By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA – Psydex, a provider of services that search and analyze the world’s news sources in real time, has received $3.5 million in funding. The company is using the funding to launch Psyng, (pronounced “sing”) a news portal that it says cuts through the noise and chatter across news sources, revealing statistical patterns and trends in social networks, human behavior and financial markets.
It says Psyng delivers instant analysis and alerting on global news events—as they happen.
Rob Usey, Psydex CEO and co-founder, tells TechJournal South the funding is a strategic investment from unnamed sources. The seven-employee company will hire incrementally around the globe, he says.
Usey says “There is a media revolution underway and Psydex has the technology and services to change the way the world looks at news. Because our system indexes and analyses both mainstream media and emerging social media sources we are effectively measuring and tracking ‘thought contagion’ in real time.”
The company’s sophisticated text and data analysis system enables to spot volatility in a given subject in real time. It measures the normal level of chatter for news events such as earth quakes, plane crashes, fires, killings, and when unusual patterns occur, sends out alerts.
For example, when US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River in January, Psydex’s algorithms detected—within seconds of the incident—unusual chatter levels well before the news was broadly disseminated.
“As this event unfolded, our data showed us—in a fraction of a second—not only the uptick in news on the incident, but also who was reporting it, and who reported it first,” Usey says. “For both investors and algorithmic trading systems, this was tradable, actionable data.”
Usey points out that “40 percent of all the market trades on the planet are done by algorithms. They’re just programs. An algorithm can’t read a headline.
“What typically happens is that a trader managing the program reads the headline and minutes pass before he can do something. Our system turns an analog headline into something a computer can use.”
Another area in which Psyng may find customers is in tracking positive or negative comments about companies. “You can’t wait 24 hours to respond,” says Usey. “The contagion spreads around the globe in seconds or minutes. If someone is saying something bad about you, you need to know right away so you can counter it.”
Psyng can also help automated Internet advertising models that dynamically alter the ads served on Web pages detect buzz that would affect which ads they serve, he says.
Dr. Robin Bloor, a partner at Newton, MA-based research and consulting firm Hurwitz & Associates, recently wrote that Psydex delivers machine-readable information that was previously available only through manual processing.
He also suggests that Psydex’s capabilities “will become as necessary to financial trading operations as Reuters and Dow Jones feeds are.”
And Dr. Fern Halper, also a partner at Hurwitz & Associates, says there are many good cases for analyzing news-related text in real-time, including being “first to know if something negative is being said about your company.”
“The secret sauce is the company’s ability to organize streaming content in-memory and around time,” she wrote on her blog.
“The goal is when an event hits, rather than taking hours or minutes to get information to the person who needs to know, it takes seconds.”
Psydex co-founder and chief technology officer Don Simpson says Psydex is the next generation of real-time search and analytics.
“We’ve solved some of the really hard problems with analyzing semantics across both archived and real-time unstructured data streams.
“Our novel approach is based on proprietary, grid-based semantic algorithms and a temporal search and discovery engine,” Simpson says.
“Psydex is the result of decades of experience working on some of the most challenging intelligence problems on the planet and learning where traditional approaches fail.”
The company’s founders have 18 years experience in sophisticated text analysis. Psydex’s sister company, Cognixint Technology Partners in Maryland does classified information analysis work for government agencies.
For the next 30 days, Psydex is offering Psyng as a beta version to customers and partners —for free.
Online: www.psydex.com ; www.psyng.com
© 2009, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
