Q&A with Cory Haik, Washington Post Executive Producer of Digital News

Cory Haik: We work with vendors who create things that complement our current offerings and bring value to our readers. When we look at vendors, we consider how interesting their product is, how we would use it and how we would go about applying it on our site. Building a live experience around the presidential debates was a priority for us, and by working with BrightContext, we were able to create a turnkey news experience around real-time feedback in a matter of days.
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Not Your Grandmother’s Presidential Debate

From Forbes: The Washington Post deploys a real-time sentiment graph next to its debate feed and you click “Agree” or “Disagree” as you watch the debate. This nifty module, powered by BrightContext, is very much like a traditional dial used in focus groups, but at web scale.

From the screenshot, you can see that close to 225,000 readers were giving thumbs up or down as Biden and Ryan squared off. BrightContext CEO John Funge said the technologies that enable real-time processing of such massive amounts of data (over 100 million communication instances between web clients and servers for a 90-minute debate) either didn’t exist or were nascent in 2008, so the users are getting quite a unique experience.
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The Future of Social Television

From VentureBeat: For all the legitimate buzz about social TV, one mystery remains: why hasn’t it come about? Why are most social TV experiences basically Twitter feeds?
The answer has to do with a modern problem of “real-time big data”—which is to say, instantly consuming, routing, processing and broadcasting large volumes of data.
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Platforms, Disruption, and Television: My Interview With John Funge of BrightContext

From the Huffington Post: If there’s any industry ripe for disruption, it’s television. Cable TV companies have long had near-monopolies in local markets, often angering customers with fees and a general lack of choice. It’s no coincidence that more and more people are looking at ditching their TVs altogether for less expensive and more flexible options. Enter BrightContext, a startup with big plans to disrupt television. By embracing platform thinking, big data, social media, and cloud computing, the company is poised to shake things up.
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BrightContext Secures Investment From CIT

BrightContext Corp., an Arlington-based software development company, secured an investment from Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology. The amount was not disclosed. BrightContext provides a cloud-based platform developers can use to build applications that can receive, process and report results on large volumes of real-time data.
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BrightContext Raises $1.74 Million for Real-Time Data Processing

BrightContext, the Arlington-based startup behind a platform that ultimately could allow millions of Internet-connected viewers to interact with one another and with TV programmers during a show, said on Monday it has raised $1.74 million in a new round of funding, led by Southern Capitol Ventures. Other participants included the founders of comScore, Bobby Yazdani and several angel investors. David Jones, a partner at Southern Capitol, joined the company’s board.
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BrightContext Raises $1.74 Million, Days After Launch

From PandoDaily: Days after launching at last week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Virginia real-time data processing startup BrightContext has announced $1.74 million in funding led by Southern Capitol Ventures with participation from Saba Software founder Bobby Yazdani, the founders of comScore, and other angel investors. Probable candidates for the technology are real-time, multiplayer gaming and connected TV or second-screen experiences.
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BrightContext Launches “Twilio” for Real Time Data Processing and Visualization

From The Next Web: The age of ‘big data‘ is driving demand for ways to make sense of all of that information being generated every day. The trouble is, it’s not exactly child’s play to make a good job of it. BrightContext is today launching a cloud-based platform that aims to make it easy for developers to compute and display real-time data feeds.
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BrightContext Aims To Democratize Real-Time Data Processing And Visualization

From TechCrunch: “Real time.” “Big Data.” I’m hearing those phrases a lot these days, but a startup called BrightContext, which is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, wants to deliver on the promise of those buzzwords for a broad group of developers.
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