An Introduction to Recorded Future: An ability to leverage the predictive power of the web

What do you think of when you hear of a company named Recorded Future? My first thought when hearing that cool name is they must have a great capability. Their name invokes a powerful metaphor. What if you could send a video camera into the future, record some things there, and then bring that camera back to today? How could that inform your decisions? As a thought experiment we can clearly say this would be a powerful capability.

Well, we have long known it pays off to study the future. Since we can’t violate the laws of physics or bend the space-time continuum in those ways, analysts seek to predict what will occur by studying the past and building models and extrapolating trends. We do quite a bit of that at CTOvision.com, with a focus on the future of technology. But Recorded Future is approaching this field in a totally new way. They use the predictive power of the web to uncover what people know about the future. They continually scan high-quality news publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade journals, government websites, financial databases and other sources of information. They analyze the content of these sources and identify references to entities and events. They extract publication dates and any temporal expressions in the text. They conduct other assessments on items like the tone of the language. Then they organize and present the results in advanced visualizations ready for human assessment.

We have used Recorded Future in researching our reports and are now planning a deeper dive into their capability. We will be issuing more reports both on their capability and on predictions we believe will be relevant to you our audience.

For more on this very interesting capability see the video below: