Psydex defines itself well, with the sentence: Psydex indexes and searches the world’s information sources in real time, turning news into numbers.

You may remember that Germany invaded Norway in 1940. At the time British intelligence was listening to all German radio traffic and in the week before the April 9th invasion, the volume of radio traffic increased dramatically. They knew immediately that something big was going on, but they were not sure what. That was the genesis of “traffic analysis”, the analysis of traffic patterns to deduce the underlying activity that causes them. Later on, British intelligence, which was decrypting a good proportion of German radio messages, was able to marry traffic patterns to message content, which was even more powerful.

These kinds of analysis have been part of the intelligence world since then, but - to my knowledge - only recently have technologies appeared in the commercial sector that could automate the tracking of messages. This is exactly what Psydex does, and in doing so it creates a real time intelligence service.

Psydex: An Intelligence Streaming Platform?

Fundamentally, Web 3.0 is about using semantic technology to derive meaning from the vast accumulation of textual information out there on the Web and do something useful with it. If you want a slightly deeper dive on Web 3.0 then read What is Web 3.0 and Why Should I Care? but fundamentally it’s about semantic technology.

Pysdex uses such technology to parse information in real time for meaning, aggregating it and filtering it, and delivering it to various streamed services that it offers to its customers. The diagram below illustrates that process.

Look at it from the bottom up. At the bottom of the diagram, 4 distinct types of sources provide information: News feeds, Television sources, Social Networks (Blogs, Twitter, etc.) and Mobile information sources (Various SMS sources). In truth just about any source of data that delivers information in a text format can be plugged in here. The important point to note is the breadth of the information that is sucked in; any text source of any kind.

This information is passed to a high performance computer grid that is tuned to process each message in about 20 milliseconds. That, by the way, is as good as real-time as far as human beings are concerned. I could go into detail about how the information is processed but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just say that it is time stamped and the meaning of each item is analyzed and then categorized in a very flexible way.

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