How Crimson Hexagon Translates the Blogosphere’s Babel Into Wisdom | Xconomy
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File this under “Only in Cambridge.” Before my interview last week with the founders of Crimson Hexagon, a startup using statistical methods to comb the blogosphere for the latest opinion on brand-name products, I had assumed that the company’s name came from its affiliation with Harvard, where its technical founder, Gary King, is a professor of government. Nope—turns out it’s an allusion to a single line in a short story in Spanish by the late avant-garde Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.The “Hexágono Carmesí” in Borges’ 1941 story “La Biblioteca de Babel” (”The Library of Babel”) is the hidden central chamber in an infinite library; it’s the room containing the single magical book that serves as a perfect compendium and guide to all the other books. The room is supposed to be a metaphor for the company’s search algorithm, which is magical in its own way. As King explains it, it’s able to gather precise summaries of the blogosphere’s sentiment on given products or personalities, but without actually having to understand or accurately classify each mention of said entities.
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