We’ve had a pretty active couple of weeks, the highlight of which has to be attending CIX on Dec 1 at MaRS. Nexalogy was selected to participate as one of the top twenty innovative startups at CIX. There were great presentations of startups to a room packed with VCs. In spite of a a technical hiccup, we managed to place fifth overall and were chosen to participate in a three month stint in Silicon Valley courtesy of the Canadian Technology Accelerator. We’re following in the footsteps of Context.io, who won the same award last year. It was a huge honour to be selected by CIX and the result certainly exceeded our expectations.

On a personal note, it gave me occasion to make connections with a couple of entrepreneurs – one of whom lives in my own backyard of Montreal – at the speakers dinner. Mark O’Sullivan of Vanilla Forums is facilitating communities everywhere a phenomenal 300,000+ forums around the world. Over dinner I had a great discussion with Allen Lau, CEO and Founder of Wattpad on different forms of social data (ebooks are social data too!). I learned about the surprising intersection between commercial real estate architecture and Virtual worlds from Colin Graham, CEO of Arcestra.

In the meantime, the team is hard at work putting the final touches on the UI for our first product, Nexalive.

Exciting times!

With Fabric Engine’s Server technology its possible to take current backend infrastructure and redeploy it to scale and gain impressive performance increases. In Nexalogy’s case we have to do a lot of back end processing on blog posts for our SDAS (Social Data Analysis System), so in order to get an idea of how much faster Fabric was we ran a standardized co-word analysis on 20,000 blog post snippets (time in seconds):

Using our PHP Engine: 105s
Using our Java Version 1 Engine: 18s
Using Fabric Engine: 2s

The results speak for themselves.

Fabric Engine Server has other advantages too. In addition to using a language very similar to Javascript for the high-performance operators (vanilla JavaScript/node for everything else), which reduces the need to learn or bring in C++ coders, you can avoid the whole code-compile-run cycle with its sometimes long delays, and use a more immediate execute model.

Fabric Engine Server is currently in alpha deployment with just a handful of startups including Nexalogy. The Fabric Engine team is very smart and responsive, and are currently building out new functionality to the Server constantly as it moves through Alpha. Turning performance into a commodity, this could be a game changer for startups needing to go to the next level. Fabric Engine is currently in Silicon Valley strutting their stuff with other top notch startups at C100′s “48 Hours in the Valley”. We wish them all the best!

Nexalogy became a partner by creating a Startup Weekend Toronto Nexalive microsite here. Creating it is simple; just plug in one #swtoronto hashtag. We captured some 3128 tweets and counting!

Sarah Jane Morris – Head of Developer Relations at Context.io – got to feel the electric atmosphere first hand. You can see she was one of the most active tweeters during the event according to Nexalive and you can read her account of this microcosm of the startup experience here.

We’ve got two microsites going for this event. One for the event as a whole – check out the #webcom microsite here!

The other one is for the Open Government stream – check out the #opengouv stream here!

We’re fast approaching our launch for Nexalive, our first product using the technology we’ve featured on this site. The final touches are being put on the product but thanks to our willing test subjects like Webcom, we’re well on our way.

What is Nexalive? It’s a turnkey Twitter visualization tool for events. Nexalive takes your event hashtag and turns it into an eye catching data visualization as unique as your event.

Not Mars the planet! MaRS Discovery District, the Toronto-based incubator for science, technology and social entrepreneurship plays host to CIX this December 1, 2011.

Nexalogy is proud to have placed in the top 20 Canadian companies for The Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX). We’ll be heading to Toronto to represent Montreal startups alongside Recoset, Vanilla Forums and Woozworld.

CIX is an annual event that expertly curates for potential partners and venture capital to watch a demo and meet the entrepreneurs. Companies are judged on a number of key factors including: product/service offering, depth of management, market opportunity and business model. There were hundreds of startups that applied so it’s a great privlege to be selected.

If you think you want to come along to cheer us on in person, you an also register here. And check out the schedule too; looks like it’s going to be a packed day!

Leadership in online influence scoring is becoming embattled territory as services in this area include Klout, Kred, Tweet Grader (by Hubspot), and Tweet Level. But one should note, all are driven by black box algorithms that vye for the title of industry  “gold standard” for anointing online influencers. This isn’t pure vanity either; knowing the level of influence of any player is a PR and marketing professional’s dream solution but nobody to date has provided the silver bullet.

This seminal article on “weblogs” by Clay Shirky (February 2003) remains a classic in the social media cannon and is a favorite around the Nexalogy office. Power Law or ‘Pareto’ distribution, describes the observable social phenomena whereby the majority of content is created by the minority of producers. It’s an unavoidable response to the plethora of choice. Network theory shows how one’s individual choice to read a blog reverberates through their network based even though such choices are sometimes completely subjective – like preferring one style of writing over another or feeling politically aligned with like-minded sources.

The main thing to remember when considering influence graders is that they are at this point blunt instruments at best. They’ve grown from being impression measurement tools trying to measure context and subjectivity, as described above. I haven’t been astounded by the results of Kred so far but I have to say that I’m most optimistic about their methodology because they been quick to slice influence into domains. With Kred, at least social capital is seen as context dependent.

Tweet Grader (the free version, anyway) has long been outstripped especially in the insights department. Surely they can offer me something better than six words in a tweet cloud featuring “RT” as my most used word? Please.

One has to ask, is it a good thing that the most influence is wielded by a small group of people? Social media content creators that reach a certain momentum in twitter followers and blog links become the a part of that small bracket thanks to search engine ranking algorithms and twitter recommendation engines. The impossibility of knowing the blogosphere is exciting the way moving from a small town to a big city is exciting. Pseudonymity allows bloggers more wiggle room to express themselves, opinions are as diverse as they are plentiful and online social mobility becomes possible.

If there is one thing that the Occupy and Arab Spring movements have shown us in the last few weeks and months is that power imbalance has consequences and social media still has disruptive potential  Influence graders are bell weathers of power. I argue that a consequence of grading influence and doing it well will confer merit, power and its multiplication effects for those who actually deserve it.

Will these companies step up to the work for the interests of the 99%?

Special Thanks to Zach Devereaux (Chief Analyst Nexalogy Environics) for his valuable feedback on this post.

A shorter version of this blog post can be found on the Toronto Board of Trade website (link)

In one of the more important turns of the campaign David Suzuki endorsed Dalton McGuinty and the OLP. Green Energy is a top issue associated significantly with the Liberals; on Twitter over the Sept. 17th weekend their environmental record was significantly discussed. The Green Energy discussion also links to the major campaign theme to date of Jobs, as jobs are discussed in terms of environmentally friendly job creation. This shows that the previous weekend’s trending of green jobs really got traction in the week of September 12-16th.

For Sunday Sept. 18th, “Vote” was the top word, associated in particular with comparisons of the voting record of Andrea Horwath to Tim Hudak in the Ontario Provincial Parliament. Many Tweeters retweeted the message that Horwath and Hudak voted the same way more than 150 times despite their ideological differences. “Job” continued to be strong, with Tim Hudak’s announcement of a five-point job plan getting some traction on Twitter showing that the progressive conservatives know how to react to the biggest topic of the election campaign so far.

Health care began to trend for the first time on Sunday the 18th in the Twitterverse as a campaign issue with Dalton McGuinty visiting the sick kids hospital to emphasize the OLP’s record on health care garnering a number of tweets. Multiple tweets critiqued the PCPO and Tim Hudak for dismantling hospitals in the past and lacking plans to fund hospitals in the future. In a reflection of how the OLP is engaging well with the Twitterverse, a number of tweets associated the Party with an elevated level of trust compared to the other parties when it comes to guiding the Ontario health care system.

Overall Timeline

Timeline for the weekend of September 17th and 18th

Top Words reflect Green Jobs, and the David Suzuki endorsement of the OLP

The top publishers e.g. those Twitter accounts that produced the largest number of tweets are as follows:

However, the most important accounts based on interaction, our “Top Tweeters” (mentions and replies, but not retweets) are as follows and show that Horwath garnered the most discussion over the weekend, followed by Hudak. McGuinty was not discussed as much this weekend by name.

Top Shared Links

1. Similar to the previous week, an attack site against Horwath tops the shared links
2. The official Dalton McGuinty OLP Facebook page, with multiple videos
3. An OLP ‘rogue’ website comparing the voting record of Horwath and Hudak
4. The official Andrea Horwath NDP website for NDP videos
5. A video that has now been removed from YouTube by the original poster, which was the endorsement of Dalton McGuinty by David Suzuki

From the get go, one of the major themes from this festival was startup demystification.  Chris Shipley (CEO, Guidewire Group) gave us a sobering helping of mythbusting on the hype around startups that’s been building in the last few years. Sarah Prevette (CEO, Sprouter) had hand drawn slides as she explained the startup journey with her characteristic mix of humility and charisma. Tara Hunt (CEO, Buyosphere) personalised the entrepreneur’s struggle: startups are hard, they’re risky, and they will test you in every way. She also gave this talk on her birthday.

Upon reflection, success in academia is just like success in the startup life. The first keynote by Dave McClure (Founder, 500 Startups) really brought this home to me with his presentation “Why NOT to do a startup” where he emphasized the insane levels of dedication, energy and self-sacrifice it takes to realize your vision while knowing the odds of success are miniscule. Many of these points below were inspired by his talk where Dave may or may not have dropped an F-bomb:

• You need to be passionate enough about a subject that you could think about it 70 hours a week (for me it was supermassive black holes)
• You must find a problem/need that no one has solved before you start working on your solution (for me, that was a just the beginning of my PhD)
• You are your own marketing and sales department (“publish or perish” is no cliche – for me it meant non-stop travelling to conferences, networking like crazy with my peers, which by the way, won’t help you a whit if your research sucks)
• You have to produce world class results on a shoestring budget; “living large” = $30K a year in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Paris.
• You need to inspire your team with vision – enough so they’ll give up the security of a Real Job.

Startups ARE hard, especially in a town that is far away from all the action in Silicon Valley. Startup Fest opened a lot of doors for the community. Thanks JS Cournoyer, Alistair Croll, Phil Telio, Julien Smith and Chris Shipley for bringing little bit of the Valley to Montreal.

By the way, Startup Fest was indeed very good for us. We placed #1 at the Demo table competition! We were ranked first using Guidewire Group’s G-Score – thanks Chris Shipley, to my wicked team: Mathieu Ouin, Maxime Martineau, Guido Vieira and to our investors at Environics (ERG and ECI ).

Read the Gazette’s round up here!

Implementing a new system can be costly in subscription fees alone; some enterprise SMA solutions will set you back over $100,000 per month! I argue they’re vastly more damaging to the organization in an intangible way: it’s a huge blow to morale to adopt and abandon if the tool is simply not right for your needs.

We thought it worthwhile to amalgamate the collected wisdom from these critical minds that have tried more solutions collectively than any SMA supplier could ever possibly do on their own. I’ve got a few notes on things to look for and things to avoid:

1. Make sure what you’re getting from your solution is actionable. Infographics are trendy but it’s strategy you want. Charts are useless if they don’t give you a clue as to what to do next.
2. Make sure your solution captures networks of information and not just reporting on social-networks-as-silos. The real insights are in network effects and amplifications, not in short, non-linear relationships.
3. Do for data what hi-def did for TV. This means Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis that are better than “positive, negative and neutral” and pull the qualitative gems from the quagmire. This goes for reporting on metadata that can tell you the who, what, where and when to give you a sense of the diffusion and discourse.
4. Filter spam. Don’t just say you do it; actually do it. Paying through the nose for a SMA with poor spam filtering is like going to Le Cirque and being expected to bus your own table.
5. Creating linkages between networks is what you pay the big bucks for and you want something that uses “sleuthy techniques”, algortihmic-ninja fancy footwork to open up that pandora’s box of the non-obvious.

Before going into any of the above however, I will recall two beautiful latin words “caveat emptor”, which means “don’t be a sucker” in plain english. Writing on Microsoft Word, WordPerfect 5.1 or on parchment has no real bearing on the quality of the prose. Ergo, an SMA tool will never define your problem for you. Dedicate some quality time to your business objectives, how social media impacts them and how you want to measure that.

Resources:

Nexalogy White Paper on Social Media Intelligence vs. Monitoring