DataSift Announces Industry's First Intelligence Engine for Unstructured Social Data

SAN FRANCISCO, CA and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwired - Dec 12, 2013) -  DataSift, the platform that powers the social economy, today announced the availability of DataSift VEDO, the next generation processing engine for the DataSift platform, featuring Programmable Intelligence. Whereas conventional big data solutions typically require teams of data scientists to mine insight from unstructured data such as Facebook and Twitter posts and blog entries, DataSift VEDO features programmable machine learning and automated classification capabilities to extract insight at scale, enabling organizations to apply their resources toward innovation rather than building and maintaining specialized and costly infrastructure.

"At DataSift, our mission is to make even the most complex data types simple and accessible to power better decisions," said Nick Halstead, Founder and CTO of DataSift. "With VEDO, DataSift enables any organization, anywhere, to extract meaning and context from social data and other large, unstructured data sets -- at scale."

According to IDC¹, by 2020 a third of the data in the digital universe (more than 13,000 exabytes) will have big data value, but only if it is tagged and analyzed. While extracting insight from social data is now business-critical for many organizations, it is equally critical to view social data -- and other big data types -- in the context of other business signals. For this reason, VEDO is also extensible to other types of unstructured content, such as data generated by enterprise social networks and from customer relationship management, business intelligence, market research, and other enterprise systems.

How DataSift VEDO Works
The DataSift platform is a cloud-based solution that enables technology companies, brands, agencies and enterprises to power applications and analytics by aggregating, processing and delivering unstructured social data at scale from multiple social networks and publishing sources. The addition of DataSift VEDO to the DataSift platform enables organizations of all sizes to quickly capture and contextualize data based on company-specific details or processes. DataSift VEDO then applies machine learning technology to enable users to train the platform to process and score content against custom criteria with extremely large data sets. The result is high-fidelity data refined to the needs of individual businesses and users.

DataSift VEDO features these three new capabilities:

• Programmable User Rules: Business users and application developers can define custom rules, categorizations, weighting and scoring for unstructured data to extract meaning and context from large data sets.
• Machine Learning: Gives users the ability to apply categorizations and custom rules at scale on massive unstructured data sets, providing structure, automated processing and greater efficiency.
• Library of Pre-Built Classifiers: DataSift VEDO includes built-in data science and best practices with pre-built example libraries of classifiers for categorizing and scoring unstructured social data to accelerate insight and application development.

"For all the promise of big data, most organizations are still challenged with manual processes and limited ability to deliver sustained business value," commented Tim Barker, Chief Product Officer, DataSift. "DataSift VEDO solves this problem with advanced programmable intelligence capabilities, making it easy for users to define their own rules, categorize and customize data using data science best practice already built into our platform."

For more information on DataSift VEDO, please visit datasift.com/platform/data-categorization/

About DataSift
DataSift Inc. is the platform the powers the social economy, enabling companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources. DataSift provides access to both real-time and historical social data to uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. Key investors include Insight Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures. DataSift has offices in San Francisco, New York City and Reading, U.K. For more information, visit www.datasift.com and follow us on Twitter @datasift.

¹ Source: IDC, THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE IN 2020: Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth in the Far East, December 2012