BC Business
BCBusiness Innovators 2012, Summify | BCBusinessBack: 2012 BCBusiness Guide to Innovation
Congratulations to Summify, #7 in 2012's Most Innovative Companies in B.C. Six years ago, Twitter was a zygote in the fertile minds of founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Today it has half a billion users and is arguably the best-known social media platform, after Facebook. So when Twitter absorbed Vancouver tech startup Context Media Technologies Inc. in January, snapping up Context’s aggregator software Summify in the deal, our panellist Brent Holliday saw it as a real coup – for Twitter.
Six years ago, Twitter was a zygote in the fertile minds of founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Today it has half a billion users and is arguably the best-known social media platform, after Facebook. So when Twitter absorbed Vancouver tech startup Context Media Technologies Inc. in January, snapping up Context’s aggregator software Summify in the deal, our panellist Brent Holliday saw it as a real coup – for Twitter.
Summify was launched just over a year ago by co-founders Mircea Pașoi and Cristian Strat, Romanian self-proclaimed “hacker entrepreneurs” who moved to Vancouver two years ago and claim to have turned down jobs at such giants as Google and Facebook to toil among the talent at former incubator Bootup Labs.
Aggregator algorithms have been seen before, but Pașoi and Strat’s innovation lay in considering a user’s interests across social media platforms and other information sources, sifting through incoming content and presenting the user with only what it perceives will be of real value. For every story that makes it into the summary, Summify rejects 150 others that would have been a waste of time.
Holliday, an angel investor in Summify, says it was Twitter that really scored in this buy-versus-build deal. “It makes it easy to invest when [Pașoi and Strat] are smarter than anybody you can put in front of them,” he says.
Or, to sum it up in 140 characters: others may be trying to curate the social media data floating around out there, but Summify did it first and best, so Twitter grabbed them.