Nothing gives me more pleasure than discussing locally grown technology.
One of the brightest stars in Hawaii’s tech firmament is Ikayzo, a Honolulu-based Web and mobile app development company that focuses on financial institutions and enterprise-level firms here, on the mainland and Japan. Its client list sounds like a who’s who, including companies such as Sony, Oracle, Bank of America and Hawaiian Airlines. Its apps run everywhere from New York trading floors to iPhones.
One of Ikayzo’s newest apps, "Bomberman," solves a problem increasingly faced by companies that solicit input from customers online. This is an important part of all product and service marketing campaigns as well as the way nonprofits build their communities. Unfortunately not everyone uses polite language in their postings. This can be a big problem, particularly for family-oriented sites.
"Bomberman" is a Web subscription service that filters postings submitted to identify and remove words you don’t want on your website. This sophisticated service can handle not only the obvious words, but any words that may be inappropriate for the content. It also provides the option of replacing those words with whatever you wish. This is not a service for home users, but for website operators who need to manage their audience-submitted content.
Ikayzo has a spinoff company called Contix (www.contix.com). Ikayzo founder Dan Leuck and Contix CEO/co-founder Ryan Bailey call it a "social media news company" whose mission is to look at breaking stories or events that could affect financial assets, mergers and acquisitions, and the like.
Contix delivers news alerts to institutional traders via desktop and mobile apps that can give them a jump on events ranging from supply chain interruption in China to a leak about an upcoming product release from Apple. These things are often tweeted before they are reported by mainstream media. That’s where Contix comes in.
It examines unstructured text coming from social media sources, sorting through the 500 million-plus tweets that post daily and analyzing the verbiage. It looks at the author as well as content tone, sentiment, word selection, etc., to determine the credibility and veracity of the news. Its software is so sophisticated that it can look at tweets to see whether they are likely to be genuine or planted by someone with an ulterior motive.
"Twitter has had some high-profile cases," says Leuck, "where false market-moving news has been written by hackers. It’s crucial to know if you’re dealing with a credible source."
Contix can analyze both English and Japanese with Chinese and Arabic in the works. It fits into a growing trend of companies that leverage the cloud, "big data" and social media. The company is funded by local investors and has a nine-person staff — all based in Honolulu with the exception of a mainland business development manager.
Leuck said other similar companies analyze social media platforms, but few are focused solely on event surfacing (breaking news) in the financial space.
Contix has a trial underway with a number of leading banks, hedge funds and investment management companies.
This is a local company that well be on the national radar screen soon. I wish it luck.
Mike Meyer, formerly Internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, is now chief information officer at Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.
