Backtype launches

by davidcrow on August 28, 2008

backtype Christopher Golda and Mike Montano have launched BackType. Jevon writes about the BackType launch on StartupNorth. And includes coverage of their previous startup, iPartee and their interview by Austin Hill on StartupNorth. I had the priviledge of meeting Christopher at Mesh 2008 in Toronto, and we’ve shared a number of email conversations about iPartee.

BackType is funded by Y Combinator. It is a search engine for comments on blog posts and other media. The BackType engine forages the web for comments, allowing them to be searchable, trackable and attributable to authors across the web. Comments can be displayed and searched on the meta-data including by author, by topic, by time, etc. It can allow social media businesses like Radian6 and others to gather conversational data and begin associating reputation and impact of authors and their conversations.

I’m hoping the BackType guys are returning to Toronto. Their blog post indicates that “BackType, Inc is a privately-held consumer Internet start-up based in Mountain View, CA”. There are lots of reasons for a startup focused on social media to be based in Silicon Valley (Paul Graham has a few thoughts on moving to a startup hub).

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Tagged as: backtype, Canada, comments, ycombinator

  • Mike Montano
    Thanks for writing about us David, and for your comment Chris.
  • Chris Newton
    Hi David. Indeed, BackType is interesting and we'll be keeping an eye on them, and their progress. Radian6 already has comment crawling technologies in play (specifically for calculating engagement, comment counts and numbers of unique commentors), but BackType does open up some neat new areas. Looking forward to seeing how they progress.



    Chris
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