At the beginning of this year I decided to join a small group of x-Microsoft and media industry folk that had been developing some interesting technology. While they have been developing for the past year and half, this month we formalized Circos.com. 

What is Circos? 

Circos is most commonly thought of as a data visualization technique but a quick Google search and you'll see it isn't a very common word in the English language (<1 million results as of today).  We liked the more specific aspects of the technique e.g. the relationships between two or more set of objects, their alignments, distances, and intra & inter-dependencies. Plus it is short and reasonably easy to remember.  

Circos.com is a consumer oriented Internet technology company based here in Silicon Valley. We have created a social knowledge platform that scans websites visitors' communications, be that in the form of transactions, blog entries, comments, email, or instant messages.  From the context of these communications we create influence scores and affinity profiles, as well as record the personal preferences of each site visitor. Our technology then uses these metrics and our matching algorithm to connect people, offerings, and information to one and other. In geek speak- semantic web technologies meet analytic engines. We have rounded out the platform by adding social networking features and exposing everything as web services.

We will have two consumer oriented websites live this week. The first started as our demonstration/testing web site however during the past 8 weeks prospective partners have requested for us to 'instrumentize' and 'skin' their sites like meferral.  Have a look at http://www.meferral.com/i001962/member.aspx to see my profile page. Feel free to sign-in and add me to your network.  In a month or two we will simplify the user experience, expose a few more web services while hiding some of the more technical meta data, translate into simple and traditional Chinese, and may even keep this as a consumer destination website.  If you know of anybody that is willing to translate the site into Spanish in exchange for praise and public appreciation- let me know. *smiles