 News and analysis from Big Data SV 2014 is brought to you by Headline Sponsors Actian, accelerating Big Data 2.0 and WANDISCO, we make Hadoop invincible. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE. We're here live at Santa Clara in the Hilton. We're right across the street from the Strata Conference, which is going on at the Santa Clara Convention Center. And there's a ton of startups over there. We're in Silicon Valley, it's the heartland of startups, sort of the innovation that's occurring across the street and here throughout the week. And we've got a special segment right now with one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, a company called CrowdChat. We've got two founders, the CEO and the CTO, John Furrier, CEO of CrowdChat and Danny Ryan, the CTO. This is a company that really is looking at the confluence of some major trends, big data, analytics, social media, which we talked about is just exploding right now, bringing them together to really help people connect. So gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to see you. Thank you. So John, you've been really focused on CrowdChat for the last year, so of course, spending time on theCUBE also, but so why don't we just start the beginning. What is CrowdChat and why did you guys found the company? So Danny and I started CrowdChat, as you know, Dave, a couple of years ago. We looked at social data, we saw people gathering around ideas and knowledge. We always say here inside theCUBE expressing big ideas to grow and enabling conversations. And one of the things that we saw was the social media world was growing significantly like we saw parallels on the web. So I've been looking for that web moment for many, many years and this is it. I mean, you're seeing conversations open and public and transparent, unfiltered as the new content and that's like the web in the early days. And the social media marketplace from marketers and for people, it's really growing up and there's a need for tooling and automation and abstraction away of the complexities of doing stuff to one, generate conversations, finding people. So CrowdChat was the beginning of a data science project that we started a couple of years ago around using algorithms of project knowledge that we built that Danny and the team engineered around identifying affinities and finding people of interest that aren't yet your friends, that might become your friends that you might want to have conversations with. That became an amazing, exciting project. We called it VFinder, CrowdSpots, other things. And we showed people in our Alpha Beta stage, people were blown away. The number one question we got was how do you use that information? And so we then built CrowdChat platform, which is an application, very similar to TweetChat, but it works on all social networks, centered around the hashtag. So the real momentum around TweetChat has really generated this idea of people forming groups to talk amongst themselves in a very targeted, unfiltered way, which is essentially crowdsourcing, content development, engagement, sharing ideas, and ultimately doing something, taking action of some sort. So that's really the crux of the vision behind it. We're passionate about the democratization of media, opening up voices for any individual in the world. To share their opinion, run it by people in groups, have that iterate and be crowdsourced, and create new content, and ultimately meeting new people. So Danny, you were at Cloudera, Georgia Tech. You came out, you were at Riot Games for quite some time. You left Riot Games to go found CrowdChat with John. What drew you to Silicon Valley, because you moved up from Southern California, what drew you to this area into CrowdChat? Silicon Valley drives a lot of innovation here, as we speak, but nevertheless, Silicon Beach is equally innovative and it was a lot of fun. You could just imagine it's a gaming company and fresh talent, and you play games within the company just to test your product, which is really good. It was all great, and League of Legends is a really, really, really good game, and it has the best engagement model I've ever seen. So people play the game for multiple hours, not just multiple hours stretching over a day, and there's a lot of big data and everything involved, and it was all fun, but at the same time, myself and John, we met at Cloudera when I was there in the office, and John was having his first small hub right there, for Silicon Angle, and we were brainstorming this idea on how to use data for the benefit of finding other people, kind of like connecting the humanity, and that idea was great, and then slowly, then we stumbled upon this idea, all right, everyone is using hashtags, it's not just Twitter, it's over Facebook, it's over Instagram, it's over Tumblr, and this hashtag is a very important signal, or sort of a proxy for sort of a group communication. So every time this group communication and communication in general has to be reinvented as we, the humans make progress, right, right from the age of, like, paper, where the knowledge was in, like, the brains, people, like, put it in writing and there was an explosion, and today you can see, like, everyone has this small stuff, which is, like, a couple of doing so many more things than just, like, pushing updates to Facebook. Yeah, this concept of the hashtag is interesting, I mean, every TV show you watch, they got a hashtag on it, right, and Super Bowl has the hashtag. That's right, so right now I think there is a conference going right across the street, and if I want to join into real conversation, a media-rich conversation, and to actually meet people who are not my friends, who are not, and to have one-to-one or one-to-many conversation who are not my followers on Twitter, it's very difficult for me to find them right now. I mean, I can use the hashtag, but Twitter is right now a river of, a river of updates along with a lot of spam and stuff, and it's not very easy for me to actually go and jump into one-to-one conversation, and also Twitter has been, like, working, and, like, Facebook has been working to, like, improve the public communication a bit, but it's a very hard problem, and we are pretty much focused on that problem. We are just focused on group communication for the internet, for the new age. It is like taking the IRC 20 years back, which is still, like, used by geeks to actually make everyday social media user to use it. So, John, let's talk about the product, sort of the high level, and then we want to get into the sort of secret sauce Danny with you. So, John, well, so it's a real product. You can go to crowdchat.net and you can see it, but so why don't you describe it a little bit? Well, we'll give a demo shortly, you know, I think ultimately what, you know, people ask us, you know, what is it, and where are we as the business? Right now it's seed-funded and we have some angel investors. We still kind of have an open-series seed round looking to fill out, and we're being patient. We, you know, we don't really need the money right now, but we're very capital-efficient. We will be doing a Series A VC round in a few months. We'll be going out and talking to some large-scale VC, but we have significant traction around large groups of people, and the core product, Dave, under the hood is about one thing. We've built a system that's now shipped and scaling. A large-scale group communication chat system. We have public chats, we also have private chats, but ultimately it's large-scale. So we've tested it against volumes on the Twittersphere, for instance, against this NFL data all year and the Super Bowl and the playoffs. No problems, full backend scaling. We are looking for a UX developer and we think we're still working on that. The product is in public beta preview one. We expect it to be in beta preview two shortly. We're adding rich user experiences to it, but ultimately you go to the website, crowdchat.net, and you just create a chat. People can get an invite, if they request an invite, we can approve them if they have a community. We're targeting community managers, and those managers can use this tool. And right now the early adopters, the core audience, is folks who have communities and want to engage. CrowdSource, town hall meeting, CrowdSource, a webinar-like experience, CrowdSource, a conversation, and we're going to do a one-hour timed content jam, as we call it. And it's very, very effective, because it generates real content real fast. So the product is working great. We've had great testimonials from folks. Merv Adrian at Gardner loved it. He had some great positive quotes there. Really, really positive feedback. Great traction. We're doubling down on that. And under the hood, full cloud scale. It's on Amazon. Originally on Hadoop and HBase, we ported it to Amazon to scale up. We've also seen the B2B space. We're starting to look at more topical interest, like, you know, the funding hashtag, Silicon Valley, San Francisco. And you're seeing people use it. And the idea is to get a coherency around readability, searchability, discoverability around large-scale group conversations. So who's using it? Let me give you some examples. IBM's using it. EMC's using it. Palo Alto Networks is using it. We have John McAfee, who's coming out of the woodwork to use. We've got interest from people in Hollywood. We've got interest from TV shows. This is the beautiful thing. This is a crowd sourced, free-for-all conversational with voting. You can vote on threads. You can vote and favor things. You can like it. And the person who wins the most votes becomes the crowd captain. But it's not just on Twitter. It's on Facebook. We've seen people on Facebook use it. And people on LinkedIn use it. You sign in. It's a crowd platform. We're really excited. We think this is just a tip of the iceberg. We have plans to bring it out on mobile. You can see that in Beta Preview 2. And then probably general availability shortly around the April-May timeframe. I wonder if we could turn to the product a little bit, Danny. John, you talked about what it is. Can we actually see it? And maybe you can take us through the back end and the secret sauce behind it. Sure. This is how it looks right now on the front end. This is a hashtag from Francisco. So you can see folks here putting like Instagram pics. They're dragging some articles. So last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the Google Bus and the rent. People have been putting stuff here because there's no other single place where they can find all the important things about a hashtag. So that's one example. And the other one, that's always on chat, wherein we are reinventing the way people communicate on forums. Forums have been not reinvented since, like, 1990s. It's one important part of the group communication which you focus on. The other one is Reddit-style AMAs. You can see here Ask Palo Alto Networks, Ask Brian. Like, he's a great guy from EMC. There may be a ton of people who want to ask questions to him. Where do they go? So how does it work? The chat is scheduled for Thursday, February 13th, with Brian Gallagher, who's the president of EMC's largest division. So he's going to be available in the chat. And so what happens at 11 a.m. Pacific time? So 11 a.m. Pacific time, the comment boxes and everything opens up and people can ask questions. All the comments and all the updates go to the social network of choice. It's really opt-in so we don't spam anyone. It's, like, perfect for people who, like, want to talk, like, one or two things using their timeline and then want to ask, like, further more questions or interact without spamming their timeline. So it's, like, network, like, it's highly good for a social network. And it's all around a hashtag. Yes, that's right. So here's the thing. So there's two things that's going on that we're really tapping into that I'm excited about. And again, I haven't been this excited in a long, long time since the early days of the web. The trend from moving from static to dynamic is really what the crowd is all about. Comments and all these forms are statically aligned with something. A blog post, a site, you know, whatever. What the hashtag has done in the social crowd has created a dynamic environment. Now the problem that that creates and the opportunity that we are going after is that it's an opportunity to unify, Dave, to unify the crowd to create action. And that action could be selling a product, educating someone in a multi-massive online courseware situation. It could be an executive using their one hour of their time to have an Ask Me Anything town hall-like experience. The bottom line is it takes advantage of the dynamic nature of social, the unification around the hashtag for distribution and discovery. And more importantly, in social media, people talk about wasting time. This makes use of time. This allows an individual to spend an hour with a group and create amazing oxygen of content. And that's a real value proposition. So you showed us some scheduled one. So this is a scheduled one with the video. So we have different kinds of chat. Can you pull up one that's already taking place or can we see what it looks like? Yeah, of course. I can put one which is live right now. So let's go to Big Data SP. I think it's a chat which is using this hashtag. And here is what you can see. Rich media content, like John. The other one is which is live is, let's say, news around Stanford. Hashtag funny. Okay, so what I was looking at before it looks like it was a thread in conversation, right? So it's kind of quora-like. Okay, now I'm seeing... A lot of funny stuff. It's not safe for work so I don't want to go. So it's like group communication for all sorts of people. I can show you some transcripts. Transcript also, once it is done, here is a popular one from IBM. So this is how it looks like. Here yourself, Dave. So you are thread and Tom Pierce and it looks beautiful to read. So Twitter is like a stream of updates which gets lost. I would tell you, this is from three months ago, right? Can you find an update which is relevant for a hashtag which is like months ago? No, nowhere on like Twitter. And what kind of metrics do you get here? Do you share like or come into the crowd? For the social media managers we do a lot of like automation. We share like the number of views, reach, post. That is like available for everyone. And then we go to like analytics which I can show you by signing in. Okay, so John, the idea here is that we've got this threaded conversation and what happens after the chat ends. So the beautiful thing about this is it's on the record transcripts. That actually evolved naturally in sequential order. And also because of the voting mechanics the top vote goes to the top. So it's also very, very readable and it's a filter built in by the crowd. So there's kind of a crowd mechanics that allows for some filtering. What is also important is the notion of pull quotes. For instance, each cluster that's grouped together has its own permalink. So someone can say, hey, I'm only interested in this conversation. So on data economy which was months ago I'm going to retweet on my timeline right now. I just retweeted. So if you go to my Twitter handle twitter.com slash furry you'll see Danny have shown that and you'll see what I just retweeted that's very relevant to the conversation happening right now at Big Data SV. And that is, so organizations are really changing to become data driven or is this a bunch of lip service by Dave Vellante? I retweeted that from November 20th and if you look at the Twitter card it's byline by Dave Vellante with the question of the thread on there. This is an example of crowd activated innovation on demand content, retweetable people can go back and look at it and interact with it. This is gravity. This is the use of data. This is knowledge that's been captured and is actionable. This is the ultimate Holy Grail experience in our opinion that generates from the crowd that has unharnessed in the past. So we are super excited for educational platforms, for marketing folks, for nonprofits for businesses, for communities. So Denny, you're just showing us something there? Yeah, the analytics. So I just logged in into my chat and I have an analytics for a lot of chats which I participated and this is free for all the hosts. So any company manager out there who is right now struggling to do multiple things writing a blog post about her tweet chat and then trying to garner the people and then doing stories of important comments and then trying to get analytics from another service we have a fully boxed solution and a completely automated process. So they just go here, they pick a hashtag they do their chats just like it works as good as like a tweet chat. The only difference is it's much better it has like threading it has a coherent way of preserving the transcript and you can embed the transcript and more importantly it gives you free analytics. It's not ephemeral it doesn't disappear in the tweet chat. That's right. Now what's this running on? This is running totally on Amazon we have no bare metal servers everything on Amazon elastic bean stock which is like a full stack which Amazon provides and it's beautiful and it's fully automated you don't even need so actually it replaces DevOps a little bit so we don't have any DevOps the reason is Amazon has done all the groundwork so all we have is like software engineers and Git repository we like push the code to Git and it goes to Amazon the Amazon servers download the code they run some bunch of testers which we actually like tell them what sort of unit has and then they deploy it on all the machines and they even do rolling upgrades which is if you have like 10 machines one machine gets a new code and they replace the machine so your site is always up so you're confident this thing will scale like scales we have a bunch of teenagers so John what are you talking about the roadmap? What's the future look like? What's next? Right now we're in public beta one which is invite only you can request the beta we're letting folks in who are using it and we're getting good working experience from that we're really excited it's a big idea it's already validated certainly in the enterprise space the B2B market loves it we're seeing great traction there great uptake we're doubling down on that as kind of an enterprise advanced analytics opportunity but we're going for the big idea for the whole world we want to bring this out at a very large scale we're talking to some VC for instance some interest in investing we'll be looking for a series A financing in a few months and some interested parties but we're looking for a partner that can help us make this a global big idea and make it a reality we've made a lot of progress technically in the back end on the business model innovation on the user user experience right now just put some polish on it so we've made a lot of progress a lot of features under the hood a lot of intellectual property that's defensible certainly from a proprietary standpoint patents etc so we're super excited you know data science meets interaction meets the crowd we're really super excited how big is the team? so right now we have six seven people and we're looking for some additional folks on the UI side user experience and obviously mobile obviously mobile first is key for us as well but we want to nail this on the web and we got all the wires wires together on all the products we're super excited great testing on the back end and again this is a lot we've done a lot and very capital efficient six to seven people they're full time full time yeah full time and we're running like the wind we're pushing more code to GitHub and we're watching the QA kick in and again a lot of the hard work is done and really what we're most excited about is the user experience that we've had with our customers so far everyone loves it it's total democratization it allows for ideas and action we've just broken all the walls so you don't have to like sit with your static networks of 500 friends on Facebook 200 friends on LinkedIn that's not the end of your world you can with hashtags we are actually breaking those walls so you can meet new people so the networks are Twitter Facebook and LinkedIn so we are soon to be Google plus so in that way like we connect the hashtags across all social networks and what about one of the company questions you guys hiring right now or yeah we're hiring UX engineers looking for community managers some data scientists but right now the number one focus is user experience engineers and getting the mobile version out the door and we're you know we're pushing that so we have a fully responsive code right now but even then we are getting feedback that they want people want like native mobile apps so mobile engineers out there UX designers so this is the first drive of the product even then it looks usable and good we don't have any UX guys this is built just by backend engineers I mean there's some real computer science involved and this looks like kind of an easy thing but it's really not we're talking about this large scale real time interactive a lot of engagement a lot of crowd behavior interaction experience it's really awesome yeah a lot of API things like different networks have different kinds of API if you've seen one thread you will find person from LinkedIn another person from Facebook and another person from Twitter and they all look like one cohesive conversation so what about the so this looks great what about the business model can you talk about that yeah so right now we are so excited about and this is something that the and I have agreed upon that we are so passionate about is because of the preview one data we got from our current batch of users we're going to open it up for free for everyone to use with the free analytics the baseline analytics because we it's helping people and this is we're finding the tooling needed in the social web is a lot like the web in the 94 95 time frame we're helping people eliminate things that are manual mundane tasks so this is good tooling and it's free for any community manager it's going to be free for anyone who wants to host a chat this will be a freemium model we will make money in the short term right now by selling an enterprise edition for advanced analytics data modeling some data science that we have we do have some proprietary technology around affinity ranking and so on and so forth but again that's going to be more on to keep things going but right now we have enough capital efficiency and leverage in the back end that it's very capital efficient to operate and we're excited to bring it out and we're going to offer it free in preview 2 you're going to see rich interactive media and beds of videos and beds of photos and some coolness around the features of the user experience and then ultimately general availability does it work on mobile? it works on mobile fully responsive design again a mobile lap is in the works but that's a hard problem as well so one hard problem done on the back end right now it works on all devices you can like post updates but yeah like a native mobile app is much faster so some of the companies you mentioned my question was how stable is it you're talking about IBM, EMC using it? yeah that's right it's pretty stable it's rock solid on the back end we can scale up to hundreds of users concurrently for every chat those kind of scalability problems are solved now right now we are working more towards the UX a person who is coming on to this side should be off and running within like few seconds yeah we're getting some feedback from folks that are being very candid about the UX in some areas on mobile for instance but I will tell you Dave what's the most exciting is that everyone who's used CrowdChat has come back and we have a lot of repeat usage and that's a key metric for us so we're super excited by that that to us is validation which is why we're opening it up for everyone to use and that's our big idea we're super excited so what are the critical success factors that we should be watching? right now core users with those community managers folks who have the need now folks doing tweet chats for instance find that using hashtags to organize groups in somewhat structured ways working this is a home run for them if you're using tweet chats you should move to CrowdChats immediately it gets storified instantly with the algorithmic transcript provides automation so if you're doing a tweet chat today that market we see about 5000 people probably on a daily basis roughly give or take and that's growing so people who are doing group conversations can have some coherency in that automation so that's one market we see it going into kind of the power law curve in the long tail for point conversations distinct user groups moving up into the mainstream TV shows movies, celebrities and so on alright Danny Ryan, John Furrier thanks very much, good luck congratulations on all the progress check out CrowdChat.net next guest this is theCUBE we're live from Silicon Valley