We cover a lot of startups using social data, but Eldar Sadikov, co-founder of a company called Jetlore, said whenever someone else wants to build a social app, they have to “reinvent the wheel again and again.” That’s why Jetlore is launching a platform designed to power these kinds of services.
Sadikov said he wants his platform to serve as “a layer that sits between social networks and consumer Internet companies.” The company’s specialty is analyzing pieces of text and matching that text with different topics. According to Sadikov, Jetlore isn’t just identifying keywords, but also figuring out the context in which those keywords are being used. To use one example that he actually showed me, if you mention the Giants in a tweet or Facebook post, Jetlore can tell from the context whether you’re talking about the football team or the baseball team. Or if you mention bridesmaids, the platform distinguishes whether you’re referring to the movie or an actual wedding.
And while there are other semantic analysis tools out there, Sadikov argued that they’re mostly designed to analyze longer pieces of text, like an article or a blog post, and have trouble with “short, colloquial content” — which is, of course, the kind of content that dominates Facebook and Twitter.
Jetlore doesn’t collect the social data itself, but instead analyzes whatever data a given customer has access to. It provides businesses with a dashboard that summarizes user interests, both in aggregate and for individual users. From an editorial perspective, a news site like TechCrunch could use that data to make content decisions — if a lot of our users are tweeting and commenting on a given tech-related topic, we probably want to write a post addressing it. The company also offers an API that can be integrated with other products, so for example a website could give their visitors personalized content recommendations, better-targeted advertising, or relevant social updates from their friends.
We wrote about Jetlore last year when it emerged from the SSE Labs accelerator (now called StartX), though it was known as Qwhisper at the time. Actually, Qwhisper still exists — it’s a consumer site that serves as a proof-of-concept for Jetlore’s technology. When you connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts, it shows you updates from your friends, broken down into different categories.
Again, this doesn’t seem to be Jetlore’s focus from a business perspective, but I really liked what I saw when I poked around this morning. Especially on a day like today, I’m interested in different topics (specifically tech versus politics) depending on the time and mood, so it’s nice to use that filter, and Qwhisper does a pretty good job of sorting things out.
Jetlore has raised $1.3 million in funding from Alsop Louie Partners, Charles River Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and various angels.