ACEIZE Tracking the current state of Science and Technology

Veratect Corp. and iJet Intelligent Risk Systems are two companies that crawl the internet. They collect posted data... the giant blur of daily data ... the incomprehensibly huge collection of mental diarrhea that we have come to know as the internet. Both Veratect and iJet seek to pull a meaningful signal from the noise. Despite the AP News hype about this technological marvel, it all seems little more than a bunch of people reading news clippings.

Oddly enough both companies focus on global disease outbreak. iJet also has hands in detecting civil unrest and telecommunications outages.

Apparently, there are a lot of online sites that seek to divine wisdom about coming disease outbreaks. I'm going to quote AP News here:

ProMed, a system designed by the Federation of American Scientists, lets human, animal and plant specialists share infectious disease information. A site called HealthMap compiles data from ProMed, the CDC, the World Health Organization and other sources. A volunteer-built site called FluWiki has tracked bird flu since 2005, and last year Google Inc. (GOOG) launched Flu Trends, which gauges U.S. flu conditions based on increases in flu-themed Web searches.

Apparently, the major clue for Varatect was indecision in the Mexican media about whether a pig farm or a fly was to blame for an outbreak of atypical pneumonia. This in itself is not particularly amazing. It is a feat accomplished by simple news alerts and rss feeds. Combine that lack-luster piece of news scrubbing with the fact that Veratect has 30 multi-lingual analysts on their staff. AND their staff is focusing on detecting early warning signs of disease outbreak. It looks to me like dedicated newsies, not smart machines or novel business practices were able to spot a disease outbreak a couple of days before the CDC.