a news report about the shooting than “Treyvon,” and Graffiti would re-jigger the hierarchy of the metadata tags on the story accordingly.
“Stories now have a head and a tail, and the tail is becoming more important than the head,” Giblin says. “Can you read 1,000 comments and 10,000 tweets? No. But my software does, and it gives context to those comments.”
Giblin acknowledges that there are a lot of companies doing so called sentiment analysis of social media content. “VCs like to tell me, ‘You’re in a very crowded space,’” he says. “But they don’t realize that what we really do is provide this extra step… The core of our proprietary technology is that we take that information and deliver it as better SEO, by inserting new metadata in the content. We can update an article’s keywords a hundred times a day.”
In any case, Giblin says he doesn’t think Graffiti is ready for venture capital just yet.
He’s applied to be enrolled in San Diego’s new downtown EvoNexus, a venture incubator backed by CommNexus, the local nonprofit telecommunications group, and he’s looking for some startup capital from angel investors.
He says he also recognizes the importance of securing some customers, and Giblin says he’s made some inroads in that area. The company’s first client for Graffiti is the former San Diego Union-Tribune, now known as The San Diego U-T, which is expected to bring the system online in the next few weeks. “They are moving outside the box as quickly as they can down there,” Giblin says.
He’s now focused on expanding the customer base for Graffiti, and then perhaps developing some other opportunities. “The next evolution of Graffiti will be to take the same product and orient it for advertising,” Giblin adds. “The commentary should really help drive the advertising.”
