Fluidinfo

Today we are incredibly proud to announce a major new release of Fluidinfo.

Our vision is that information should be easy to create, find and use. This led us to develop our core technology: an openly writable database for storing and organizing metadata. Our database is useful for developers looking to glue together data from multiple sources, be it from the web or in-house systems. Information stored in context is more valuable. By aggregating information in one place, writing new visualizations, generating reports or performing analytics across multiple sources of data becomes trivial.

Our new user interface provides these same benefits to users of the social web. We take the most useful pieces of data from your social network- the web links and hashtags that people use – and attach activity to them from around the web. To start with, we’ve focused on content from Twitter, but you’ll see data from other services very soon.

URLs and hashtags become places where conversations can occur, as shown in the image on the right for the hashtag #euro. We save you the pain of repeatedly scanning multiple activity streams, a dashboard shows what’s hot in your social graph, or across Fluidinfo as a whole. Contribute directly, or Tweet knowing that whatever hashtag or URL you mention will find its way into Fluidinfo.

This act of gluing different sets of data together to detect signals, trends and relevant activity, also forms the basis for our new set of enterprise products. The problem that individuals face in trying to stitch together information from multiple sources to see what’s going, is magnified in any organization dealing with multiple databases. For most organizations, managing the sprawl of different data platforms is the biggest barrier to turning data into a useful asset for employees or customers.

Our first new product, Fluidinfo Enterprise helps companies take the first steps in taming their data. It bundles our new user interface with the openly writable database and enterprise grade API features to allow organizations to view and manage their data wherever it may be stored.

By co-locating metadata from existing platforms, Fluidinfo Enterprise eliminates the need to copy or move large chunks of data around, instead providing a single index for all data. This can include data that is not hosted on-site, whether it be on social networks, web pages, or 3rd party cloud services. This allows employees, partners and customers to interact with the data, via the API or UI. We believe this freedom and flexibility can turn a company into an open-data business.

FluidSense, our second product, is a white-label browser extension for Firefox, Safari and Chrome that takes this ability to expose useful data even further. It lets a company give end-users a way to engage with their unified content as they browse the web. A browser sidebar alerts users to contextually relevant company content and comments from their social network.

We are now living in the age of data. We want individuals and organizations to be able to find, share and use the data that matters most to them. Whether you are a web user interested in links and hashtags, a publisher whose core data is books, or a news company whose critical content is their articles, our new interface and products help you establish and track these important data types and allow users to start collaborating around them.

You can learn more about our new products and explore our new user interface at http://www.fluidinfo.com. We’d love to hear from you at info@fluidinfo.com if you are keen to become an open-data business.