The first, PlanetFeedback, was launched by Blackshaw and Nazzaro, now 40, a Harvard MBA and former Procter & Gamble brand manager.
The main product of Planet-Feedback, which was financed by US$31 million in venture capital, was a Web site intended to attract consumer opinions about products and services, and to earn revenue from advertising.
The second company, Intelliseek, which Kadayam helped to found, developed Internet search and information retrieval programs and software.
In 2004, Intelliseek bought PlanetFeedback, combining the market, branding and Web expertise of the Blackshaw-Nazzaro team with Kadayam's computer science background.
Early last year, VNU invested in an Israeli research and development company, which then bought BuzzMetrics. With additional capital from VNU, BuzzMetrics bought Intelliseek and changed the name of the firm to Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
Now that it is generating steady revenue in brand monitoring, BuzzMetrics is considering how to use its media search and monitoring capabilities to expand into other markets such as politics.
Kadayam recently projected on a large white screen the company's most promising new tool, which he calls Floodgate. It is a program that displays in real time what people around the world are saying on thousands of blogs and message boards. The program shows each new message as a blinking green dot that fades to light blue and then vanishes after a few minutes. The program can cluster messages according to general themes, and track keywords and phrases and the full content of what the writer is saying.
Click on any dot and the message appears in complete text in real time. A blogger from England writes about the ritual of putting her baby to bed. One from California celebrates buying a new computer game.
Within a few minutes, the screen begins to look like the night sky, full of blue and green stars, all arranged by subject -- an evolving constellation of the thoughts and desires that form the parameters of the new information universe.
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