By Jim Dallke - Staff Writer
Geofeedia, the Chicago-based startup that searches, archives and analyzes real-time social media content, just launched an iOS app and new features to help companies cut through the noise on social media and better utilize Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.The new iOS app allows users to gather location-based social media information in their area, or monitor any location, from their phone. Brands use Geofeedia's software to gain real-time consumer insights from social media sites. Police departments use Geofeedia to search social media for crime, and media companies use it to see what people are talking about in specific areas to frame their coverage. More than 400 organizations currently use the platform including Fortune 500 companies like McDonald’s and Dell, as well as media companies such as the AP, BBC and CNN.Other new features Geofeedia released include the ability to identify "top influencers" in a given location and their social connections, and it added a Salesforce integration that allows users to create a Salesforce.com lead or customer service case from a location-tagged social media post with a single click, the company said.“Our upgraded platform augments the value of social media as a powerful tool to get the pulse of any location around the world,” Phil Harris, CEO and co-founder of Geofeedia, said in a statement. “Whether it’s to gain situational awareness in a crisis, maintain public safety at events or generate sales leads at retail outlets, we provide users with the most actionable intelligence in real time. Further setting Geofeedia apart from other social media monitoring technology, our app is the only way to easily empower users with geo-tagged real-time social media data on the go.”Geofeedia launched in 2011 raised $3 million last March. It said its subscription-based platform recently reached more than 10,000 users, and it's on track to quadruple its client base by the end of the year.
New Social Media Intelligence Platform Getting Serious Attention
By Emma Martin on June 17, 2015
Haven’t heard of Geofeedia? You probably will. And very soon.An emerging leader in location-based social media monitoring, the company has just released version 4.0 of its platform.With new capabilities and features, the updated platform makes it even easier to cut through the massive amount of social data to understand social media signals in real time at a specific place.In short, Geofeedia enables the use of location-tagged data to discover, engage, and analyze content across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, Sina Weibo and other social channels.“Our upgraded platform augments the value of social media as a powerful tool to get the pulse of any location around the world,” said Phil Harris, CEO and co-founder of Geofeedia. “Whether it’s to gain situational awareness in a crisis, maintain public safety at events or generate sales leads at retail outlets, we provide users with the most actionable intelligence in real time. Further setting Geofeedia apart from other social media monitoring technology, our app is the only way to easily empower users with geo-tagged real-time social media data on the go.”
Geofeedia Launches Updated Location Monitoring Platform & iOS App
New platform has updated interface, faster processing and has added China's Sina Weibo to the "largest location-based data set in the world."By Martin BeckGeofeedia, the location-based social media monitoring and analytics company, announced today the launch of an iOS app and the latest version of its platform.The Chicago-based company helps enterprise customers — including McDonald’s, Dell, the Associated Press, BBC and CNN — gather geographically sourced information from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, Twitter and other social channels. With today’s launch, the company has added Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging network.The new platform includes an updated interface and faster processing. The company says it can handle more than 10,000 posts a second and 1 billion daily across the “largest location-based data set in the world.” Geofeedia has also added sentiment analysis, identification of top influencers and functionality to gather data about multiple locations. The new iOS app, available now in the Apple store, gives clients the ability to track the data while they are on the go.
Geofeedia puts new features in place
By Kim DavisGeofeedia, the location-based social media monitoring platform with headquarters in Chicago, today announced a series of enhancements to its product, including an iOS app version.With a number of vendors bringing different perspectives to place-based social relationship management, I spoke with R.J. Talyor, Geofeedia's VP of product management, to figure out what the platform does and doesn't offer, and the significance of the new changes.Interestingly, unlike other social media management solutions, Geofeedia emerged not from the commercial challenge of funneling Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines, but out of the narrower need of journalists to validate the originating location of social updates, as part of the process of confirming the veracity of online reports from places where they had no first-hand reporting.From Talyor's description, Geofeedia's business today bears clear traces of its origins. It still serves media clients, and it also supplements executive protection strategies. Corporations implementing high level protection for traveling employees leverage data from Geofeedia to create a virtual geo-fence, guarding executives on the move against everything from protests and demonstrations to natural disasters.At the same time, Geofeedia is emphasizing its evolution as a commercial social listening tool, with location as the differentiator. How does it work? Well, not through spy cams and sensors, of course. The geo data derives from analytics, run entirely against public domain information, sourced through API interfaces with social partners. In other words, multiple tweets and updates help to pin the tail on the donkey.Geofeedia's customers set up virtual perimeters around the locations which matter to them--stores for example--and receive alerts of local social activity, allowing them perhaps to target offers or share advice on finding whatever people happen to be looking for. "Events are increasingly important to us," said Talyor. A recent example was the NCAA Final Four in Indianapolis, where focused listening within the event's defined perimeter allowed Geofeedia customers to share directions, neighborhood advice, suggestions on where to eat and drink, etc.This doesn't mean, however, that Geofeedia is aggregating data on individuals based on their location, hour-by-hour. "We're focused on location-based trending, not individuals," said Talyor. This doesn't mean, however, that Geofeedia's data couldn't be mined to track the movements of a social account. Indeed, one of the enhancements announced today--integration with Salesforce--does make it easier to create a Salesforce lead or customer service profile based on location-tagged social posts.If Geofeedia's data can lend itself to location-based profiling, one thing it can't do is real-time GPS targeting of mobile users. The app just doesn't have the features which would permit that, said Talyor, "but we can use our data to do location-based advertising." Again, the reliance is on public tagging of tweets and posts, and the focus is on advertizing around the location, not the individual.Here are some of today's other product enhancements:
- An upgraded data platform that can manage up to one billion posts per day, process, tagging and analyzing them essentially in real time.
- The capacity to search multiple locations, and to search micro-locations within larger sites (activity in one department of a big box store, for example).
- The iOS app, hopefully to be followed very soon by an Android version.
- Integrated sentiment analysis, sourced from a third party vendor.
- An updated UI.
Geofeedia Announces Version 4.0, New iOS App
By Justin LaffertyGeofeedia, a location-based social media monitoring, intelligence and analysis platform, today announced version 4.0 of its platform and a new iOS app. Through this new version of Geofeedia, users can gather location-tagged data across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, Sina Weibo and other channels.Through the iOS app, Geofeedia users and marketers can gather data based on their current locations, or create/monitor any location.The company’s research found that 74 percent of social posts can’t be discovered via hashtag or keyword monitoring. Additionally, six percent of posts only have a photo or video without text. Geofeedia’s technology allows marketers and users to keep a finger on the pulse of what’s going on around them or in a certain area. Geofeedia serves more than 400 organizations and 10,000 users, aiming to double its client base by the end of the year.
Phil Harris, Geofeedia’s CEO and co-founder, commented on the new version in a press release:Our upgraded platform augments the value of social media as a powerful tool to get the pulse of any location around the world. Whether it’s to gain situational awareness in a crisis, maintain public safety at events or generate sales leads at retail outlets, we provide users with the most actionable intelligence in real-time. Further setting Geofeedia apart from other social media monitoring technology, our app is the only way to easily empower users with geo-tagged real-time social media data on the go. The new version of Geofeedia includes these enhancements:
- New Look and Feel: Now it’s even easier to discover, engage and analyze social media data with a streamlined and updated user interface.
- Upgraded Data Platform: With the upgraded capacity to process more than 1 billion posts daily (~10,000 per second) by the platform, Geofeedia enables the most complete searches across the largest location-based data set in the world.
- Aggregated Location Monitoring: Save time and gain insight by collecting intelligence across many locations in a single search.
- Enhanced Location Analytics: Make smarter real-time decisions through updated and interactive location analytics.
- Location Sentiment: Quickly understand the sentiment (positive/negative) of posts from one or more locations.
- New Data Source: With the largest Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo added to Geofeedia, users now have an even larger data set to discover, engage and analyze.
- Templates: Save time by creating and reusing search criteria (including locations, keywords, networks, usernames) within a search template.
- Influencers: Discover top influencers in a location and their social connections.
- Salesforce Integration: Increase sales and improve customer service by creating a Salesforce.com lead or customer service case from a location-tagged social media post with a single click.
Quertle Launches Improved Biomedical Search Engine
Quertle Launches Improved Biomedical Search EngineUduak Grace ThomasNEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Biomedical and health IT solution developer Quertle recently released Quetzal Search and Communication, a new iteration of its biomedical literature search system that it claims outperforms existing search solutions and delivers contextually relevant results for life science and healthcare professionals.Jeffrey Saffer, the company's president, told GenomeWeb this week that the new product shares some of the same DNA as the company's preceding system — also called Quertle —but expands on that earlier system with new features and capabilities that help researchers in industry and academia get to relevant results faster and capture information that other search systems miss, and access a broad range of valuable content for research.Unique features in this release include automated key concept extraction, filtering options, and instant searches for entire classes of entities. Moreover, the tool uses optimized ontologies to eliminate reliance on Boolean searches, and uses separate author, journal, and affiliation entries to avoid providing conflicting results.Quetzal's so-called power term functionality lets users search, for example, all members of a category such as 'diseases' and get results that exclude false hits from general terms like disease or syndrome, the company said. Quetzal accesses content from a host of resources including PubMed, PubMed Central full text, patent grants and applications, AHRQ Treatment Protocols, NIH grants, TOXLINE, and relevant news sources. These documents — some 35 million of them so far — are stored in a local database hosted on Quertle's servers. Users have access to tools that they can use to annotate documents and they can conduct private discussions with their peers within the system.Quetzel uses the same patented Quantum Logic Linguistic (QLL) technology as its predecessor? to identify and return relevant results faster and more effectively than existing methods. Rather than search for all possible responses to a search query, the company's QLL-based system searches documents for concepts and also looks for relationships between concepts and input search terms, he explained. This way, it pares down the list of all possible documents that could be returned in response to a user's query to only the most relevant ones, saving time and ensuring that no critical documents are missed, he said.It's different from searching PubMed directly or leveraging resources such as Google Scholar and Thomson Reuters' Web of Science, which simply scan documents for input terms and return all instances where the terms are mentioned whether they are relevant or not, Saffer said. Quetzal, on the other hand, with its emphasis on concepts and relationships between them, is able to provide a more focused set of results. Quetzal also covers more ground in terms of content than PubMed including not just the content contained in that database but also patent grants and applications, NIH grants, toxicology information from the National Library of Medicine, and more.Quertle offers free and priced versions of Quetzal. With the basic version, users can search PubMed for free and receive relevant results filtered by publication data and type — this option is best suited for undergraduates or occasional consumers of biomedical papers and resources. Meanwhile Quetzal professional and Quetzal advanced offer more comprehensive search capabilities and access to a broader content than PubMed alone. The company charges $9.90 per subscription per month for Quetzal professional and $99 per annum for yearly subscriptions. A subscription to Quetzal advanced costs $99 a month and $990 per annum. Also, customers that purchase annual subscriptions for both Quetzal advanced and Quetzal professional will receive two months of free access and use of the search engine.Quertle also offers site licenses to its search engine for larger organizations such as pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions, Saffer said. Pricing operates on a sliding scale with the largest for-profit customers paying on the order of $75,000 for a site license with smaller for-profit customers being charged much less. The company also offers deep discounts for site license for non-profits and educational institutions, Saffer said. A small university, for example, could be charged as low as $5,000 for a license. The company also offers discount pricing to members of library consortia and is currently inking agreements with some such groups.Besides targeting clients in pharma, biotech, academia, as well as hospitals, Quertle also hopes to draw interest from solution providers who might be interested in linking their applications to the Quetzal database and search engine, Saffer said. The company offers an application programming interface that those vendors could use to link to Quetzal, and Quertle will work with these vendors to customize the content that their products have access to as well as the functionality available within those tools. The API is also available to customers seeking to deploy Quetzal within existing in-house applications, he said. Saffer said that some current customers begun using the API for this purpose but have signed non-disclosure agreements with Quertle so he is unable to discuss how the API is being used. He did say however that the company has received requests from physicians who want to use the API to make Quetzal content and functionality available within their electronic health records.
BLM Acquisition Invests in Codero Hosting
BLM Acquisition Corp., a consortium of 32 regional telecom and broadband providers, completed the acquisition of on-demand hybrid cloud hosting services provider Codero Hosting‘s outstanding equity from majority owner Catalyst Investors and other shareholders.Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.The acquisition includes a significant investment by BLM to accelerate Codero’s next phase of growth, which will include development and launch of new products and services that leverage its existing data center facilities, expansion of sales channel, and growth of the its presence across the U.S. and the world.Codero Hosting delivers on-demand dedicated, managed, cloud and hybrid hosting infrastructure and solutions to global customers from data centers in Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, and Ashburn, Virginia with plans for expansion in Europe.Emil Sayegh will remain as president and CEO of Codero, and will become Chairman of the Board of Directors of the new organization. Webster Bank of Hartford, Conn. provided senior financing to BLM in support of the transaction.
Catalyst exits Codero Hosting
BY LUISA BELTRANBLM Acquisition Corp. has acquired a majority of Codero Hosting. The sellers were Catalyst Investors and other shareholders. Financial terms weren’t announced. BLM is a consortium of 32 regional telecom and broadband providers. Codero, with data centers in Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, and Ashburn, Virginia, provides hybrid cloud hosting services. Webster Bank of Hartford, Conn. provided senior financing to BLM while DH Capital acted as financial advisor.
Codero Hosting Acquired By Broadband Consortium
Austin-based Codero, a provider of Internet hosting services, said this morning that it has been acquired by a consortium of 32 regional telecom companies. Financial terms of the acquisition were not announced. Codero said the BLM Acquisition Corp. consortium acquired all of the company's outstanding equity from current owner Catalyst Investors and others. Codero said the deal also includes a "significant" investment aimed at helping the company grow its products and services. Codero explained that Emil Sayegh, the company's current president and CEO, will remain in that position and become Chairman of the company's board.
Codero sells to group of telecom, broadband providers
Overland Park-based Web-hosting company Codero Hosting announced Tuesday its sale to a group of regional telecom and broadband providers.
BLM Acquisition Corp. bought Codero from majority owner Catalyst Investors and other shareholders. Although the amount was not disclosed, the companies said the deal includes “a significant investment” in Codero’s growth.
Codero CEO Emil Sayegh will remain in that post.
BLM is described as a consortium of 32 regional telecom and broadband providers. Sayegh said in a release that the deal not only brings investment in Codero, but also partnerships with a wide range of telecom providers. The members of BLM will offer an expanded sales channel and access to their data centers.
Bill King, Leo Staurulakis and Manny Staurulakis are listed in a release as the founding shareholders of BLM. Manny Staurulakis is president and Leo Staurulakis executive vice president of John Staurulakis Inc., a Maryland-based company that provides financial and business services to independent telecommunications companies. King is president of JSI Capital Advisors LLC, which provides valuation and transaction services to telecom companies.
Codero offers a variety of hosting services, including dedicated, cloud, managed and hybrid hosting. The company has offices in Overland Park and Austin, Texas, and data centers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Phoenix and Ashburn, Va.