Power of community analytics and predicting elections

Image via Wikipedia

I have written about Clara and their Icelandic PR and Brand monitoring product Vaktarinn. What fascinated me while we were discussing the investment in Clara was a couple of projects that team had done with the technology platform that they had created to analyze community dynamics. Actually, team Clara had blogged about it but  it was all in Icelandic and of course I had to learn from the team.

National Assembly 2009
Right after the collapse of the Financial system in Iceland and before the fall of the then Government, there was a National Assembly organized and it was called Þjóðfundar in Icelandic. This was a cross section of over 1000 people from all walks of life in Iceland and there was a crowd sourcing movement to determine the values  that were important to Iceland as a nation. The values list is published here. Clara's community analytics platform was used on the captured words, discussions and debates.

The team then used the data from National Assembly and took all the speeches made in the Parliament of Iceland by the elected members. They mashed up the data to see the correlation between the words used by the Members of the Parliament and those used by the crowd in the National Assembly. The picture to the right shows the names of the top 5 MPs with the highest correlation and bottom 5 MPs with the lowest correlation. The one with the highest correlation became the Finance Minister of Iceland and 5th highest became the Prime Minister. What is even more interesting is that this analysis was done before the General election. The blog link that I had provided before to the analysis has lots of graphs, the background and description of the analysis. One political party scored very high in the correlation and that was the party that showed the highest growth rate in the number of votes in the general election and took many of the important Ministry appointments. Oh! what one can predict if one had the right tools and data, especially unstructured data.

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Clara - Unstructured Big Data Analyzer!

I met the team at Clara in November 2009, they were 6 guys had an interesting idea and they were figuring out how to make a business out of that idea. They had solved the Language problem and had create a seamless way to suck a lot of unstructured text, tag and mash it with user information, analyze sentiment using the Crimson hexagon Artificial Intelligence Algorithm, do fantastic pivots on the data because of the granularity of the meta data behind the data structure and present it beautifully in an intuitive user interface. We invested in them in May 2010, by that time they had launched a product called Vaktarinn.is (Monitor in Icelandic) for the Icelandic market to monitor all digital media, twitter posts, facebook comments, blog posts and community forums. The product was to test the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and they were successful, they quickly started getting corporate customers like Toyota Iceland, Microsoft Iceland and Coca cola Iceland and all the major Icelandic banks who wanted to monitor their Public Relationship image and Brand image. They currently have over 70 customers in Iceland in this product segment However, the original business idea was to go after the online communities associated with Gaming companies.

Having CCP Games in our backyard was very helpful they worked very closely with CCP to develop their flagship product Clara Insight which basically took the entire infrastructure and ran a software as a service business where their customers just gives them access to their closed web forum and the meta data associated with their customers. They have had CCP Games as their customer for the past 14 months in addition to them they have added Sony and Square Enix (both are Fortune 500 companies!). They are in discussion with all the top 10 gaming companies in the world.

They grew the team to 12, established a presence in San Francisco and have been slowing growing the customer base in Iceland for the PR and Media monitoring solution. They have achieved all this in a matter of 18 months. This is just to emphasise the fact that one can build viable businesses in a short period of time and get to the growth stage in 12 to 18 months, they have done it when the whole world has been going to doom and gloom here in Iceland according to Michael Lewis in his book Boomerang. This is for a company that I know a lot about but I have met other companies that are being built as you read this. I believe there is lot more to the Icelandic Startup Scene than what meets the eye!

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