Taming the torrent of Internet data

With its huge and ever-expanding base of content and services, the Internet can be a boon for businesses and consumers alike. At the same time, all that data makes it a challenge to manage.
Two local companies are among the many out there developing new tools to help people get a handle on their digital-age information flows.
BatchBlue Software, co-founded in Barrington in 2006 and now based in Providence, has developed a product called BatchBook for businesses to manage their relationships with customers.
Since its debut, BatchBook’s features have grown far beyond simply tracking phone numbers, e-mail addresses and invoices. The software now lets companies create a client page that also can track a client’s activities on social-media networks, like Twitter and Flickr, as well as blogs and any other content with an RSS feed. In addition, BatchBlue recently made it possible to sync BatchBook with a number of popular services from other companies: Gmail, MailChimp, FreshBooks and Shoeboxed.
Pamela O’Hara, BatchBlue’s co-founder and president, said one of the challenges the company sought to address when it started out was “the siloing of information” across a bunch of different programs that had no ability to talk to each other or share relevant details – and the answer they came up with was sorting it all by client through BatchBook.
“The idea was to really help people sort of take advantage of the information they’ve already got there, but just pull it into one place so they could really understand these relationships better,” O’Hara said.
“It’s a lot of the information the sole proprietors are carrying around in their heads,” she continued. “He knows who his biggest customer is and who his most important supplier is. But as he grows a little bit – hires three, four, five, 10 more people – can he rely on [them] to always know, this is my biggest customer – drop everything when he calls?”
The rapid growth of social media led BatchBlue in February to launch a new version of the software called BatchBook for Marketing, with additional features that can track clients’ mentions on the Web.
O’Hara said she sees her firm as playing a natural and necessary role as the Web matures. “I think people are a little bit overwhelmed by some of the new tools,” she said. “Should I be on Facebook or LinkedIn or on Twitter or on the American Express forum for small business or an entrepreneurship magazine? There are millions [of outlets] and they keep coming out.” Another inventive idea is being worked on at the Providence-based startup Public Display, also founded in 2006, which is developing a product called FuseCal. The firm has received two rounds of seed funding from the quasi-public Slater Technology Fund.
FuseCal takes calendars posted on Web sites – say, the game schedule on RedSox.com or the list of upcoming marching band performances on a high school site – and extracts that information to create a file, which then can be imported into popular calendar programs like Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal, Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar. When the original calendar is updated, FuseCal also updates it wherever it has been imported.
Bill O’Farrell, Public Display’s founder and CEO, envisions FuseCal becoming a standard format for publishing and subscribing to calendars, similar to the role that RSS feeds play for text content – in fact, he refers to the FuseCal files as “event feeds.” Either the calendar’s creator or someone reading it can create an event feed.
O’Farrell used an example from his own life: “I have four boys. They go to two different schools, and they each play, like, two sports a season – which I know is ridiculous – and I have at least six [event] feeds that I use [to keep track of their schedules]. And it is fabulous.”
The idea could be a lucrative one, too. In 2007, Google paid $100 million to acquire Feedburner, the leading RSS management company. “We would like to be the Feedburner of event feeds,” O’Farrell said.
At the same time, he acknowledged that smoothing the information-extraction process has posed a technical challenge – though not an insurmountable one – and with venture capital drying up, he said the company is looking for strategic partners.
But O’Farrell has no doubts about Fusecal’s usefulness. “There’s no question that the terabytes, the enormous amounts of information that are out there, are growing,” he said. “It’s going to get bigger and more complex and more interwoven into all of our lives. So I think the need for companies and technologies to help us manage it is definitely there, and it’s expanding.” &#8226