Guy Kawasaki and Unstructured Data

Seconding the point made by John Dodds, Guy's post is outstanding and a must read for everybody.  Come back and I'll share an interesting observation. Welcome back, good read, eh?

I got asked the other day why our firm invested in Nstein. In reading Guy's post, there was an excellent example of the great unwashed, unstructured data problem out there.

A disclaimer. Nstein is a public company, traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, we are big shareholders, and my partner sits on the board.  View everything I say with suspicion, invest only after talking to your investment professional, and don't run with the scissors.

First, trying to determine what the general feeling about (for example) Dell is a fairly simple exercise.  Look for burning laptops, screaming people on tech support hold, and employees crying about the evaporation of their stock.  Dell sucks or other such comments get picked up and added to the "Houston, we've got a problem" pile when all the Dell corporate types dig through the data about what the world is saying with respect to Dell.

Now let's consider this quote from Guy's great blog posting:

"You don’t want to make people playback your message to get your phone number, and if either of you are using Cingular, you may not hear all the digits."

Clearly, upon reading this, you know it is a hit on Cingular's quality.  If you do the Kawasaki and Cingular Google search, you'd get a pile of random mentions but not specifically this one (yet).  But what if I wanted to track trends and comments about Cingular's network reliability, customer service, call quality, etc.  What bucket does this dump into? Apart from brute force (i.e. people sniffing through every mention of Cingular), it gets tough to categorize and track this. In addition (and at the risk of starting the Canadian version of A-lister fight night) what can I do with the data that tells me how important Mr. Kawasaki is in relationship to this and any other comments he may have made about Cingular? Or the words buried in his comments section that say "I like the Cingular phone and can deal with the network drops" (This isn't there, I made it up to make the point). Is that a direct hit on Cingular? Will somebody manually classify this comment correctly, etc, etc...

Nstein's claim to fame, secret sauce, and product mix (existing and in the future) is all about dealing with millions of pieces of random/unstructured data in a way that allows people to get information in a way that allows them to make smarter decisions.  The power of this can be seen in Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence Network which takes millions of pieces of seemingly unrelated data combines it with health information and works to predict and monitor outbreaks.

Our view is that going beyond simple searches, beyond keyword watches, etc, to working with unstructured/unrelated data can provide businesses some great competitive and operational advantages.

Comments

[chris]

If nstein is about search, where is the search box on the site?

[Slava]

Ooooh... burn!

[Rick Segal]

Heh.
Yeah, good point. I sent a "doh!" note to the partner regarding that one. Don't you hate when that happens..