My first thought at hearing earlier this week about Lithium Technology’s acquisition of Keibi Technologies was “Why?” Admittedly, Keibi hasn’t been much on my radar, but its tag line as “The Leader in Moderation Solutions for User Generated Content” caused one of my brows to wrinkle, as Lithium already provides some pretty strong moderation-based service offerings. Seeing that Keibi also provides analytic services compounded my initial confusion, as Lithium has been beefing up the analytics side of its community solution, most recently through its Lithium Insights offering and Community Health Index. What could Keibi bring that enhances this mix?
Some digging brought a little clarity, which is centered on a key word: automation.
Keibi’s Java-based SaaS platform is built to scan and classify massive data sets of user-generated content (UGC). Not only text, but video clips, photographs and pictures, and animation files, as well. Members of online communities and social networking services are creating staggering volumes of UGC—YouTube claims hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded daily to its system—and social media-aware companies continue laying the groundwork for their customers to create more. But how can companies, which are rightly concerned about (1) the potential negative impact on their brands due to inappropriate UGC, and (2) the gray areas surrounding intellectual property of UGC, reduce their exposure to risk while swamped with (and encouraging more of) content from customers?
Lithium’s pre-existing moderation services have focused on the human touch. Its moderators police the communities they’re responsible for, vet content, engage community members, and handle issues that arise. These tasks are done on a manual case-by-base basis. But how many forum posts can one person read in a day? How many photos can one person scan? Keibi’s system reportedly processes over two million images a day for the Bebo social networking service. Combining human moderators with a high-powered, automated content-processing system makes for a pretty powerful risk-mitigation service.
But beyond the protect-the-brand aspect, Keibi’s Moderation Suite can classify and analyze the data it looks at. There’s some strong potential here for augmenting Lithium’s Insight service by being able to parse all content for important, relevant information, such as ideas and sentiment. (The applicable buzzword here is content “discovery.”) This will be down-the-road stuff for Lithium, once the basics of the Keibi system are integrated into its product and service offerings.
Keibi is Lithium’s first acquisition, so it hasn’t yet been through this type of corporate assimilation. But the Keibi team isn’t especially large—it had about 25 employees at its peak, and Lithium is likely not bringing everyone on board—and Lithium does have a good track record of integrating new hires. The company has a good mix at all levels of longstanding employees and relative recent additions, so taking on members of the Keibi team shouldn’t be especially disruptive.
Having seen Lithium’s aggressive product roadmap through 2011, I don’t envy the ever-increasing workload of Lithium’s development team. But, at a time when most online community and social media vendors are hunkering down, Lithium continues to staff up, expand its product and service offerings, and make a compelling case as a one-stop shop for social media and customer community needs.
While not a blockbuster announcement, Lithium’s first acquisition looks like a smart move. Brow unwrinkled.
Interesting story line
Posted by: IT Service | 01/19/2010 at 03:26 PM