May 2012
11 posts
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Fourplay and Sidewinder Win MetaLayer's API...
Team Fourplay (above) and Team Sidewinder (below) took home the MetaLayer API Awards at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012. Both apps were built from concept to working product in only 48 hours!
FourPlay (previously Team Serendipity) used our Text API in combination with Foursquare to take ‘missed connection’ posts from Craigslist and matched the places where the encounter occurred with...
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MetaLayer API Workshop at Disrupt 2012
Slides from our workshop at TC Disrupt in NY on basic features and use of our APIs.
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Integration with InfoChimps Platform & Hadoop
Today at the TechCrunch: Disrupt Hackathon, metaLayer is happy to announce that we now support native integration with the Infochimps Platform and Hadoop. Through integration with the Infochimps Platform, metaLayer Dashboard users not only get access to Hadoop, but Infochimp’s analytic product Dashpot, managed database hosting, and easy Hadoop cluster management.
And that’s just...
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Giveaways for #NYCDisrupt
What you could win hacking on metaLayer APIs this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt! A Kindle Touch 3G and an AppleTV with HDMI Cable.
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WatchChris Burrage discusses the metaLayer platform at The Paley Center in New York.
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“The opportunity from Big Data (of which social data is a part) is gigantic. Even...”
– Sameer Patel, “Tiny Insights. Big Data.”
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MetaLayer Presents at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC
MetaLayer will present at TechCrunch Disrupt at Pier94 in a few days! Come to our API workshop session at 3:00pm to learn how to use our Text and Image APIs in your projects. Best use of our APIs will win you a Kindle (for text hackers) or an Apple TV (for photo hackers) as well as a free metaLayer T-Shirt and Hoodie.
This will be the second Hackathon TechCrunch has organized at Pier 94 in...
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APIs for Data Science
If you’re a programmer or data scientist looking for APIs to utilize in your work, look no further than api.metalayer.com!
With our various APIs you’re able to extract contextual features from streams of imagery and text. For instance take an archive millions of long form articles and auto-categorize them using our Text API or do the same for an archive of photos based on the...
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New Website, Check it Out!
This weekend we relaunched metaLayer.com. The first thing you’ll notice is that our social community for data enthusiasts, deLv, is no longer the the landing page. You can now register for deLv at the url deLv.co. There you’ll be able to explore all the web’s social data freely and visually.
The second thing you’ll notice is that there’s much more to do across...
March 2012
9 posts
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Real-Time Awareness
Various individuals from @TechAtState’s February “Real-Time Awareness” conference speak about the new challenges of dealing with real-time data streams. This clip includes our own Jon Gosier (metaLayer), Jack Holt (Blue Ridge Information Systems), Dave Weinberger (author “Too Big to Know”), Patrick Scullin (Georgetown University), Andrew Turner (GeoIQ), Chris Damsen...
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What's Next in Tech for Journalism?
Chris Burrage (Director of Biz Dev at metaLayer) presented along with a number of other emerging companies including: BiblioCrunch, Contently, NewsIT, Zeega and Engagio.
Colombia Journalism Review wrote a great summary of of the day:
This morning, The Paley Center for Media hosted a forum called “The Next Big Thing in Digital News Innovation,” with six presenters from “news and information...
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Can Data Visualization Augment Your Reality?
So at metaLayer we’re working very hard to bring you the best selection of algorithms, visualizations, and data manipulation techniques in a simple drag and drop interface. One feature that is occasionally asked about is offering data mashups that can control augmented reality platforms like Layar and Sekai.
For those of you who’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know...
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The Next Big Thing at #PaleyNext
The Paley Center for Media and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation present The Next Big Thing in Digital News Innovation, a series of forums in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles showcasing news and information startups for an audience of high-level media executives and investors.
Chris Burrage, Director of Business Development at metaLayer, will talk about our community platform deLv, the...
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Calculators for Data Science
The following was the keynote I delivered at STRATA 2012 entitled “Democratizing Data Platforms”. You can find the full set of accompanying slides here.
Data science should be more like art. Not everyone understands art. Not everyone appreciates art But whether you understand it or not you draw, you doodle.
This is the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. What’s interesting about...
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Our Big Idea at GigaOM #DataConf
Team metaLayer is at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference today presenting our big ideas for the Big Data space. You can check out the live stream here. Our talk is at 5:25pm EST.
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MetaLayer Wins the Startup Showcase at Strata!
We’re really excited to be here in San Jose at Strata 2012 and even more excited now that metaLayer’s won the Startup Showcase Audience Choice Award! As the winners, we’ll pitch in front of the Strata conference audience and a panel of esteemed judges during the keynote sessions on Day 2!
February 2012
3 posts
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Visualizing the Full Spectrum of TED2012
This morning at TED Steve Bratt of the World Wide Web Foundation gave a great talk about building an index to measure how humanity uses the web. Not just to measure scale but interaction and user behavior. While he’s working on that, metaLayer decided to tackle something slightly less ambitious, an index measuring how people react to TED2012.
As part of our Spectrum Project, we unveiled...
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A Big Thanks from TED2012
We’re excited to be able to give back to a community that has supported our ideas for so long. MetaLayer co-founder Jon Gosier has been a Senior TED Fellow and member of the TED community for the past three years. So the small contributions we were able to make to this year’s gift bag are the least we can offer back.
We printed 80 limited edition metaLayer hoodies for all the TED...
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Startup Showcase at #StrataConf!
metaLayer has been selected as one of the 10 startups picked for the Startup Showcase at Strata 2012 in Santa Clara. This is in addition to our keynote “Democratizing Data Platforms” which we’ll be giving at the conference as well.
January 2012
3 posts
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Data Driven Infographics Made Easy
The problem with infographics is that they are hard to create, time-consuming to design, or expensive to outsource. Not too mention that most infographics are static, meaning that they don’t update in real time. Now this is great if you’ve got data that changes rather infrequently. But what if you want to create compelling visualizations that are driven by real-time data?
The...
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Our Strata Keynote: Democratizing Access to Data...
metaLayer is excited to give a keynote talk at Strata 2012 in a few weeks. We’ll share our vision on why data platforms need to be made accessible. Check out the schedule and some of the other talks here.
Democratization of Data Platforms
Jonathan Gosier (metaLayer Inc.)
8:50am Thursday, 03/01/2012
Keynote
Location: Mission City Ballroom
Big data isn’t just an abstract problem for...
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The New Challenge of Data Inflation
The online chatter of individuals, networks of friends or professionals, and the data being created by networked devices is growing exponentially, although our time to consume it remains depressingly finite. There are a plethora of solutions that approach this problem in different ways. But what are the methodologies that have worked at scale and how are they being used in the field?
This is an...
December 2011
1 post
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Free T-Shirts for Cool Uses of Our APIs
Are you a data hacker, data journalist, or just a programmer looking for something new? Use our imgLayer and dataLayer APIs for your next project and we’ll send you an awesome metaLayer T-Shirt…just for letting us know! You can find details at wiki.metalayer.com.
You do not need an API key to get started but you will be rate limited to 100 calls a day for text data and 10 calls per...
November 2011
14 posts
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Visualizing Online Chatter During Hurricane Irene
Our friends at a firm called GeoSprocket gave a great breakdown yesterday of how they used a combination of technologies to discover trends in online conversations during and after Hurricane Irene. Their challenge, though, is that most Twitter messages don’t carry location data and to get all this content on a map might prove incredibly time consuming for a human.
Our dataLayer API aims...
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New Visualizations coming to metaLayer
For those of you wondering why there are so few charts and visualizations in our product, it’s because we’re building our own visualization libraries. So that the data you’re mashing up and analyzing can be quickly summarized in unique ways that are also nice to look at. Here is a sneak peak at things to come.
The stacked area graph is a common chart in many programs. The...
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#DCWeek Redux
We had a great time this week at what more than one person referred to as ‘the SXSW of the beltway’.
The venue for the events we attended, the Artisphere in Arlington, VA, was impressive with winding corridors and a creative floorplan. I learned that it used to be the old home of the Newseum before it relocated to where it is now in D.C.
The wizardry of iStrategy Labs was on...
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From Data to Action
We’re excited to be in Dakar, Senegal this weekend, presenting on the subject of big data to regional Civil Society and Governments. The event, organized by UNDP (the United Nation’s global development network), explores scalable solutions for holding governments accountable through data platforms:
Over the past decade, governance assessments have become increasingly important...
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OpenSEAS uses metaLayer APIs to Counter Extremism
Our partner, Navanti Group, have taken our dataLayer API to scale, using it as part of an internal dashboard for monitoring emerging trends across social media conversations. Navanti specializes in providing analytical, programmatic, and technological services in various capacities. Their ambitious goal is to offer a system that identifies potential extremist actors and networks across public...
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metaLayer Day at DCWeek
Come see us tomorrow at Digital Capital Week! Here’s our schedule:
Jon is giving a Keynote on Thursday morning 10:30am “Disruptive Entrepreneurs”
Jon will also be on panel Thursday afternoon 4:00pm “Tools to Activate Social Good”
Matt will demo metaLayer Dashboard Thursday evening 7:00pm “Tech Cocktail: Startup Mixer”
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Add Us to Your Circles!
With the roll out of Google+ Pages, you can now add our company to the list of sources you follow. There’s a lot of places to follow us online Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, here on Tumblr, pick the one that adds the most value for you, or pick them all!
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Simplexity: Making Algorithms Easy to Use
Yesterday we had the pleasure of speaking at the World Bank’s “Putting Aid Data to Work” conference in Washington, D.C. The panel I was on was entitled “Closing the Feedback Loop: Innovations in Grassroots Monitoring of Aid and Public Service Delivery”.
Speakers included myself, Shanta Devarajan (World Bank Chief Economist, Africa Region), Sahr Kpundeh (Senior...
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We're at TechCocktail's Startup Extravaganza...
Team Meta will be at Tech Cocktail next week! We’ve got a Panel presentation at DCWEEK as well as a space at Tech Cocktail’s Expo where we’ll have a display for people who aren’t in our private beta to demo our Dashboard app.
Tech Cocktail is a media company focused on better connecting, educating and amplifying the start-up technology community and showcasing the...
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Private Beta Cometh!
Just a heads up for all of you out there waiting to get your hands on metaLayer Dashboard, on Friday we’ll be opening our private beta up to anyone who has signed up at relaunch.metalayer.com! After that there will be a different waiting list for those interested in the public beta.
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Our Open Source Projects
A lot of people seem to appreciate the fact that they can utilize our open APIs for small projects for no to low cost. Well, good news, we’ve got a few open source goodies that we’re contributing to. You’ll find these products and more in our gitHub repo.
MovableCite is the latest. It’s a simple solution for creating self-updating blockquotes, which allow you to quote...
October 2011
13 posts
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Future For Sale
The following is an excerpt from my talk at Tech4Africa in Johannesberg last week. You can read the full text here.
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson
This is a favorite quote of mine. It sums up much about the post-60’s world we live in. Why the 60’s? Because that was the last time, as far as I can tell (because I wasn’t alive...
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Computational Linguistics and Google+
Over the past few years our team has come to learn a lot about the effectiveness information retrieval using natural language processing and text parsing algorithms. In particular around information collected from Twitter.
At the last company we worked for, one of the projects we worked to develop as part of was an open source natural language processing tagger designed to extract keywords which...
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Filtering News of Gaddafi with Sentiment
This is a screenshot of my metaLayer Dashboard configured to track real-time discussions of Gaddafi’s death this morning. In the column to the left you’re seeing the results of a mash-up of Twitter searches for the words ‘Gaddafi’, ‘Ghaddafi’, ‘Khadafi’, ‘Gaddafy’, and ‘Libya’ filtered for positive sentiment values. The...
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What's it like at DreamIt Ventures?
We’re entering the halfway point of DreamIt Philly and really enjoying it. But if you aren’t here or are wondering what it’s like, this is the post to read.
In short, it’s like running a marathon barefoot, through the arctic with snow ninjas shooting arrows at you. Painful, but awesome. It’s painful because it forces you to rethink a lot of key assumptions about...
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The Life of Content
The amount of content being created daily is incredible. Last year Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, estimated just how high that number might actually be in this statement…
“Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data…”
The Infinite Age
One can only surmise...
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Much ado About Color
The guys over at Zillabyte posted a great blogpost over the weekend about what’s possible once you can manipulate the raw histogram data of an image. If you aren’t sure how to extract these features from an image file, we offer that raw data via our imgLayer API. So we thought we’d give them a shout while also sharing their tutorial with our own users:
A big trouble spot...
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Toungue-in-Cheek, Foot in Mouth
Okay, we hear you. We apologize for our job posting which featured a lot of references that a lot of people didn’t seem to get. In particular this blog post about how absurd job postings for startups have become. For us it was an attempt at meta-satire, as we’re a startup and we’re putting up job-postings.
Here’s the post from Pseudocoder that we were channeling, FYI.
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