IQT Quarterly Is a Publication of In-Q-Tel, Inc., the Strategic Investment Firm That Serves As a Bridge Between the U.S
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QUARTERLY VOL. 3 NO. 3 WINTER 2012 IQT Quarterly is a publication of In-Q-Tel, Inc., the strategic investment firm that serves as a bridge between the U.S. Intelligence Community and venture-backed startup firms on the leading edge of technological innovation.IQT Quarterly advances the situational awareness component of the IQT mission, serving as a platform to debut, discuss, and debate issues of innovation in the areas of overlap between commercial potential and U.S. Intelligence Community needs. For comments or questions regarding IQT or this document, please visit www.iqt.org, write to [email protected], or call 703-248-3000. The views expressed are those of the authors in their personal capacities and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of IQT, their employers, or the Government. ©2012 In-Q-Tel, Inc. This document was prepared by In-Q-Tel, Inc., with Government funding (U.S. Government Contract No. 2009*0674524*000). The Government has Government Purpose License Rights in this document. Subject to those rights, the reproduction, display, or distribution of the Quarterly without prior written consent from IQT is prohibited. EDITORIAL IQT Quarterly, published by In-Q-Tel, Inc. Editor-in-Chief: Lisa L. Bader Theme Editor: Bruce Lund Contributing Editors: Brittany Smith, Emma Resnick, and Adam Dove Managing Editor: Lisbeth Poulos Design by Lomangino Studio, Inc. Printed in the United States of America QUARTERLY Identify. Adapt. Deliver.™ TABLE OF CONTENTS On Our Radar: Social Media Technologies 02 By Bruce Lund A Look Inside: Using Social Media 05 By Bruce Lund The New Challenge of Data Inflation 06 By Jon Gosier Structuring, Analyzing, and Leveraging Social Media Data 10 By Ioana Roxana Stanoi, Rajasekar Krishnamurthy, and Shivakumar Vaithyanathan Is Social Media the Human Geography of the 15 Emerging Human Sensor Network? By Sean Gorman On (Robot) Influence: 19 Theory, Practice, and Strategic Implications By Tim Hwang Extracting Intelligence from Social Media 24 By Rishab Aiyer Ghosh Basics of Social Media Analytics for 29 Counterterrorism Specialists By Rebecca Garcia Tech Corner 33 A technology overview from IQT portfolio company Visible Technologies In the News 37 IQT QUARTERLY WINTER 2012 Vol. 3 No. 3 01 IQT QUARTERLY ORN U RADAR SOcIAL MEDIA TEchnologIES By Bruce Lund Governments are increasingly finding that monitoring social media is an essential component in keeping track of erupting political movements, crises, epidemics, and disasters, not to mention general global trends. Today social media is an information torrent fed by Advances in consumer technology have also been countless sources that can originate from almost a factor. SMS mobile text messaging first became anywhere on the planet. Information shared from any possible in the mid-1990s on a limited basis, and Internet-connected computer or text-enabled phone reached global critical mass by the middle of the last communicating with a hosting/distribution service, decade due to several factors, including increased such as Twitter or Facebook, can potentially mobile device support and marketing by mobile be viewed by millions of people. carriers. To this day, many social media services based on SMS, such as Twitter, limit their message size to Absolute statistics on the use and growth of social the 140-byte length defined for SMS in the 1990s. media become obsolete overnight. But currently, Facebook has about 800 million active users, and But mobile devices don’t tell the whole story. What approximately 70 percent of those users are outside started in the earlier part of the last decade as limited the U.S.1, 2 In terms of social media-enabled mobile conversations between computer users participating devices, wireless carriers activate 350,000 phones in web-based chat rooms (e.g., to discuss music running Google’s Android operating system every day.3 or the pros and cons of their favorite type of car or laundry detergent) has increased to span virtually any What is driving social media content and mainstream and special interest topic imaginable. consumption? A key factor is the low barrier to entry. Marketers, political analysts, and reporters took early Consumers don’t need smart phones with monthly note, and have been following — and sometimes data plans or even e-mail accounts; they can post participating in — these conversations ever since. 140-character SMS messages via virtually any mobile phone made in the last decade. Where texting services While computers still play a role in chat rooms, have been shut down, companies such as Google have blogs, wikis, and tweets, it is people with mobile stepped in with voice-to-text-to-tweet services. phones who are driving social media’s importance 1 “The Revolution will Not Be Monetized.” IEEE Spectrum, June 2011, p. 38. 2 “Facebook F8: Redesigning and hitting 800 million users." LA Times, September 22, 2011. 3 “5 Technologies that Will Shape the Web.” IEEE Spectrum, June 2011. 02 Vol. 3 No. 3 Identify. Adapt. Deliver.™ IQT QUARTERLY well beyond the initial application of interacting with and on Twitter. Example service providers friends (i.e., people who they actually know) or a include IQT portfolio companies NetBase and few like-minded participants in a chat room. During Visible Technologies. this transition, a new sense of the word “friend” has • News and Intelligence Services. News organizations entered the lexicon to accompany the growth. have monitored social media for several years While there are many personal reasons why individuals for early indicators of emerging political unrest. want to use social media, the ways that corporations Other services monitor social media for public and governments can use it are still evolving. In this health awareness. Researchers from Southeastern issue of the IQT Quarterly, we’ll focus on what social Louisiana University said they have been able to media can offer government agencies. forecast future influenza rates with high accuracy by monitoring Twitter messages, and the U.S. The Role of Social Media Monitoring Geological Survey is evaluating the use of tweets for localizing seismic events. Such applications may Corporations are increasingly participating in social eventually be adopted by government agencies to media conversations for reasons related to both track epidemics, disasters, and emerging political marketing and customer service. This involvement movements on a global scale. can range from corporate-branded sites with their own chat rooms to Facebook pages to a company’s What Social Media companies can Offer direct participation in real-time conversations on Twitter. Some of the most innovative applications from Social media gives individuals the ability to reach a technology perspective can be found in the social communities across the globe with little latency media monitoring space. (perhaps 30 seconds or less from origin to visibility). However, to ingest and store Twitter feeds alone Who are the consumers and stakeholders in the social requires a data storage and analysis infrastructure to media monitoring and analysis marketplace? Other service up to 100 million new tweets per day (approx. than the providers of the infrastructure used by social 1,000/sec.).4 Many of the real-time social media search media (e.g., telecoms, Internet service providers, companies also offer feeds from Facebook, Digg, aggregators, hardware networking, storage providers, foursquare, Flickr, and others. and handset makers), there are some key services that specialize in monitoring social media: Key reasons to monitor social media as close to real- time as possible include: • Listening Platforms/Brand Management Services. Advertising agencies and consumer product • Improving the analysis of potential indicators companies use social media for brand management of societal change as well as informing and sentiment analysis. Several listening platforms predictive analysis. focus on providing major consumer brand • Understanding the source and direction of companies (e.g., Microsoft, P&G) with information trending topics by measuring how ideas spread in on views about products expressed in consumer social networks. forums, group or fan pages on consumer sites, 4 The information content of 140-byte messages in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean is inherently greater than those messages in Western languages, even when accounting for the multiple bytes required for Asian-language character encodings, since an individual character in such an Asian language can equate to an entire word in English. Thus, they’re denser. IQT QUARTERLY WINTER 2012 Vol. 3 No. 3 03 IQT QUARTERLY Social media gives individuals the ability to reach communities across the globe with little latency (perhaps 30 seconds or less from origin to visibility). • Providing faster situational awareness and early MySpace’s loss of users and advertisers coincided warning when disasters such as earthquakes and with the rise of Facebook over the same period. hurricanes occur. • Role of Large Search Providers: Large companies As with commercial news organizations, government such as Google, Microsoft (Bing), and Yahoo! offer agencies need to gain insight into trending topics and access to major social media channels, as does discussions in social media outlets. Specifically, they Twitter itself. need to access, search, rank, and analyze large and • Integration into the Core: Instead of relying on a exponentially-growing data sets from social media dedicated “app” or branded web-based portal to platforms as a part of