In an
open-plan office in Durham, N.C., that feels part ad agency and part rec room,
a 31-year-old EvoApp executive named Pritam Das sits rummaging through all the
Twitter posts that have mentioned Mitt Romney in the previous 24 hours, sifting
and sorting by various keywords and metrics.
The
day before, a senior Romney advisor had likened the campaign's transition from
the primary fight to the general election to shaking an Etch A Sketch. With the
stroke of a key, Das reveals that of the tweets mentioning Romney, the word
"Etch" ranked third among tags, behind only the candidate's first and
last name. More tellingly, perhaps, Das was able to gauge that many of those
judging the impact on Romney's campaign most harshly had the greatest influence
in the Twittersphere--not just the most followers, but followers who in turn
have influence of their own.
"These
guys have come up with a way to understand and interpret unstructured data in
real time," says EvoApp CEO Kip Frey of founders Joe Davy and Alexey
Melnichenko, 23-year-olds who met at a specialty math-and-science high school
and abandoned college careers to start the company. "Politics is only one
of its uses, but it's an important one. It shows that we can solve difficult
problems." EvoApp, which has landed $2.9 million in angel investment,
expects to gross nearly $1 million in 2012, its first year in business.
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