BlogForward : Money

More than a year of secrecy spawned rumors about Radar Networks. The most popular: It’s a “Google killer.” Tomorrow morning, Radar will surprise a few people by launching Twine, a tool for collecting and organizing information that’s very different from Google. But it’s potentially just as ambitious.

An example of how Twine works: A user uploads a text document to their Twine account. Twine then parses the document to find the words with meaning — names, places, concepts and so forth. Those terms become tags, which the person can use to access related information.

Twine’s underlying technology gives the computer a measure of intelligence. Using tags, a computer can distinguish between, say, a reference to the kind of bird that flies and the kind that flips people off. Once it has, it can give users a wealth of other information, drawn from their own accumulated knowledge base, other users and the outside internet. Where Google crawls the entire web and ultimately pollutes your search results with different kinds of “birds,” Radar picks from a smaller universe of sources and tries to automatically discard the ones you don’t want.

That could help a marketer collect all the information about a particular product, or a group of analysts to aggregate information on a subject. The “documents” gathered will include, among many others, text, PDFs, or even videos on YouTube (Twine simply draws on pre-existing tags and description of visual media to do its tagging work).

The information that helps Twine make decisions on its own about what content to pull in for you comes both from a users’ accumulated information as well as their actions, which means that, as the user pulls more info into their account on their own, Twine will begin to work cooperatively, providing more content where it’s needed and even assisting groups or teams of people with collaborative research and knowledge-building.

Young companies with a limited ability to do similar selection tricks — for instance, Jiglu, which we posted about a few days ago — are increasingly common, and tend to obscure the companies that truly have a chance of becoming market leaders. That’s too bad, because there’s no question that intelligent computer handling of data — a first step toward artificial intelligence — will be an important part of the internet in coming years.

Helping Radar is the breadth of its underlying technology and the strong scientific and engineering team, now 30 strong, that has been working on the platform for years.

Radar does, however, have competitors. The winning bet will boil down to which company will be able to throw enough scientific brilliance at the difficult problem of teaching computers to understand human information. The winner will likely dominate, as Google does with search.

To explain the differences between these competing startups, it’s easiest to separate them by the particular types of technology they utilize.

Broadly speaking, those technologies fall into three categories. The first is statistical analysis, in which Google reigns supreme. Terms are examined for their frequency, placement and outside links to determine their apparent relevancy, and then ranked. Google’s algorithms have gotten better over the years, and it has incrementally added on other technologies and services.

Natural language search is the second category. Teaching computers to understand human language is a complex process which involves breaking sentences down to their component parts — nouns, verbs, adjectives and so forth — which can then take on symbolic meaning for computers. Powerset (previous coverage), which is dribbling out its technology in stages, is a prime example of this approach.

The third, semantic search, is much-hyped, but little understood. Simply put, people attach markers to human-generated content, whether a paragraph of text or a picture, to outright tell computers in a special machine language what’s meaningful. In these databases of these companies, for example, I might be identified as “Chris Morrison,” with the markers “writer,” “venturebeat,” “male,” “technology,” “charming” and “goodlooking.” (All true, of course.) If applied to the entire internet, the result could be thought of as a giant, interrelated Wikipedia. Metaweb, which recently launched Freebase, is attempting to create just that.

For the most part, each company is betting on its own core technology to win the race. Radar hopes its own special combination of all three will take the day — much like another secretive startup, Franz Inc.

To be fair, there’s also a fourth, less glamorous approach which relies almost entirely on humans. ChaCha and a forthcoming startup from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales are two examples.

First, though, the viability of any technology must be proven. To return to Twine, it’s the horse Radar is betting on, just as Powerset hopes to take the approach of slowly beating out Google at searching the internet.

What matters is how well Twine can perform at helping humans organize the avalanche of information that is modern life. So while there are other features we could mention, from adding content through an innovative bookmarklet to finding related content through a “social graph” of similar users, it’s more useful to give our reaction to Twine.

Having sat through a demo by founder Nova Spivack, we can say that we’re excited to try out Twine. The interface is simple, yet powerful. While the use of tagging resembles tag-lists that have been around for years, their application is clearly more useful. And Twine was obviously capable of completing some complex tasks, like distinguishing the person’s name J.P. Morgan from the company with the same name.

The site is just as obviously still in development. A wealth of other features could obviously be useful, from a more full array of choices for communicating with other users (Spivack says instant messaging is coming) to adding more possibilities for linking information.

However, the Twine team won’t have to do the work alone. Sometime after the current beta launch, which will be limited to a few thousand people, Twine plans on opening up several APIs to allow outside developers to work with the platform.

For now, the site is geared toward people who use the internet heavily — primarily knowledge professionals, like the marketers and analysts mentioned above. Students, prosumers (people with a strong interest in a particular thing) and companies will also likely find uses for Twine.

For more discussion of Radar’s idea of the future — including what could go wrong — we’ll post a Q&A with Nova Spivack on Saturday

Source: VentureBeat