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Source: Daily Research News

Google, CIA Look into Future

July 30 2010

Google and In-Q-Tel, an investment vehicle which forms part of the CIA, have both been revealed as backers of Recorded Future, a company tracking and analyzing Web content to report on trends and make predictions about future events.

CIA Seeks FBI [Future Business Intelligence]The search giant made the injection, said to be just under ten million dollars and roughly matching that of In-Q-Tel, via its Google Ventures investment division in 2009. Although there is no suggestion that the two organizations are working together, those fearing Big Brother-like state and corporate control of information will no doubt find plenty to worry about in the news.

Recorded Future collects data from tens of thousands of web sites, blogs and Twitter accounts and analysis relationships between people, organizations and events, using its ‘temporal analytics engine’ to spot hidden links based on subject matter and extrapolating them into the future using a measure of online ‘momentum’, to predict where and when events such as expansion, mergers and acquisitions might happen.

In-Q-Tel, run as a not-for-profit venture capital firm with the sole aim of keeping the CIA equipped with the latest in IT, has already shown an interest in other web analytics providers. Last October, the organization commissioned social media monitoring firm Visible Technologies to provide it with social media monitoring tools; it is also an investor in WPP / Omniture subsidiary Visual Sciences.


Source: Wired

Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.