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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
ENow wants to track every word you type in a chat room and peruse the results to divine the "global collective consciousness."
Feb 25, 2000 | At first glance, the little Los Angeles firm eNow appears to be your typical high-tech start-up. It's got a new Net application called ChatScan, currently in a closed beta test but due to launch in April, which will let you search live chat much like you search Web pages. It's got a zippy Web site promising that "ChatScan is your direct connection to fascinating people." It's got $10 million in venture capital from a collective of Hollywood executives called Entertainment Media Ventures. And it's got a dynamic CEO with an entrepreneurial risumi as long as your arm.
But eNow considers itself to be more than just a technology start-up. As the company's press materials put it, eNow wants to "realize the Internet's total communication potential as an aggregator of human discourse and information" -- not a small task for an enterprise that is less than a year old. And eNow's first product, ChatScan, promises to shake up the world of chat the way DejaNews initially shook up the world of Usenet -- by making the evanescent and scattered medium permanently archived, loggable, searchable and, hopefully, meaningful. It's a technology that could stir up chat communities and privacy advocates alike. And to top it all off, CEO Edo Segal plans to start a whole foundation helmed by the granddaddy of all futurists, Kevin Kelly, just to study the ramifications of his own work.
Segal is a veteran entrepreneur of Israeli birth, who founded his first start-up -- a gaming company -- when he was 15 years old, and has since skipped from interactive design to engineering to marketing. His company was conceived last year with a lofty vision; as Segal describes it, "It's like a religion, a company with a purpose."
If eNow is a religion, than its principle icon of worship is its first product: the chat search software called ChatScan. ChatScan works like this: A human editorial team identifies thousands of chat rooms across the Web -- regular rooms hidden everywhere from UnderNet to Talk City to CNN. Using what Segal describes as an "artificial intelligence agent," ChatScan monitors the most active conversations in these chat rooms, logs the text and sorts the rooms into categories based on keyword identification: a room where people are discussing Andre Agassi would get categorized as "sports," a room where chocolate mousse is the topic of conversation would be filed as "food" and so on.
Using the ChatScan client -- a 60K Java applet -- users can either click on presorted categories to pick out topics of interest; or they can do their own keyword search. If you type "puppies" into the keyword file, the client will swiftly search the last five minutes of all chats currently in its database and spit out the resulting canine matches, with less than one second of delay. All you have to do is select one of the matching keyword chats and you will immediately join the conversation.
The idea, says Segal, is to make it easier to find relevant conversations, rather than muddling through rooms full of teenagers swapping age/sex information (unless, of course, you are a teenager who wants to find those conversations, in which case ChatScan is also useful). "Chat is inaccessible -- there are thousands of rooms and no way of finding out what people are talking about without going from room to room," he explains. "We are driving people to [chat rooms] where they are relevant."
