halstead and Datasift

Nick Halstead, Founder & CTO, Datasift & Milo Yiannopoulos, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, The Kernel

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NH sells a lot of data to financial markets; eg looked at Facebook IPO and sentiment around it. You can look at patterns, at back testing and at predictions. THey look at inflections. In most days, there is a certain amount if talk, so see if it is changing from baseline enough,. Another usage is content in twitter going to news sites, They help media optimise their stories to get traffic, to understand their audience

NH announcing that they are working with Wikipedia, look at how people are editing things. Datasift allows you look at stream, what is being edited, track subjects etc. So Wikistats looks at the articles that are being edited and what is being done. This is faster in realtime, you can see things happening now, see trends

MY asking about his initial product, the retweet button etc, for news articles. NH was one of the first to understand social sharing…someof this got sold to Twitter, they did it before them. MY asking about funding, it is $50m NH has had plenty of experience of EU funders, had to go to US for funding, wonders why the EU people behaved the way they did. NH sees a strong trend of US VCs coming to UK, s US is saturated.

MY asking about where he is based,…not in Shoreditch, based in Reading. NH says look at the companies that have exited, a lot are in the M4 corridor. It may not be easy for consumer space, but for companies and infrastructure and companies, it is a great place to be. Gov need to broadcast there are other centres of excellence…Thames Valley is good

MY talks about the madness of crowds, but NH does the opposite, sifts it down. NH customers have a number of ways of doing this. It could be for influence etc, or is it stock markets. They have worked with people to handpick people, to get strong influencers. So Klout looks at patterns etc.

NH is interested in looking at the research opps with wikipedia. Look at NLP, the wikipedia is great source. There are about 100 firms that build commercial products on top, so wikipedia will be another stream of usage

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