Company Collective Intellect Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: TECH STARTUP - Company overview

INITIAL LIGHT BULB: Co-founders Tim Wolters and Don Springer, now Collective Intellect's chief technical officer and chief executive officer, respectively, have an entrepreneurial history together, previously starting Dante Software in Boulder in 2001 before selling it to webMethods in 2003.

"We had co-founded a company together before," Wolters said. "It's better to go into business using the buddy system.

"Dante was a business intelligence application, real-time business intelligence," he said of the evolution from Dante to Collective Intellect. "We took some of those tenets and applied them to unstructured text."

The original concept for Collective Intellect was to search social media--blogs, social-networking websites and other user-generated content--for market trading cues for financial clients. A hedge fund approached them about perhaps making the company itself a fund, a concept Wolters and company rejected.

However, in April 2007, Collective Intellect "serendipitously landed a few clients in the marketing/advertising/PR space," Wolters said. Thanks to "bigger deals and shorter sales cycles," the focus turned from the financial services industry to marketing, and the company tripled in size to more than 50 employees in the year-plus since.

IN A NUTSHELL: Collective Intellect's mission--"We help companies track, understand and use social media," Wolters said--is facilitated by technology that combines artificial intelligence and a good dose of analytics. The company offers three products: CI Listen, CI Learn and CI Engage.

Dubbing the unstructured text of millions of blogs and comment posts "the dark matter of the data universe," Wolters elaborated on Collective Intellect's ability to illuminate it with CI Listen's user-friendly, real-time dashboard, complete with graphs and alerts. "More than 90 percent of the data out there is in unstructured text," Wolters said.

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CI Learn offers the dashboard as well as "influencer-weighted reports," i.e. weekly, monthly or quarterly reports focused on the top bloggers and individuals in a given space. CI Engage helps companies proactively shape their image in the social-media sphere.

"We offer a full set of services," he said. "We just don't listen to the conversations; we help you analyze what's going on and take some action. We're going to continue to...