State is a semantic web platform created by

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

, UK-based Equal Media Ltd. Announced in 2013, and launched in 2014, State aims to build a global opinion network using

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

, databases and

sentiment analysis Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjec ...

. It seeks to "democratiz online conversations" by giving equal representation of each person's opinion. As of 2020, the site is inactive.

History

Equal Media was founded by Jawbone founder

Alex Asseily Alexander Asseily is a British/Lebanese technology entrepreneur and investor, and co-founder of consumer electronics company Jawbone. He was CEO of the company until 2007, Executive Chairman until 2010 and Non-Executive Chairman until January 201 ...

and his brother Mark Asseily, who raised $14 million in seed financing in May 2012 from funders such as

Atomico Atomico is a European Venture Capital firm headquartered in London, with offices in Paris, and Stockholm. Its founder and CEO is Niklas Zennström, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Skype and Kazaa. History and investments It has invested ...

. State launched in closed

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whi ...

in May 2013 with around 10,000 users and at

TechCrunch Disrupt TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately $ ...

in September 2013 it launched an invite-only

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

release. When State launched its mobile app and the platform to the public in February 2014, it had about 30 employees, most of whom work at headquarters in

. It also has an office in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

. Its advisors include

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profes ...

Deepak Chopra Deepak Chopra (; ; born October 22, 1946) is an Indian-American author and alternative medicine advocate. A prominent figure in the New Age movement, his books and videos have made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternativ ...

, Troy Carter,

Eli Pariser Eli Pariser (born December 17, 1980) is an author, activist, and entrepreneur. He has stated that his focus is "how to make technology and media serve democracy". He became executive director of MoveOn.org in 2004, where he helped pioneer the pr ...

, Andrew Paulson, and

Nigel Shadbolt Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt (born 9 April 1956) is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is Chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded ...

Features

State has a large dictionary of "headlines", or structured expressions organized semantically. This allows users to opine more specifically, as Asseily explained: "The world isn’t as thumbs-up/thumbs-down as we may have imagined. They are adding texture to their opinions." Furthermore, users can “tune”—i.e., follow— in to specific topics such as politics or technology, and can also import friends from

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...

Google Plus Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google p ...

, and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

. Because opinions are computer-readable, they can automatically be summarized and cross-referenced.

Re/code ''Recode'' (formerly ''Re/code'') is a technology news website that focused on the business of Silicon Valley. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher founded it in January 2014, after they left Dow Jones and the similar website they had previously ...

writer Liz Gannes described it as an " interest graph" startup.

Business model

Asseily envisions State "eventually becom nga research-on-demand service" with a "database that brands can access". For example, "insights reports" based on aggregated opinions could "aim to capture sentiment about a concept, brand, or event, which are currently free for State users". Examples of such insights include the following. State users generally viewed "

as a whole" negatively while opinions of the company's new Paper app were overwhelmingly positive. Regarding the surveillance disclosures by

Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and su ...

, some people held conflicted opinions towards Edward Snowden and the Prism programme. As Asseily explained, "In general terms, some people who thought Snowden was a villain, also thought Prism was bad and likewise, some thought Snowden was a hero but that Prism was a good thing".

References

{{reflist Semantic Web companies Technology companies based in London Internet properties established in 2013 Technology companies established in 2013 British social networking websites