The 2009 hostage rescue by US Navy SEALs off the coast of Somalia made the media focus attention on the growing threat of piracy to international shipping in the Horn of Africa. Palantir have applied their advanced analysis capabilities to data published by the International Maritime Bureau Piracy Reporting Centre, as well as open source news reports. The analysts at Palantir then focused on geo-temporal patterns of attacks, as well as the financing network of the Central Regional Coast Guard, a federation of Somali pirates to create an amazing analysis of the events.
The second video on the page, about the Gulf of Aden, shows the dramatic increase in piracy in the area beginning in 2008 and continuing to the present. With Palantir’s advanced visualization capabilities, a couple of interesting patterns emerge:
- Before the fall of 2008, piracy events were somewhat scattered in the eastern end of the Gulf.
- Beginning in August 2008, there is a surge of attacks that occur in a band about 60 km off the Yemeni coast.
- In mid-February 2009, a new band begins to appear another 50 km further out into the Gulf.
It’s possible that shipping companies shifted the shipping lane in response to the surge in piracy along the original route.
What are your thoughts of this types of analysis of monumental proportion? How will governments (Palantir’s largest market segment) use Palantir’s tools for the better good?
It’s out there, free of charge just waiting to be (ab)used. Competitor Intelligence has been readily available to us at no cost across various social networks. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Plaxo just to name a few, have been transmitting user generated content for quite some time now. What happens to this content when users do not make use of any of the available privacy settings? Correct, it becomes available to the world.
Over the past few months it has become very clear that many companies are taking a pro-active roll in jumping on the social media bandwagon. Corporate twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages and LinkedIN groups. Companies are anxiously trying to claim there territory on the predominant social networks. Some with succes, some with absolute failures. But in the rush, some companies have left ‘strategy’ out in the cold
Is nothing better than something?
Be proud, share your endevours! Employees have a voice too… don’t they? Be careful when sharing information about meetings/dealsavoid names/dates/places Changing Jobs Monitor Privacy
Are corporate policies the way to go?
The social showoff, doing it all on purpose
