Kyle
Twitter is a treasure trove of content. We actually source quite a bit of startup news and new startups from everywhere else using Twitter. The problem is, until now there was no great way to do a contextual search. You can use the Twitter search tool built into Twitter and most of the good third party Twitter apps, but they fall short when looking for context. For example, a search for accelerator brings up tweets about car parts and incubator talks about babies.
The team behind Berlin startup Tame have been tirelessly working on solving that problem. They want to make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on Twitter. That can be tough when at peak loads there can be 300,000 tweets per minute.
The company has launched their product today at tame.it. We got a chance to talk with them, check out the interview below.
What does your startup do?
Tame is the first context search engine for Twitter delivering relevant content around a specific topic in real-time. Aimed at journalists, PRs, marketers and politicians, Tame analyses content from Twitter, sifting through the huge amounts of noise to find exactly what is relevant.
Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds?
Frederik Fischer is founder and CEO of Tame. Fischer has five years of professional experience as a staff and freelance journalist for TV, radio, online and print.
Arno Dirlam is founder and CTO of Tame. The developer guy!
Torsten Müller is founder and CMO of Tame. He has three years professional experience as freelance journalist for online and print including the German Press Agency dpa, stern.de, Zeit Online.
Where are you based?
Berlin, Germany
What’s the startup scene like where you are based?
Berlin is a perfect place to start a business. It may be over-hyped, but we find that the scene is indeed very active, people help out each other a lot and are very open. Since the city is attractive for living, many people from Europe or beyond flock into it which helps creating international teams with a global approach from the start, which we think is important. We came to Berlin with not much more than an idea and thanks to the Humboldt University’s spin-off team and many others we could get Tame off the ground in a bit more than a year.
What problem do you solve?
Tame aims to address information overload on Twitter. Nearly every user follows more people than they can manage. At peak times, more than 300,000 tweets are sent out per minute, hence people miss a lot of important content. Professionals working with social media need to identify relevant topics, users and content quickly. A solution to ‘Tame’ the social web is needed.
Why now?
In 2011, Google stopped indexing Twitter and has since left a gap in filtering real-time information. Twitter has continued to grow and has a global impact as not only an alternative, but often primary news source (think of Arab spring). Our mission is to tame the wealth of real-time information in social networks so as to empower people to make sense of the world.
What are some of the milestones your startup has already reached?
We got an initial € 94k ($125,725) funding from the German Federal Ministry of Technology and Economics (BWMi) in 2012
Tame has secured € 250k ($334,375) from a crowd-investing campaign with Companisto
A product already used by thousands of journalists and PRs, first paying customers and first cooperations with outlets
We won a spot in the Germany Silicon Valley Accelerator (also by BMWi) and will be working from San Francisco from October on for at least 3 months.
What are your next milestones?
rolling out more features for Tame including a refinement of our Algorithm that will improve the results by ie filtering out spam on Twitter
starting our global launch by entering the US market from October onward
looking in to the possibility of including more real-time information services
Where can people find out more? Any social media links you want to share?
People can find out everything they need at tame.it. We’re also on Twitter – https://twitter.com/tame_it – and Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/tameapp.
