CrowdCloud LLC, a subsidiary of digital media technology company Adiant, last month released the final version of its CrowdCloud app, which uses a patent pending technology to search social media and provide curated reports for users in the 41 U.S. cities it currently covers. Other Adiant brands include the Adblade Ad Network, OptiServe ad platform, CrowdCloud Mobile Community platform, and Mani Rewards.
The CrowdCloud app, available for free on the iTunes store, is also now available in beta version for the Android. Adiant CEO Ash Nashed said: “This launch is another great milestone in our digital media strategy. Our goal is for CrowdCloud to be the real-time information platform for local venues such as restaurants, merchants, mass transit systems, and other community focal points.”
The CrowdCloud app provides the most important and relevant information about happenings and events in a community by searching millions of social media posts. CrowdCloud lets users share their location with select friends for a defined span of time, share photographs by tagging, and use dynamic mapping to search posts by location.
CrowdCloud can be downloaded for free from the iTunes store. (Image Source: screenshots from CrowdCloud, LLC)
I talked with Josh Detweiler, Director of Operations for CrowdCloud LLC, about what the app does and how it works. I asked Mr. Detweiler about this statement on the press release announcing CrowdCloud’s launch: “CrowdCloud is striking partnerships with leading local media outlets to help partners leverage their unique mobile technology within their markets.”
Mr. Detweiler explained that because CrowdCloud searches through millions of tweets it is able to find out information before it is officially released or reported by major news outlets. As an example of how this can benefit media outlets, he cited an announcement made by the Steelers football team the previous weekend via its Twitter account. Because the football team management chose to report the news first on its Twitter account, CrowdCloud had the news a full 40 minutes before the Steelers officially announced the news, and before the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Mr. Detweiler said this is how CrowdCloud can make partnerships with and add value to media outlets. CrowdCloud has a web widget website which brings in relevant information based on the category of interest in a user’s community, like restaurants, sporting events, transportation, weather, and news. Anyone who goes to this website or one of its partner websites, can select one of the 37 major U.S. cities from the dropdown box, including Austin, Texas, New York, New York, and Hartford CT, and then choose their area of interest from another drop down box, and the box below will bring in the real time streaming, relevant tweets for that category and that city.
To test the CrowdCloud Web Widget, I went to the website, chose Boston, MA then “Transportation”, and sure enough the box filled up with relevant tweets about transportation like this one from the MBTA: “Update: Redline experiencing Residual Delays Due to Earlier Medical Emergency at Charles/MGH..” For those of us who enjoy Twitter but find the mass of information available a tad overwhelming, this kind of filter is a breath of fresh air. An item of interest can also be shared back to one’s Facebook or Twitter accounts or even emailed. I tested these functions and all three worked fine, and the item could be immediately viewed.
However, I noticed that the transportation category for Boston MA on the CrowdCloud Web Widget was only bringing in feeds from one source: the MBTA Twitter account. Similarly, when checking New York, transportation feeds came from only one source: the NYCTSubway scoop Twitter account. And, I checked the transportation category for other markets like Hartford, CT and Miami Florida and there were no feeds at all. Perhaps CrowdCloud is still refining its filtering system.
CrowdCloud Web Widget
I asked Mr. Detweiler if CrowdCloud searches other social media besides Twitter, and he said at the moment, it does not, but he emphasized that CrowdCloud has developed a technology for identifying highly relevant information, and pushing it out to the user: “Our patent pending system searches tens of millions of social media posts daily, filtering out nearly 99% of the junk, automatically identifying the highest quality and most relevant data which is displayed to our users.”
I made reference to a recent review on the CrowdCloud app in PC Magazine that said CrowdCloud was essentially just another social networking website to manage because in order to get posts about the happenings and events in one’s community, the user would have to contribute frequently and have a network of other users who would published reports that would be of interest: “[]CrowdCloud really pushes the capability of finding out where your friends are and what they’re doing. In order to do that, you need to share the app with your friends, and actively create ‘reports’ by posting information about where you are and what you’re doing. That to me sounds like another social networking website I have to manage.”
Mr. Detweiler suggested perhaps the writer for that article was not using the app in one of the 41 covered markets, because CrowdCloud regularly curates information from social media and publishes reports for all 41 cities (full list follows at the end of this article).
Mr. Detweiler said at the moment, about 130 million Americans could see data upon opening the CrowdCloud app. If a user opens the app and does not see any data, they can use the map feature, and scroll to the location they are interested in.
Users can use the Map feature to scroll to a location they are interested in (Image Source: CrowdCloud LLC)
I asked Mr. Detweiler about how CrowdCloud works – how does this app know to push out tweets that are of interest to me based on where I live? He explains that the app “geotags” both the tweets made by me and by those made in my area. I live in Pathum Thani, Thailand, and asked about geotagging here – he explained users who log on from here will be geotagged but the tweets are not. In this case then, for me to get relevant information about happenings and events in my area I would need to develop a network of users in my area over time.
These are the 41 cities in the United States for which CrowdCloud currently publishes more than 10,000 high quality, curated, individual reports every day:
1) Atlanta, Georgia
2) Austin, Texas
3) Baltimore, Maryland
4) Boston, Massachusetts
5) Charlotte, North Carolina
6) Chicago, Illinois
7) Cleveland, Ohio
8) Cupertino, California
9) Dallas, Texas
10) Detroit, Michigan
11) Houston, Texas
12) Denver, Colorado
13) Indianapolis, Indiana
14) Jacksonville, Florida
15) Kansas City, Missouri,
16) Los Angeles, California
17) Las Vegas, Nevada
18) Memphis, Tennessee
19) Miami, Florida
20) Milwaukee, Wisconsin
21) Nashville, Tennessee
22) New Orleans, Louisiana
23) New York, New York
24) Oakland, California
25) Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
26) Orlando, Florida
27) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
28) Phoenix, Arizona
29) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
30) Portland, Oregon
31) Sacramento, California
32) Salt Lake City, Utah
33) San Antonio, Texas
34) San Diego, California
35) San Francisco, California
36) Seattle, Washington
37) Somerville, New Jersey
38) Stamford, Connecticut
39) St. Louis, Missouri
40) Washington DC
41) Rochester, New York
