State is a
semantic web platform created by
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
,
UK-based Equal Media Ltd. Announced in 2013, and launched in 2014, State aims to build a global opinion network using
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...
, databases and
sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjec ...
.
It seeks to "democratiz
online conversations" by giving equal representation of each person's opinion.
As of 2020, the site is inactive.
History
Equal Media was founded by Jawbone founder
Alex Asseily and his brother Mark Asseily, who raised $14 million in
seed financing in May 2012
from funders such as
Atomico.
[
State launched in closed ]alpha
Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...
in May 2013 with around 10,000 users and at TechCrunch Disrupt
TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately $ ...
in September 2013 it launched an invite-only beta
Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...
release. When State launched its mobile app and the platform to the public in February 2014, it had about 30 employees,[ most of whom work at headquarters in ]London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
. It also has an office in San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
.
Its advisors include Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profes ...
, Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra (; ; born October 22, 1946) is an Indian-American author and alternative medicine advocate. A prominent figure in the New Age movement, his books and videos have made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternati ...
, Troy Carter, Eli Pariser
Eli Pariser (born December 17, 1980) is an author, activist, and entrepreneur. He has stated that his focus is "how to make technology and media serve democracy". He became executive director of MoveOn.org in 2004, where he helped pioneer the pra ...
, Andrew Paulson
Andrew Meredith Paulson (November 13, 1958 – July 18, 2017) was an American entrepreneur. Born in Champaign, Illinois, he was the son of noted American professor Ronald Paulson.
During his early years he worked with oncology and neurophysiology ...
, and Nigel Shadbolt
Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt (born 9 April 1956) is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is Chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded ...
.
Features
State has a large dictionary of "headlines", or structured expressions organized semantically. This allows users to opine more specifically, as Asseily explained: "The world isn’t as thumbs-up/thumbs-down as we may have imagined. They are adding texture to their opinions."[ Furthermore, users can “tune”—i.e., follow— in to specific topics such as politics or technology, and can also import friends from ]Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
, Google Plus
Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google ...
, and Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
. Because opinions are computer-readable, they can automatically be summarized and cross-referenced.
Re/code
''Recode'' (formerly ''Re/code'') is a technology news website that focused on the business of Silicon Valley. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher founded it in January 2014, after they left Dow Jones and the similar website they had previously c ...
writer Liz Gannes described it as an " interest graph" startup.[
]
Business model
Asseily envisions State "eventually becom nga research-on-demand service" with a "database that brands can access". For example, "insights reports" based on aggregated opinions could "aim to capture sentiment about a concept, brand, or event, which are currently free for State users".
Examples of such insights include the following. State users generally viewed "Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
as a whole" negatively while opinions of the company's new Paper app were overwhelmingly positive.[ Regarding the surveillance disclosures by ]Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and su ...
, some people held conflicted opinions towards Edward Snowden and the Prism programme. As Asseily explained, "In general terms, some people who thought Snowden was a villain, also thought Prism was bad and likewise, some thought Snowden was a hero but that Prism was a good thing".
References
{{reflist
Semantic Web companies
Technology companies based in London
Internet properties established in 2013
Technology companies established in 2013
British social networking websites