Darwin Ecosystem Brings Awareness Engine™ to the Web and within the Enterprise
Posted by Bill Ives on Wed, Nov 04, 2009
The introduction of Web 2.0 social media into the enterprise creates large amounts of potentially useful information about the social side of business processes. The key is gaining awareness and access to this social intelligence. Paula Thronton recent covers this issue nicely in The Context of “Intent.” She opens with, “Two differentiating attributes of 2.0 are adaptation and emergence. Adaptive systems rely on feedback loops for continuous assessment. Emergence is the result of self-organizing adaptation.”
Paula later adds, “The goal is to bring together relevant facts to inform discovery (the possibilities) that then lead to design — especially adaptive design to support individuals interacting with or on behalf of a business. Such facts are often difficult to find and difficult to effectively interpret and leverage.” And then offers, “A more 2.0 approach would bring the facts into the context they’re related to, featuring (draw attention to via teasers) certain findings in tidbits, leading to more detail.”
We think that enterprise 2.0 provides a wealth of social “data” as a byproduct of its use. Companies are only beginning to figure out how to harvest this content. The organizations that do this are truly working in the enterprise 2.0 space. of course the same opportunity for discovering new and useful content and the relationships between content applies to the Web. Increasing awareness in context and finding related content is the goal of Darwin Ecosystem. Its awareness engine™ gives users the ability to perceive and be conscious of events and patterns of activities captured in the enterprise and Web 2.0. The introduction of Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise also opens up possibilities for even more information silos if these tools do not connect. Darwin provides a way to see emerging patterns of related content across information generated through a variety of tools. There is both a Web edition and an enterprise edition. The Web edition is available on our web site through free registration. The enterprise edition is available through our adopters program.
With the enterprise edition, Darwin reduces the effort of keeping-up with enterprise 2.0 content (Information Overload Management). It classifies and correlates patterns of the business activities trapped in your Web. Through its Scan Cloud™ Darwin makes visible and measurable the value of the enterprise 2.0 content (Awareness and Monitoring). You can see related items in a tag cloud like visualization and this relationship shifts as you move through the cloud. This dynamic nature makes it easy for users to see the correlation across the enterprise 2.0 content (Discovering and Sharing).
Using correlationmetrics based on Chaos Theory, Darwin looks for the emergence of correlated themes within chaotic content. This moves Darwin away from the voting and popularity rankings used by many information aggregators and search engines to rank information. By using correlation metrics, it does not require a known process or taxonomy to discover useful and related information. Darwin allows for the emergence that Paula discussed. You can set up ongoing filters or “attractors” to explore emerging themes in specific topics of interest or simply look at the broad picture. Darwin is a not a replacement of existing enterprise 2.0 technologies, dashboards, and document management tools. It is designed to complement and leverage these technologies by making their tacit knowledge more visible. Darwin looks at events, blogs and other Web 2.0 sources that may correlate with the enterprise actions, its competitors and the voice of its critics and customers. This allows the enterprise to be capable of more easily discovering its own knowledge assets as well as its market and competitive positioning.Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ , a program manager in Marketing becomes aware of concerns in R&D, Sales or other initiatives that are emerging as he/she tries to promote a product (all without having to wait and depend the next meeting or coffee break encounter). They can also see competitive moves that may correlate with their own plans or the efforts of their customers and prospects. Likewise management can have a high-level view of what topics are emerging across all divisions and initiatives to better steer the business or measure the effectiveness of the vision’s execution, in the process discovering emerging and stronger initiatives or employees that are noteworthy. It is a Web browser application (Scan Cloud™) or it can become a custom solution through API access. It is delivered through a Web server with services and a database correlating the different Web 2.0 sources. For the enterprise there is an on-premise solution running on Ruby on Rails and making use of RSS feeds. Its Virtual Cortex™ database can be set on Oracle, MS-SQL or mySQL according to scalability needs. You can go from inside out so an enterprise can correlate their initiatives, knowledge and business intelligence against the pulse of the Web. The application is currently in Alpha stage and available for use.
Let's take a look at how it operates by looking at an example from the Web edition. We set up a query on the term - social media - for the last few days and saw the word - gain - was correlated to it as shown in the cluster below. This relationship interested us and we looked to see why gain is associated with social media by selecting gain and highlighting the cluster of correlations between social media and gain.
Then we saw three articles that matched this correlation in the past few days as you see in the image below.
There was a story about how NASDAQ has launched a social network site and we went to the story shown blow. This was something we had not heard about and was very interesting to us.
We also saw an article that reported that in the UK social networking sites account for 25% of display ads. We had read recently that ad revenue on the Web had passed tV ad revenue in the UK so this was especially significant. There was also an article on using Facebook traffic to drive brand loyalty as you can see above. None of these articles appeared on a Google search for social media plus gain. Nor did they appear on Google News on the topic. Below is screen shot of the complete Darwin interface so you can see where the details above appeared and their relationships.
This is a sample of how you can discover relevant new information through correlation that is hard, if not impossible to find in traditional search. It takes a very different approach to discover than the traditional key word search as you can find content you did not know to search for.
You can also find stories about themes that are emerging in the Web (or breaking news), as well as images that correlate with content as shown in results about a very recent helicopter crash in the Pacific shown below.
In addition, Darwin allows you to correlate content in traditional mainstream media with what is happening in blogs and other social media. All of these features can be applied to the Web or to information stored behind the firewall through your own dedicated server.
In 2008 Darwin won a Young Entrepreneurs Award from the Office for Science and Technology of the French Embassy in the United States. The Young Entrepreneurs Initiative (YEI) is a platform for mentoring and networking US based entrepreneurs who understand the importance of internationalizing their vision and their activity, and who wish to set up a technology venue in France.