In the promotional materials I see the alerts they have spotted, but what about the false positives, that is the big question.
Of course, most of financial advice/alerts/tips/et al industry is similarly wishy washy, that is everyone touts their successes and discounts their misses.
Let's not even go into larger scale economic forecasts, those have similar problems. An economist can build a whole career of a single successful forecast.
So Dataminr should feel right at home in this niche.
It looks like Dataminr has had a different experience than Meerkat when building businesses off access to others' APIs.
I also think this is interesting in that an ecosystem company, Dataminr, has raised just as much money as the company that created the ecosystem (Twitter). Of course, this is a bit of stretch in that Dataminr is more than just interpreting tweets.
Dataminr also uses the Twitter API very differently from Meerkat.
I believe when you depend on another company's API, you have to think very hard about what value you provide them, either monetarily or otherwise. If you're not providing value, what incentive do they have to keep providing you with access?
That's pretty sensible rule of thumb, but even safer one would be not build any products around other service's API unless you are explicitly paying them money for access.
Of course, most of financial advice/alerts/tips/et al industry is similarly wishy washy, that is everyone touts their successes and discounts their misses.
Let's not even go into larger scale economic forecasts, those have similar problems. An economist can build a whole career of a single successful forecast.
So Dataminr should feel right at home in this niche.