 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live inside theCUBE in Las Vegas for a special presentation at IBM Interconnect. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, our next guest, Eric Swain, who's the VP of product at Mutual Mind, based out of Dallas, great product, amazing visualization of analytics, powering all of the IBM big boards all over the show and on the big stage. Eric, great to see you, welcome to theCUBE. It's my pleasure, thanks for having me. I mean, you guys saw visualization as a pretty big deal a couple of years ago. We saw you guys, I think it was two years ago at an event, small little board inside a booth. Now you're expanding, you're on the big stage. What was it like to get to make it work on the big stage? Data, you get the data back end done, but now you got to pipe that into just, share with folks what you guys have done here, what you're doing, and how did you do that big analytics board? Yeah, well, I know I succeeded when I posted on Facebook my mom said, wow, that you actually do something, and figured out what I actually do for a living. Yeah, we've got over 75 panels worth of Mutual Mind here at the conference, so this is a big coming out party for us, we're really excited. I mean, everything you see here is on IBM Softlayer, so we're running from, actually our offices are about a mile away from their headquarters in Dallas. We're very excited about what that offers in terms of bare metal plus public hybrid. We also are powering analytics behind the scenes to analyze the event, to provide social business team and others with insights about what's going on with the conference from a digital perspective. Okay, so you guys are obviously a heavy software company, sort of, off air said, BI is really your focus, but a big part of what you do is design. I mean, the boards are gorgeous. Thanks, thanks. I know there's a big movement, obviously, to find developers who are also sort of artistic and designers. Can you talk about your culture in that regard, in that respect? Yeah, I mean, our developers have to be full stack. I mean, there's no one way or two ways about it. You have to jump in with both feet. We were really careful up front to set a clear design vocabulary for what we're going to build a board. So when new data, new data sources come in, we already know what our language is for how we're going to show that data on the screen. And our developers are just killer. They do the full stack, front to back. We focus primarily on responsive web so that everything will work on every device and that automatically makes them design decisions for us as well. So when you say responsive web, but you, off the area, you talked about having a mobile app as well. So, but their primary is a responsive design. So the mobile app you see is a web app and that's why we're able to push it out to multiple devices at once. So if you go to ibm.biz slash ibm engage, you'll see our mobile engagement center. That's compliant with iOS and Android, any of those browsers on those devices. Okay, but I can run that same URL if I run it on my laptop or my iPad, it's going to just respond to whatever. That's right. To mention, but do you design for, so how do you make that trade off, right? Cause a lot of responsive designs are okay on a bigger screen and okay on mobile, or they're really good on mobile, not so great on laptop. How do you balance that? It's a weird world. When we launched the engagement center in May of 2013, nobody asked about touch, nobody really cared. I think now the cost of touch screens has fallen so dramatically that we're getting that question a whole lot. So we said first we're going to launch it on a mobile, in a mobile web app, then we're going to back that into the large screens cause we wanted to learn our lessons on the small screen and then push them out to the big screen. So let's talk about data sources. Yeah. What are your data sources? A lot of people point to Twitter first, it's the fastest source of data we have. We are a plugged in partner with Gnip, which is Twitter's data arm. So we're part of about a dozen companies that have that status. We participate in pilot programs with them, help them optimize their services. We're very excited about that relationship with Twitter because it gives us such a rich data set. Full firehose. Yeah, full firehose access. Okay. We also have access to thousands of forums, blogs, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all of those at firehose level. So we're able to bring in millions of data sources at once and bring them to bear. We even do international data sources like Stina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, VK, Naver out of South Korea. Basically, I have a marketplace I can go to for data and we're very modular in consuming that data in information source as possible. So we were at Oracle OpenWorld a couple years ago and we watched Larry Ellison give a demo and he talked about, it was a Twitter based demo. And he talked about doing all this stuff with Twitter and a filter and a dupe and then jamming it into a big giant exadata box. And we were looking at saying, that's kind of cool, but is it real time? Yeah. No, it's not real time. Are you real time? Entirely so. In fact, the distance from tweet published to screen is about 12 seconds. And considering that tweet probably bounced off a satellite somewhere, that's pretty good. All right, how do you guys handle like spam and like spam filtering and bots coming in? Yeah, so we have a lot of tools there. We have keyword based tools to filter out most of the bad language. Actually, interesting, we partnered with a company called Alson Dallas called ImageVision that does image analytics. So every image feed you see here on the boards is run through their analytics to filter out nudity. So we have literally a nudity filter. I guess you could filter in nudity if you really wanted to but we have a filter to remove out any images you might not want to see on the big screen. So you guys taking real time feeds and doing image recognition filtering that? Yeah, so we have our partner ImageVision. We hand those off in real time, get a result, bring that back in real time and display in real time. And then how do you determine, literally I was staring at that board for, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes and I wish I had more time, I had to go, but so I'm looking at the leader board. What am I looking at? How do you determine sort of, I mean, I'm sure you have some algorithm, a clout-like thing maybe. We have a lot of options for how to do that. I mean, a lot of our customers are asking for different ways to measure influence. So we have all the raw metrics like clout score, following, followers. What you saw there was more about volume of mentions. So we had different topics that were re-ranking. And then we're also working on tools to better understand influence. And that's where our work with IBM Watson comes in. Because we're analyzing personality traits using Watson personality insights to better understand not just an influential person, but is that the right person? On one of the websites, but maybe it was the board, I saw Watson sort of powered by Watson. What is the relationship between Watson and what you're doing? Right, we work very tightly with the Watson personality insights product team because we're bringing to market a solution. We've already brought to market our social portraits widget, which is what you saw, which you'll see at the conference here, which takes a group of influencers and displays their social portrait, their realization of their personality vectors, as well as their influence in clout score distribution. So that's the clout score of their followers, which is interesting insight there. And also the topics that their followers most often talk about. But then also we're working on further instigations where we can implement personality insights on a real-time level, so that we can target individuals based off of not just clout score following and all those other lovely things, but also are they open to change? Do they have a degree of altruism? Are they analytical? They're purists, open-source purists. They have some interesting topics there. Is that a text analytics capability? Yeah, so the personality insights tool investigates your, basically last 200 tweets, and they use linguistics to determine how that text is indicative of your personality traits. So you can essentially build a persona. So we would be like bipolar. It's schizophrenic, bipolar. It's also your own personality, yeah. John's talking about open daylight and neutron, then talking about social business. What the hell's going on in your brain? Driftwood. Data ocean. What's the coolest thing that you guys are doing on the graphics that people talk about the most? What's the coolest thing? Yeah, I think one of the cool things we're doing is called the perspective motion widget. You'll see it out here as well. It's a 3D visualization. And what's cool about that is there's no software involved there as well. It's using a browser language called WebGL, which actually iOS 8 just brought that onto iOS devices. So the perspective motion widget lets you see basically kind of cards floating in a star field and they kind of swarm back and forth. So that was our first implementation of 3D. We'll be doing a lot more of that in the coming year as well. But it's amazing that browser technology has caught up to that level of almost game development. So talk about the size of the company, what you guys are doing, how big are you? Are you growing? What's the state of the funding? Growth, et cetera. So we're actually a fairly, a company's been around for four years. We're a team of about a dozen people, which you consider what we're doing with a dozen people. We punch above our weight class pretty well. We actually have bootstrapped the company and Angel Fund and we're seeking a rounds of investment, but we've been able to do a whole lot when very efficiently with our capital. And you know what, knowing you guys and have previous conversations folks out there, we've chatted before, want to tee that up, because really being bootstrapped is a huge accomplishment. And in this market, you guys have a great product that certainly renders itself well. So congratulations, you know, it's something, I always say entrepreneurs that can bootstrap and grow without outside funding are the true tier one. Now you might need to get rocket fuel if you have that rocket ship all ready to go. That's right. Or everything's clean. And you bring in the big money, scale, ride the rocket ship. And you guys are building it out in real time. It's pretty phenomenal. Well, I think that this is the kind of moment that that type of fuel is necessary, right? I mean, we have shown a lot of capability and a lot of scale with IBM, literally in physical inches as far as the screens. Are they selling your product for you? Or are you guys joint sailing together? Is there a real business relationship? So we have a lot of relationships with IBM, both as a vendor and as a reseller, and those are continuing developments. So they're reselling your stuff or that you're reselling their stuff? But they are reselling our tools or we're working on that solution, as well as we are a vendor to them. So they use our tools for detecting, well, not just at events, but also in the wild for detecting opportunities for social selling. So we're working on that project as well. We have a lot of those different types of relations with IBM. And so we're both vendor as well as reseller as well as partner. So how do you position with the sort of sentiment analysis guys, are you head to head with them? So we have our own proprietary sentiment and analysis engine. But I think what's really powerful about our platform is we've built from the ground up with an integration mindset. So we can bring in other external sources of enrichment. I mentioned image vision, you know, that plug in for that image analytics API was a week worth of coding for us. It's really amazing how quickly we can bring in someone that brings value to the table like Watson and use that to enrich the social data we already have. Well, what's the real time nature of what you do? I think differentiate you from some of the sort of gen one sentiment analysis guys are just sort of you know, a lot of tools focused and my background is on agency side for 10 years running and leading social analytics teams before I came on here. In fact, I was the customer before I came on part of the company. A lot of those tools are doing research and they're doing really well historically. But we realize that marketers now want not just impressions and volume and mentions, they want action, they want something now. So we've laser focused on the real time visualizing it and then we have an engine called adaptive listening. It's kind of like if this then that for social media. So you can say if cloud score above 50 and mentioned by brand and it's negative sentiment kick off a workflow task for Eric Swain because he better respond to that stuff like that. We see that as the moment that makes social business go. And you've got a killer API to go on with all this. Yeah, so if you go to dev.mutualmind.com, our API documentation is all public. We're very proud of that. We integrate with a lot of partners that use our tools for social listening or they have a box in their flow chart called social and they don't know what to do there and they plug us in. It's great. Eric, thanks for coming on the queue. We're getting the hook here. We've got to run social business is about the data and visualizing it, taking action, the insights engines, IBM's all over this. And so we have the queue and we'll be right back after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.