Christopher Ahlberg: I Know What You’ll Do Next Summer – Pioneers Festival 2013


Recorded Future is a web intelligence software platform that helps companies anticipate threats and capitalize on opportunities.

A fascinating software and start up company that can come to conclusions with the analysis of the large amount of data which is openly available on the world wide web. It does make one curious how a company can tap and harness into such information and come up with various results. Looking into the potential of what the future in a certain spectrum might be holding.

In this video Milo Yiannopoulos from The Kernel at Pioneer interviews Christopher Ahlberg founder of Recorded Future in a short compact 21 minutes session.

If you like subjects such as Big Data, Web Intelligence and organisation of data, analysis and giving it structure – before diving into the video you can have an idea what Recorded Future does here → https://www.recordedfuture.com/web-intelligence/

In this video, in the beginning the understanding of time, text, events (past & future) is adressed that this is scraped and can help to figure out the organising of upcoming events and also their very own analysis of the events that are happening. This software can definitely do more than I can describe here in a few words.

Other key notes mentioned
Data Analysis
Big Data
Spotfire – visualisation of large databases – a company Christopher Ahlberg founded and sold. “In 2007, Spotfire was acquired by Tibco for US$195 million in cash.”
Ref → http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Ahlberg
Spotfire → http://spotfire.tibco.com/

Their software has attracted some big investors like the CIA and Google.
Meet Google’s Secret Time Machine Investment
http://www.wired.com/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/

Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring
http://allthingsd.com/20100503/meet-googles-secret-time-machine-investment/

As a book recommendation Christopher Ahlberg recommends to read:
Bloomberg by Bloomberg book. → http://www.bookdepository.com/Bloomberg-by-Bloomberg-Michael-Bloomberg/9780471208884
And also mentions that Bloomberg – took financial data and put a screen to that.

Other topics addressed
Cybersecurity, unrest. Modelling. Predictive modelling.

Customers: Banks, Oil Companies, Government agencies, etc.

Metric: money.

Typical queries (examples):
Twitter to government sites are analysed.
Public feeds.
100% Open.
Organise data.

What is my competitor up to? What products are they launching? Calendar of their events.

Security issues of the software falling into the wrong hands? Another large topic. A few restrictions mentions that by already being based in the US to sell the software to certain countries is prohibited. Considering that it was only a 21mins speech this part wasn’t much more elaborated.

Some strengths of this software is understanding unrest.

Regarding user security who use the software
No analysis of users log. They are encrypted.
No one internally can use it for trading who works for recorded future.

Before the video ended the following subject were also reviewed
Geopolitical threats: Terrorism?
Potential application of this software:
No ticking bomb scenario.
Thirst – hunger – anger… > Find the root of the problem to tackle it early on.

Find problems before they become big.

Cybersecurity. External threat. Web Intelligence.
Other areas where the software can be applied for but the time limit didn’t permit them to dig deeper on this subject. You will also find in other videos on youtube by Christopher Ahlberg where he talks a bit more of this.

Links
To this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu680fB2mRY

Linkedin Group
https://www.linkedin.com/company/recorded-future

Recorded Future
https://www.recordedfuture.com/

On Google+
https://plus.google.com/+recordedfuture/posts


2 thoughts on “Christopher Ahlberg: I Know What You’ll Do Next Summer – Pioneers Festival 2013

  1. selven

    Interesting article. Nice video. 😀 I seriously lol’ed when the interviewer asked ashlberg if his company doesn’t sell to countries who could use the information wrongly, lol it is open information, if someone had enough time, money and patience, they would eventually be able to harnest those bits of open information and analyse it, he doesn’t understand that the beauty of this technology is that it seems to be able to analyse a hell lot of data for almost all form of information needed.

     
    Reply
    1. Dietmar Reigber

      Hi Selven,

      thanks for your input. Always great to see the various angles of other viewers and what particularly striked you the most. Too bad they just had only 20mins! Indeed his response was very short regarding this question. I can only recall that he mentioned that since they operate in the US they stick to not selling the software to countries that they are restricted to and also avoid to sell it to some of their own choice. It’s most likely coming that this will be the next run in the future, as you say – with money, time and patience – what was once the run to the moon might be some day what do can you do with all this open data lying around for free. A few years back we didn’t publicly publish what we think of, or how do we feel right now etc…

       
      Reply

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