This kind of automatically processed information for your website is all possible and available for free (at the moment and presumably also in the future) thanks to the Stockholm based Uclassify.com and its three team members, Jon Kågström (AI programmer), Emil Kågström (database/web expert) and Roger Karlsson (server expert). Jon Kågström quit his fulltime job as an AI programmer at EA Digital Illusions to work on the uClassify project.

That’s an impressive sign of dedication and commitment, isn’t it? That’s what startups are built of, complete dedication and confidence in the product and idea. The path to success,  no doubt. The uClassify team are looking for sponsors to enable them to develop the service further.

Typealyzer.com, one of the interesting services based on the uClassify AI engine, describes ArcticStartup’s  processed content and its providers in the following fashion:

“The organizing and efficient type. They are especially attuned to setting goals and managing available resources to get the job done. Once they have made up their mind about something, it can be quite difficult to convince them otherwise. They listen to hard facts and can have a hard time accepting new or innovative ways of doing things. The Guardians are often happy working in highly structured work environments where everyone knows the rules of the job. They respect authority and are loyal team players.”

Next, we are provided with a graph displaying the active parts (assumed by the AI) of the ArcticStartup team’s brains while writing the processed content, as seen here:

Now contrast that to the AI claimed “facts” that can be extracted when running Techcrunch.com as the source of content.

“techcrunch.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and happy most of the time.“

It continues describing the ArcticStartup equivalent for the US market in this way:

“The direct and assertive type. They are especially attuned to the big picture and how to get things done. They are talented strategic planners, but might come off as insensitive to others’ needs and appear arrogant. They like to be where the action is and like making bold and sweeping changes in complex situations. The Executives are happy when their work lets them learn and improve themselves and how things work around them. Not being very shy about expressing their ideas and often very outgoing they often make excellent public speakers.”

Many fields of application to the Bayes theorem (the AI part) are showcased by uClassify. Dimensions like age estimate, language detection, the tonality, mood, perceiving, judging, attitude, lifestyle and more can be accessed through the provided understandable open API .

Continuing our little comparison, we also discover that the ArcticStartup team has the mixed writing style of HG Wells/ J. Verne while Techcrunch has the style of HG Wells/O. Wilde/L. Caroll in that order of dominance. The system has been trained against three books by each author, collected from the Gutenberg Project.

How does a text classifier work?

To answer what category a text or website content is most likely to belong to, the AI learning function (a naive Bayes classifier) needs some training. Training involves creating all wanted classes (categories) and training each class on text documents that are of that type. In spite of the naive design and over-simplified assumptions, naive Bayes classifiers are known to work quite well in many complex real-world situations. Here is a Bayes theorem demo to shed some more light on this “magical” yet useful and simple formula.

How well does this AI approach work?

Well, it is hard to say based on some random searches, but the more feedback & training; the more likely it is the algorithm will hit the bullseye. Try for yourself and be your own judge of how efficient this method is and might become with some more tuning (read training). I think it works fairly well so far, but of course it is not perfect yet. Some of the functions are hard for us humans to really judge, which is why we would want to use these functions in the first place.

Other uClassify-based services to try out are urlai.com, ageanalyzer.com and bloggparti.se (Swedish).

To be fair, let’s present Aitellu.com and Saplo.com as well, to get a picture of the prominent startups in the text analysis segment in Sweden at the moment (If your company should have been mentioned, please drop me a line and I will do my best to find a remedy).

Aitellu.com – Since 2002 (not a startup anymore) they have used self learning systems to understand digital texts, in order to give their customers the option to act on that extracted valuable information.  All together Aitellu employs 11 people in Gothenburg with clients in the Nordic countries as well as in the U.K..  They are looking for additional sales staff at the moment (according to a recent Twitter message).

Saplo.com – They utilize semantic technologies to extract opinions and sentiment in text. They claim that their technique is equivalent to having thousands of employees constantly searching and sifting what is written about your organization. Saplo employs 7 people.

Related links:

• http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes – (a decent explanation of the Bayes theorem)
• http://typealyzer.com/?page_id=76 (about the theory behind Typealizer)

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The first event is Mini Seedcamp, which aims to give the startups a chance to meet face-to-face with the local startup and investor scene, and discuss anything from their product to investments. Seedcamp hopes to give the Valley folks better understanding of European startups, and show the participating European startups the US entrepreneurship culture in action, and help them connect with advisors and mentors.

Another event is organized by Invest in Sweden Agency North America (ISA). ISA has gathered a delegation of 20 Swedish early stage wireless, IT, electronics, and internet startups seeking risk capital, and takes them in front of some of the biggest VC firms in the US. The event takes place tomorrow November 11th in Menlo Park, CA. ISA is reporting to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and markets Sweden, its industry clusters, funds and individual businesses to North American companies and investors.

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uberVU: Tracking comments on your social media content
Kyko: Casual gaming inside MSN / Live Messenger
Basekit – Make building complex webapplications easy.
Soup.io – Personal publishing on the web made easy
Toksta – Provide instant messaging systems for social networks
Mobclix – Iphone analytics
StupeFlix – Smart video slideshows from photographs

Via The Next Web

Neither Scred nor Saplo made it all the way to the winners’ table this year, but I’m sure they have experienced a lot of valuable things that will take them far next year.

Edit: Here’s TechCrunchUK’s take on the Seedcamp 08 winners.

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Here’s Kristoffer Lawson, Head of Product at Scred, pitching for the packed room full of investors and startups on the first day.

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Saplo from Sweden and Scred from Finland have been selected to the Seedcamp finals among 22 other firms! Altogether the finalists companies come from 9 different countries.

The main event Seedcamp Week 2008 will kick of next week with Europe’s leading technologists, company founders, venture capitalists, and marketing strategists, including a lot of networking and sharing of experiences.

The agenda also includes panel sessions and one-on-one mentoring with some of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs, product developers, designers, marketers, investors, and company builders. In the panel will be big companies like Bebo, Facebook, MySQL, and Skype, and startups like MOO, Dopplr, and Netlog.

Congrats to all the finalists, and especially Saplo and Scred, and good luck for next week!

Our previous coverage on Saplo and Scred.

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Saplo has a software called AIAnalys, which according to Tyrberg can understand text in a similar way as humans do. It’s based on intelligent context analysis, meaning the software can value information automatically. It allows to get rid of slow manual work and problems with subjective judgment, like individual bias and systematic errors, in analysing and evaluating different kinds of texts. The software also enables analyzing huge pieces of text, which may have been impractical before. According to Tyrberg this kind of a product is of interest in many different areas, like media analysis, advertising, and web site optimization to name a few obvious ones.

The main benefits are the product saves money and it enables potentially more revenues. For example, with the technology one can measure exactly how positive or negative a person or firm is covered in media, and the program can show a graph with a comparison to another person or firm. One can also optimize ads with AIAnalys. Saplo web pages state results up to 70 % higher ad revenue can be achieved through presenting the right ads to the right reader, as AIAnalys can understand the text and present suitable ads accordingly. The software can also be used to tweak the whole user experience on a website, to make the users stay longer on the site by displaying similar content, which the user is interested in.

According to Mattias Tyrberg the technology is unique, even though there are some competitors in the sector. Saplo’s technology is based on several years of research, and Tyrberg’s final thesis, which he doesn’t want to turn in until the patent process allows for it. It seems there’s potential for a financing round later on as well, since Tyrberg mentions he’s especially looking forward to establishing risk financier contacts in London.

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