Silobreaker Named Red Herring 200 Global Finalist

"Red Herring Global is the culmination of a year's work of scouring thousands of privately held companies from around the world. During this time we have meticulously selected 1200 of the top companies from Europe, North America, and Asia, of which 200 have made it as Finalists" - Red Herring (read more)

This is further recognition and confirmation that Silobreaker is making a real impact in the search arena. Unfortunately, we won't be able to attend the Red Herring conference in San Diego but wish the organizers and our fellow Finalists a great event.

Silobreaker Selected for 2008 Mediatech 100 Award

The Mediatech 100 is a list of Europe’s hottest private media technology companies likely to have the biggest impact on the industry in the future.

Library House, the essential source on fast-growth, innovation-led private companies across Europe, has revealed its 2008 Mediatech 100 in association with Kemp Little and New Media Age.

Silobreaker was awarded a place on the list!

The list was dominated by UK companies (60) followed by France (11), Germany (11), Finland (3), Iceland (2), Sweden (2), Ireland (2), Luxembourg (2), The Netherlands (2), Switzerland (2), Belgium (1), Denmark (1), and the Isle of Man (1). For the full list, click here.

Silobreaker "Truthiness" - Who Needs Opinion Polls?

It’s the eve of the US Presidential Election and pollsters are working around the clock to predict the result. Each new poll, though, seems to have a shelf-life of no more than a few hours and is met with either suspicion or disbelief (or is forgotten in the deluge of other polls being released).

The problems with polls, of course, are that (a) they can only cover a very small sample of the actual electorate because of the time and effort involved in carrying out the surveys; and (b) they rely on the people being asked to actually vote the way they say they will when being polled. We know from the past, however, that many voters may say one thing and vote another.

So, if polls offer no more than “qualified guesses”, aren’t there faster and cheaper ways to come up with an alternative gauge of the election outcome?

Take a look at the chart below.



The chart shows the relative share of mentions in the news between Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin. To go to the chart click here.

Since the campaigns begun, Silobreaker has aggregated hundreds of thousands of articles related to the US election and anyone can use its Trends Search to see the relative media attention that the presidential and vice-presidential candidates receive over time. Essentially, it enables users to measure trends from what the aggregate press corps is writing about. In our blog from 14th September,“Silobreaker Truthiness – The Sarah Palin Effect”, we showed how Sarah Palin dominated news coverage following her surprise appearance as John McCain’s running mate. The chart above shows that it didn’t last and that Barack Obama has raced away from John McCain in the last week or so in terms of media coverage.

This is not the time to go deeper into the correlation between media attention and opinion polls, let's just observe that the Silobreaker chart suggests what almost every poll indicates right now as well.

It may not be more reliable, but the "Silobreaker poll" takes a few seconds to conduct and can be re-run at any time for updated results.

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

The trend charts that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually edited in any way. All Silobreaker’s search results are deduced by algorithms performing semantic and statistical analyses of tens of thousands of articles every day. Sounds complicated? Well, the equivalent manual research effort would be more or less impossible. Silobreaker's search results offer users "auto-generated" insight, which is updated dynamically as new articles are being published and the search is re-run.

Silobreaker "Truthiness" - Effects From Financial Meltdown

As much as we would like to (and probably should), we rarely find the time to blog about Silobreaker. So there is normally quite some time between our posts. However, considering the unprecedented turn of events in the financial markets, here are a few "algorithmic" insights into the situation.

Silobreaker Trends Search provides media attention trends based on mentions in the news. Essentially, it enables users to gauge trends from what the aggregate press corps is writing about. We are also about to introduce "Tracks" in Silobreaker. Tracks will enable enterprise users to define what they are tracking from a media monitoring perspective.

Here are few general tracks that we have already set up for everyone's use:

• Rate Hike
• Rate Cut
• Oil Price Higher
• Oil Price Lower
• Dollar Weaker
• Dollar Stronger

Each Track has been defined through a variety of rules and terms to enable a much broader approach than just single keyword-based alert-systems. By using these Tracks in Trends Search we can gauge what media are focusing on and how it changes over time.

So by looking at the relative share between Rate Hike and Rate Cut based on media's attention to the respective scenarios, we get the following picture:

Click here to go to the chart.

We have also filtered the press coverage for the chart above to only include news about the Federal Reserve to provide a more specific and multi-dimensional search result. So again, the chart shows the relative focus between Rate Hike and Rate Cut in Fed-related news. The chart seems to suggest a strong anticipation of an actual rate cut by the Fed later today. Is it an accurate forecast by media or are they just trying to "talk up" the market? We'll soon know.

Here's the same but filtered on Bank of England related news:

Click here to go to the chart.

What about in European Central Bank related news?

Click here to go to the chart.

Now, let's switch to media's reporting on oil prices and the relative focus between "Oil Prices Higher" and "Oil Prices Lower":

Click here to go to the chart.

..and finally the US dollar and the relative media attention between "Dollar Stronger" and "Dollar Weaker":

Click here to go to the chart.

I'll leave the interpretation to the reader, but as always with this blog, the purpose is to promote the easy use and benefits of Silobreaker. The above analysis took no more than a couple of minutes to complete.

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

The trend charts that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually edited in any way. All Silobreaker’s search results are deduced by algorithms performing semantic and statistical analyses of tens of thousands of articles every day. Sounds complicated? Well, the equivalent manual research effort would be more or less impossible. Silobreaker's search results offer auto-generated insight “live” and the graphical results are updated dynamically as new articles are being published and the search is re-run.

Silobreaker "Truthiness" - The Sarah Palin Effect

Whether your loyalties lie with the Democrats or the Republicans in the US Presidential race, very few of us can pretend to have been unaffected by the media frenzy following Sarah Palin’s surprise appearance as John McCain’s running-mate.

There has been much discussion about the “Palin-effect” in media and Silobreaker is the perfect news search service to use for examining it a bit closer.

In the weeks and months leading up to the Republicans' surprise announcement, Silobreaker averaged around five articles per day about Sarah Palin (hardly noticeable on the graph below). Ever since the announcement, the equivalent number of articles is about 1,000 per day (with peaks over 2,000). That is a 200 times increase.

So how has this increase in absolute terms affected Palin’s relative share of press coverage compared to the other candidates? Silobreaker’s Trends Search provides media attention trends based on mentions in the news. Essentially, it enables users to gauge trends from what the aggregate press corps is writing about. The chart below suggests clear evidence of the “Palin-effect”. Quite sensationally actually, for the first time since the campaigns begun, Barack Obama is not the obvious leader in terms of press coverage. And in terms of the vice-presidential media attention race, there is simply no match at the moment. Joe Biden gets around 6-7% of the overall coverage of the four candidates compared to Palin’s 30%.

The chart shows the relative share of mentions in the news between Palin, McCain, Obama and Biden. Click here to go to the chart.

So is it all good news for the Republicans?

Well, for believers in “all PR is good PR” the answer might be yes. The networks below, however, analyze the media attention through another lens and show the 10 keyphrases that have been found in the overall press coverage to have the strongest association with Barack Obama and Sarah Palin respectively (filtered out in both networks are obvious terms like White House, US Election, etc).


The networks show what keyphrases in the news flow that have the strongest association to Obama and Palin respectively. Such keyphrases, and their connections to the candidates, are extracted from the overall reporting about Obama and Palin, which during the last few weeks amount to some 40,000 articles in Silobreaker (blogs are not included in this analysis).

These pictures seem to support those who believe that a large part of the press coverage around Palin is based primarily on sensationalism and controversy rather than policy. Can this ultimately hurt the Republicans, and might it be difficult for the McCain camp to maintain media’s interest to the same degree or for the right reasons as their campaign races on towards the November election date?

So is Barack Obama's apparent silence about Sarah Palin evidence of grave concern over the "Palin-effect", or is he just silently confident that the controversial topics surrounding Palin will eventually be the sword on to which the Republicans will fall themselves?

By using Silobreaker regularly, it will be easy for anyone to follow these twists and turns - up to the election and beyond.

Finally, the purpose of this blog is not to provide political commentary, for which I am clearly not qualified, but to promote the easy use and benefits of Silobreaker. The above analysis took no more than a few minutes to complete.

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

The connections and trends that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually edited in any way. All Silobreaker’s search results are deduced by algorithms performing semantic and statistical analyses of tens of thousands of articles every day. Sounds complicated? Well, the equivalent manual research effort would be more or less impossible. Silobreaker's search results offer auto-generated insight “live” and the graphical results are updated dynamically as new articles are being published and the search is re-run.

Go get them Jimmy!

Our chief architect Jimmy is once again in the TopCoder finals.

We'll all be watching it live on Thursday, May 15 at 10:00 AM, Vegas time. Go get them!

Silobreaker goes beyond the news headlines to uncover the latest trends

Here's a podcast from Network World that was released a couple of days ago (although the interview took place mid-Feb).

"A new search engine upstart making waves is Silobreaker, which has created a search system for users wanting more than just the latest news headlines and looking for deeper analysis and trends. Silobreaker CEO Kristofer Mansson talks about how the site works, what data it can deliver and how it differs from that other big search engine dominating the news."

Click here to listen to the podcast

Search market in focus

As we reported last week, we had fantastic feedback following our official launch of Silobreaker at the DEMO 08 conference in California at the end of January. The need for “smarter” search engines seems to touch a raw nerve amongst many web users and positive reactions keep coming in from press and bloggers alike as the word about Silobreaker is spreading. I am sure Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has helped as well because of the renewed focus on the search space as a whole.

In my view, Microsoft's bid for Yahoo and Google's subsequent involvement is a clash of giants that will likely have implications for everyone involved in or using the Internet. However, in the wake of this deal and regardless of its outcome, information overload will still be a problem and users will continue to ask for quicker and better ways of finding more relevant search results than what traditional search engines have been offering so far. Silobreaker was developed to meet exactly such growing user demand and the service brings meaning to news content through sense-making analytics and graphical search results.

Ultimately, it’s the value and relevance of the search result that matter and our goal is very simple; to deliver insight as a service.

Thanks for using Silobreaker.
Best regards,
Kristofer Mansson, CEO

New Feature: We have added a zoom-feature to Network Search. You can zoom in or out either by using the scroll wheel on your mouse or the zoom-slider in the upper left corner of the network area. See what you think.

Recent press clippings:

"Search tools made clever" - Financial Times, 8 February, 2008

"Silobreaker can also chart article volumes by media type, identify geographic news hotspots and, impressively, map relationships between topics in the form of an interactive network. Users can navigate spiders- web graphics by dragging and dropping the elements in it. I found the graphic often suggested relationships I had not immediately thought of."

"Silobreaker Brings a Graphical View to News Research" - Information Today, 7 February, 2008

"The smart context extraction and relational analysis of Silobreaker is by far the best I have seen in the semantic search space. Silobreaker quickly becomes indispensable; it is an invaluable research tool with a sophisticated algorithm that I’d like to see proliferate in the search market."[Says Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO]"

"The Search Market Fallout Of Microsoft-Yahoo" - InformationWeek, 9 February, 2008

"When tigers battle, mice get fat. That pseudo-Chinese proverb well describes one likely outcome of Microsoft's $44 billion bid for Yahoo... The clash of the titans atop the search pyramid is opening up new opportunities for smaller players while helping to enable a broad flourishing of innovation in information-access technology... Take Silobreaker, which debuted its contextual search engine at last month's Demo conference..."


"And here are blogs about Silobreaker found on Google Blog Search"

DEMO 08 (Part II)

We're back from the DEMO 08 conference that was held in Palm Desert, CA, 28-30 January. It was great! Truly a unique mix of demonstrators, media, VCs and industry experts coming together in an event that is informal and relaxed, yet incredibly professionally produced by Chris Shipley and her team. Anyone looking to launch anything in tech or media, this is the event!

We had a great time and judging by the attention and media coverage so far, Silobreaker's message of providing "insight as a service" struck a chord with many of the attendees. Thanks to all who came by our booth and saw the presentation. You can find Silobreaker's presentation in DEMO's video center.

And here's some feedback that's come in so far:

"The Coolest Thing I Saw At DEMO" - InformationWeek, 31 Jan 2008

"Every year at Demo there's one presenter that captures my imagination and actually seems to be providing something that I will find useful. This year, while Skyfire showed off the beta of an intriguing new mobile browser and BitGravity displayed its power new network platform for high-definition video, the choice was easy: Silobreaker."

"Picking the winners at the DEMO conference" - San Jose Mercury News, 31 Jan 2008

"It's rare that a Web site offers a genuinely new way of looking at information. But that's what you get with Silobreaker"

"The Best of DEMO 08" - Seattle Post Intelligencer, 30 Jan 2008

"BEST PITCH: I didn't have the chance to watch every company, but one that really hooked me was London's Silobreaker."

"Silobreaker advances social-network visualization" - Intelligent Enterprise, 30 Jan 2008

"Silobreaker's visualizations add huge value to the company’s underlying news-aggregation service."

"Silobreaker pitches ‘insight as a service’" - ZDNet, 30 Jan 2008

"Silobreaker offers a new twist on news aggregation and search navigation."

"SiloBreaker: More than just the latest headline news" - Microsoft Startup Zone, 31 Jan 2008

"SiloBreaker was one of my favorites at DEMO this year. Based on statistical relationships, they are the first company I’ve come across that is able to perform sophisticated visualization and text analytic-like functionality on large unstructured data sets like news articles."

"Silobreaker: Information, Context and Correlation" - White African, 31 Jan 2008

"Of all the products that I saw at DEMO 2008, none impressed me more than Silobreaker."

"DEMO 08: My Favorites" - Somewhat Frank, 31 Jan 2008

"Silobreaker - An innovative trend analysis site with lots of visual goodies to dig deeper."

"Blogs about Silobreaker found on Google"

DEMO 08

So, we've just come up for air after a couple of months of some serious new development. We will launch this major release (and Silobreaker officially) at the prestigious DEMO 08 conference in California next week (28-30 Jan). Due to DEMO-rules, we can't tell you about any features, tools and designs, but be sure to check it out next week at http://www.silobreaker.com/.

"DEMO is the premier launch venue for new products, technologies and companies and has established a reputation for identifying and presenting to an elite audience the products most likely to have a significant impact on the marketplace and market trends in the coming year. Each product is carefully screened and selected by DEMO's Executive Producer, Chris Shipley, one of the top trend spotters in the personal technology product industry."
- Source: www.demo.com

Silobreaker was one of only four European companies selected for DEMO 08, so it's a great opportunity to demonstrate Silobreaker to an audience of US media, VCs and industry experts.

Wish us luck.