Silicon Valley meets government with Palantir's collaborative information analysis platform

Part three of the Tap the Collective profiles...

Named for the seeing stone in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir Technologies is a software firm to better integrate, visualize, and analyze the world’s information. One of Business Week's top 50 tech startups this year, Palantir is deployed across the intelligence, defense, and finance communities, helping analysts better connect the dots to solve complex challenges.

The company was founded in 2004 by a team from PayPal, who had pioneered fraud detection techniques, and Stanford. Its pattern recognition tool has helped solve some of the most sophisticated cyber-terrorist operations discovered to date, including GhostNet, the vast electronic spy network which infiltrated at least 1,295 computers, including those of embassies and other government offices. Famously, it compromised the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers. With governments across the world working on the case, it was finally cracked by University of Toronto researchers utilizing Palantir’s software suite.

This collaborative information analysis program is helping distributed analysts piece together details from intelligence sphere -- finances, relationships, travel, etc -- that are inputted from various locations, with difference classification levels and degrees of certainty. The powerful Paypal-inspired algorithms in the background coupled with an immensely intuitive visual network display make this collaborative information analysis platform a potential game changer. Palantir Tech is a great, and rare, example of Silicon Valley cutting edge technology successfully infiltrating the massive government contracting bureaucracy.

I'm thrilled that Shyam Sankar, director of business development at Palantir (and also a brilliant and kind guy) will be sharing his insights on collective intelligence in a data-rich environment with multiple levels of access and privacy, such as the intelligence community at Tap the Collective next week.

Also thank you Palantir Tech for your generous sponsorship of the event!