Palantir Advises More Abstraction for Less Frustration
June 10, 2014
At this year’s Gigaom Structure Data conference, Palantir’s Ari Gesher offered an apt parallel for the data field’s current growing pains: using computers before the dawn of operating systems. Gigaom summarizes his explanation in, “Palantir: Big Data Needs to Get Even More Abstract(ions).” Writer Tom Krazit tells us:
“Gesher took attendees on a bit of a computer history lesson, recalling how computers once required their users to manually reconfigure the machine each time they wanted to run a new program. This took a fair amount of time and effort: ‘if you wanted to use a computer to solve a problem, most of the effort went into organizing the pieces of hardware instead of doing what you wanted to do.’
“Operating systems brought abstraction, or a way to separate the busy work from the higher-level duties assigned to the computer. This is the foundation of modern computing, but it’s not widely used in the practice of data science.
“In other words, the current state of data science is like ‘yak shaving,’ a techie meme for a situation in which a bunch of tedious tasks that appear pointless actually solve a greater problem. ‘We need operating system abstractions for data problems,’ Gesher said.”
An operating system for data analysis? That’s one way to look at it, I suppose. The article invites us to click through to a video of the session, but as of this writing it is not functioning. Perhaps they will heed the request of one commenter and fix it soon.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Palantir focuses on improving the methods their customers use to analyze data. The company was founded in 2004 by some folks from PayPal and from Stanford University. The write-up makes a point of noting that Palantir is “notoriously secretive” and that part(s) of the U.S. government can be found among its clients. I’m not exactly sure, though, how that ties into Gesher’s observations. Does Krazit suspect it is the federal government calling for better organization and a simplified user experience? Now, that would be interesting.
Cynthia Murrell, June 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Palantir: What Is the Main Business of the Company?
December 11, 2013
I read about Palantir and its successful funding campaign in “Palantir’s Latest Round Valuing It at $9B Swells to $107.8M in New Funding.” Compared to the funding for ordinary search and content processing companies, Palantir is obviously able to attract investors better than most of the other companies that make sense out of data.
If you run a query for “Palantir” on Beyond Search, you will get links to articles about the company’s previous funding and to a couple of stories about the companies interaction with IBM i2 related to an allegation about Palantir’s business methods.
Image from the Louisiana Lottery.
I find Palantir interesting for three reasons.
First, it is able to generate significant buzz in police and intelligence entities in a number of countries. Based on what I have heard at conferences, the Palantir visualizations knock the socks off highly placed officials who want killer graphics in their personal slide presentations.
Second, the company has been nosing into certain financial markets. The idea is that the Palantir methods will give some of the investment outfits a better way to figure out what’s going up and what’s going down. The visuals are good, I have heard, but the Palantir analytics are perceived, if my sources are accurate, as better than those from companies like IBM SPSS, Digital Reasoning, Recorded Future, and similar analytics firms.
Third, the company may have moved into a new business sector. The firm’s success in fund raising begs the question, “Is Palantir becoming a vehicle to raise more and more cash?”
Palantir is worth monitoring. The visualizations and the math are not really a secret sauce. The magic ingredient at Palantir may be its ability to sell its upside to investors. Is Palantir introducing a new approach to search and content processing? The main business of the company could be raising more and more money.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2013
Palantirs Growth Continues Following the 2011 Move to Australia
November 11, 2013
The article titled The Rise and Rise of Palantir and Its Deep Domain Knowledge on Crikey follows the move of Palantir Technologies, a datamining company with a 2 million dollar investment from the CIA, to Canberra, Australia. Palantir has seen its fair share of press, good and bad, but ever since Anonymous hacked their system and discovered their plan to destroy WikiLeaks’ credibility in 2011, the adjective “ruthless” seems appropriate. The company, founded in 2002, moved to Australia in 2011 and has seen enormous success. The article explains,
“The Department of Defence began using some of its software in 2011 via third-party providers, but this year has seen the company grow rapidly… Top-flight lobbying firm Government Relations Australia was hired to represent them in Canberra and state capitals. In the last few weeks, the company has secured multi-year contracts with the Department of Defence’s Intelligence and Security branch worth nearly $2 million, all secured via limited tender…Those of course are the contracts we know about.”
The article speculates that Palantir is being utilized by the Australian government given the proven effectiveness of datamining for national security. While the ACLU believes they pose a massive threat to the privacy of civilians, governments continue to invest in cybersecurity companies.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Palantir Accused of Being the Creepiest App
October 8, 2013
There is a new startup called Shadow that records your dreams and shares the info with the world. Sounds creepy, right? Yes, but The Telegraph gives the title to another startup, “Is ‘Shadow’ The Creepiest Startup Ever? Nom CIA Investment Palantir Still Owns The Crown.” Palantir Technologies still reigns supreme as the creepiest IT company, because its main business principle is that artificial intelligence software is not enough to track people. It also relies on human analysts coupled with automated data analysis. Palantir has dubbed this concept “intelligence automation.”
Palantir is the brainchild of Peter Thiel, with the participation of Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings. Its name derives from a Lord of the Rings artifact called a seeing stone, most often wielded by evil bad guys. Thiel developed Palantir’s technology from his PayPal venture to detect fraud. The success caught the attention of some very big clients: the CIA and Us Army.
Why makes it creepy?
“Though it seems quite clear that Palantir has a role to play in moves by the US and her allies – including the UK – to battle growing online threats from Russia, China and others, it definitely earns its Most Creepy Startup award. In 2010, Palantir itself was exposed as somewhat complicit in moves by Hunton & Williams (a US lobbying firm) to combat “the WikiLeaks Threat”. In early 2011, elements from Anonymous leaked documents that included the plan. The strategy proposed using Palantir software “as the foundation for all the data collection, integration, analysis, and production efforts”.”
Thiel does not take any direct responsibility for how his technology could be used for evil purposes. His company’s technology is used all over, mostly without any one knowing it. Right now it is watching you and me.
Whitney Grace, October 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Palantir Funding: Exuberance with Alpha Brain
September 28, 2013
I read “Palantir Just Raised a Massive $196M, Filing Shows.” The factoid I noted was:
The rumored value of Palantir is at over $8 billion, and its chief executive, Alex Karp, told Forbes that it’s likely to close $1 billion in contracts next year.
What I found interesting is that none of the write ups I scanned mentioned “Berto Jongman: U.S. command in Afghanistan gives Army 60 days to fix or replace intel network [meanwhile, Palantir spends millions buying legislative intervention].” Perhaps, this report about issues with Palantir is off base. My hunch is that getting more information is going to be difficult.
My conclusion:
Investors may need Joe Rogan supplements to assist them in the Olympic revenue races ahead. Only the heat winners get to compete for after-tax profits.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2013
Palantir: $300 Million Not Enough?
June 30, 2013
I spotted a blog post called “Could Palantir Technologies Be Raising Additional Funding?” I have no clue who or what is behind this interesting item. The main idea is that Palantir, a high profile company which has been in the news about litigation and other matters, has been funded already. According to Crunchbase, the company has more than $300 million in funding. For the sake of comparison, Attivio and Coveo — both in the content processing space — have been able to drum up about $30 million in funding. Most of the companies in the search and content processing space — Digital Reasoning, for instance — have garnered a fraction of what long time players Attivio and Coveo have been able to gather. At the time of its sale to Oracle, Endeca — another content processing and intelligence vendors — was generating an estimated $150 million in revenues. At the time of its sale to Hewlett Packard, Autonomy was nosing into the $800 million range. But the key figure for Autonomy is that it sold to the prescient managers at HP for more than $10 billion.
Let’s assume that Palantir has received funding in the $300 million range. Let’s assume that the company is not raising any additional funding. Let’s assume that the company, founded in 2004, is going to pay back its investors, operate at a profit, and fund necessary research to keep the content processing system in step with competitors like Cybertap, among others.
So what does the gargantuan funding suggest to me, this fine, humid Sunday morning in rural Kentucky?
First, revenue in the Endeca range or even the Autonomy range, may not be enough to meet investors’ targets. Expectations for big plays are rarely in the credit union savings account range. To hit a 10x return, Palantir has to be in the $3 billion per year range. That works out to 3X the revenue of Autonomy and 30X plus Autonomy’s revenue? How may companies today selling content processing are in this $3 billion club? According to my data, not too many. Based on the information I monitor, no search or content processing company has hit this type of revenue goal since I have been monitoring the 200 companies in the Overflight service.
Second, the $300 million funding may be a signal that doing advanced search and content processing is not just expensive. The costs are quite high and may be difficult for Palantir’s senior management to predict. (Perhaps the company needs some of Recorded Future’s technology to get the money thing parameterized?) Will the costs of creating, supporting, and innovating a service like Palantir whet the appetites of big bucks investors for Palantir or stimulate a flow of revenue into one of the dozens of start ups in the space? Will, for example, Quid benefit?
Third, perhaps the massive funding is a form of stage dressing for a high profile, super sized sale of the company. Could large firms be jockeying to bid eBay-style for Palantir. The idea is that if so much smart money has flowed into the firm, a more IBM-style or GM-style management approach can uncork massive revenues and even more gigantic profits? I can formulate this question, “Is the Palantir cash appetite a prelude to the main course; that is, the blockbuster sale later this year or in 2014?”
A Palantir professional asked me recently, “Why do you ping Palantir?”
Answer: Heck, it is an anomaly in funding, in litigation, and in getting media attention. Why wouldn’t I pay attention to Palantir? I have zero interest in writing about the actions of a government entity. Last time I checked, a retired person approaching 70 years of age can do research and summarize it, offer an opinion, and ask questions, right?
I have a goose as a logo. Maybe I am angling for a stand up comedy gig at the local open mike night in a big city not far from Harrod’s Creek? Ever think of that? I don’t think investors who do not get their money back are going to be in a receptive frame of mind for my brand of humor? I did not need Recorded Future to predict that, by the way.
Stephen E Arnold, June 30, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Palantir Embraces Open Source
March 4, 2013
Palantir leaves its interesting legal past and affirms open-source goodness, we learn from Directions Magazine’s article, “Palantir: An Open Source Development Success Story.”
The tale begins with Gotham, an analytics platform with a nifty new geospatial component, in 2007. The product launched successfully, and Palantir looked to expand to different databases across a variety of industries. See the article for the details of their needs and their decision-making process; long story short, the company chose PostGIS as the springboard for their solution.
Yes, springboard. It took a lot of tinkering to make the software do just what they wanted, but the experience with the open source community was a positive one for the company. In fact, Palantir went on working with OpenGeo to develop more PostGIS enhancements that would benefit more than their own company. The article tells us:
“Gotham developers were happy to fund this open source development and were especially impressed with the network effects of community bug testing and further feature development. To them it seemed only fair that others would be able to benefit from their investment, since they had benefited so greatly from what was already built by others and would similarly benefit from what others built in the future. Their assumption has proved correct; since Palantir’s original investment, many users have funded or developed new functions and performance enhancements for geography calculations.”
If interested in the development of geospatial applications, the details in this article are worth checking out. Palantir was so happy with their open source experience that they have not only continued to support others’ open source projects, but have also opened some open source ventures of their own.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Palantir Technologies focuses on improving the ways their client organizations analyze data. The company was founded in 2004 by some enterprising folks from PayPal and from Stanford University.
Cynthia Murrell, March 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Another Palantir Push: But Little Hard Financial Data. Why Not?
February 23, 2013
I was reading about the TED Conference’s yo-yo presentation. My eye drifted across an expanse of cellulose and landed on “The Humane Way to Crack Terrorists.” (This link will go dead so be aware that you may have to pay to read the item online.) The subtitle was one of those News Corp. Google things: “Big data may make enhanced interrogation obsolete.” The source? Some minor blog from America’s hinterland, Silicon Valley? Nope. The Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2013, page C 12.
What’s the subject – really? The answer, in my opinion, Palantir. If you monitor the flagship, traditional media, Palantir has a solid track record of getting written about in print magazines. I suppose that the folks who have pumped about $150 million into the “big data” company read those magazines and the Wall Street Journal type publications each day. I know I do, and I am an addled goose in rural Kentucky, the high tech nerve center of the new industrial revolution. After February 28, 2013, I am not sure about the economy, however.
Here’s the passage I noted:
There’s a tellingly brief passage in “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden” by Mark Bowden. “The hunt for bin Laden and others eventually drew on an unfathomably rich database,” he writes. “Sifting through it required software capable of ranging deep and fast and with keen discernment—a problem the government itself proved less effective at solving than were teams of young software engineers in Silicon Valley. A startup called Palantir, for instance, came up with a program that elegantly accomplished what TIA [Terrorism Information Awareness program, set up in 2002] had set out to do.” When I met the chief executive and co-founder of Palantir, Alex Karp, recently, he was straightforward: “It is my personal belief that flawless data integration at any kind of scale, with a rigorous access control model, allows analysts to perform operations that are only intrusive on the data. They are not intrusive on human beings.” Obviously, Palantir doesn’t comment on classified work. But its technological phalanx—processing countless leads, from flight manifests to tapped phone calls, into one resource for people to interpret—is known to have been key in locating bin Laden. The company, founded in 2004, has large contracts across the intelligence community and is enterprise-wide at the FBI. Its first client was the CIA.
Nifty stuff. Palantir has high profile clients like intelligence and law enforcement outfits. But where is a hedge fund or a consumer products company? Allegedly the fancy math technology can work wonders. The implication is that outfits like Digital Reasoning, Recorded Future, and even Tibco are not in Palantir’s league. Oh, really? What about outfits like IBM and Oracle and SAS? Nah. Palantir seems to be where the good stuff happens in the context of this Wall Street Journal article.
In my view, the write up triggered several notes on my ubiquitous 4×6 paper note cards, just like the ones I used in high school debate competitions:
First, what about that legal dust up with i2 Group? Here’s a link to refresh one’s memory. I recall that there was also some disagreement, a few real media stories, and then a settlement regarding sector leader i2. Note: I did some work years ago for this out, which is now owned by IBM. Oh, and after the settlement silence. Just what was that legal dispute about anyway? The Wall Street Journal story does not touch on that obviously trivial issue related to the legal matter. Why not? The space in the newspaper was probably needed to cover the yo-yo guy.
Second, can software emulate the motion picture approach to reality? In my experience, numerical recipes can be useful, but they can also provide some points which are subject to contention. A recent example is the gentleman’s disagreement about an electric vehicle. Data, analyses, and interpretations—muddled. Not like the motion pictures’ tidiness and quite final end point. “The end” solves a lot of fictional problems. Life is less clear, a lot less clear in my experience.
Third, how is Palantir doing as a business? After all, the story ran in the Wall Street Journal, which is about business. I appreciate the references to a motion picture, but I am curious about how Palantir is doing on its march to generate a billion or more in revenues. At some point, the investors are going to look at the money pumped into Palantir, the time spent developing the magical technology which warrants metaphorical juxtaposition to Hollywood outputs, and the profitability of the company’s sales. Why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal do the business thing? Revenue, commercial customers, and case studies which do not flaunt words which Bing and Google love to consume in their indexing systems?
It is Saturday, and I suppose I there are lots of 20 somethings working at 0900 Eastern as I write this. They will fill the gap. I will have to wait. I wonder if the predictive algorithms from Palantir can tell me how long before hard facts become available?
One final question: If this Palantir type of system worked, why aren’t the firms in this Palantir-type software sector dominating in financial services, marketing, and consumer products? I wonder if the reason is that fancy math generates high expectations and then creates some situations in which reality does not work just like a cinema thriller?
Stephen E Arnold, February 23, 2013
Pros and Cons of Palantir?
July 12, 2012
It seems as though writer Dave Kellogg would love to hate analytics firm Palantir, if only he could. That’s my summary of his Kellblog entry, “Why Palantir Makes my Head Hurt.” Though he admits there are several things about the company he is forced to admire, his sense of fair play compels him to slam it in print.
Kellogg believes that Palantir is playing fast and loose with definitions for accounting reasons. For example, they claim to have no marketing, sales, or services. He also asserts that their positioning as a billion-dollar company is a stretch. (See the piece for his explanations.)
Kellogg admits to some bias borne of his experiences covering Palantir. He writes:
“It turns out being a naysayer isn’t fun work: for three years you sound like a whining, doubting-Thomas constantly on the back foot, constantly playing defense and then one day you’re proven right. But there’s no joy in it. And the naysaying doesn’t help sell newspapers so you don’t get much press coverage. And, in the end, all people remember is that ‘MicroStrategy was pretty cool back in the day’ and ‘Dave’s a grump.'”
Okay, so now we know where his head is at. Kellogg is conflicted, because he still thinks Palantir does several things very well; he calls them “the first SI to figure out how to build a world-class software business.” Sounds like he really admires the company. If only he didn’t despise them so.
Cynthia Murrell, July 12, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Palantir Receives Seventh Round of Funding
May 24, 2012
Palantir is in the money again, TechCrunch informs us in “Palantir Technologies Nabs $56M in New Funding, SEC Filing Shows.” According to the article, this is the seventh round of venture capital funding for the data management company.
What is the company doing with this money?
That’s a lot of investment. What are these folks inventing? Writer Colleen Taylor doesn’t seem quite sure, noting that TechCrunch has requested more information from the company. She plans to update her post when she gets a response. For now, she writes:
“The company provides high-powered software platforms that let users integrate, visualize, and analyze large quantities of data. Perhaps most importantly, Palantir specifically has targeted its products to two sectors that need to parse large amounts of classified information, and require super solid security: Government and finance. The company counts governmental organizations such as the FBI and financial institutions such as JP Morgan as customers. Palantir has doubled in size each year since it was founded, according to its website.”
With founding members from such promising pools as PayPal alumni and Stanford computer science grads, Palantir launched in 2004. Its two products, Palantir Government and Palantir Finance, work with a wide range of data types. The company is based in Palo Alto, CA, and has offices in Virginia, New York, and London. Despite its growth, Palantir strives to retain its startup attitude and maintain the highest of standards.
But. . . just what are they working on now? Try turning back to the TechCrunch article to see whether Taylor got her answers. Other companies are able to push forward without sucking tens of millions in cash. Check out www.ikanow.com and www.digitalreasoning.com.
Cynthia Murrell, May 24, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
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