How do all the companies on the Internet fit together? Where is the center? What is on the outside and moving in?
Menlo Park, Ca. startup EverString has put the whole thing on a map, using artificial intelligence technology to perform semantic analysis on 900 million news sentences and counting.
The company was started last September by ex-NASA engineer Patrick Martinchek and former investment banker Vincent Yang, who are both students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Their team includes a neural network brain scientist, NASA scientists, mathematicians, growth equity investors, event trading experts, and a professional gambler, many of them also MBA students at Stanford.
Other than its technology galaxy product, EverString also has a smart news reader product. If you're interested in enterprise companies and big data, you can search through news articles that mention big data events and conferences, or you could search only for the companies that had recent product launches or just raised funding.
EverString's services are marketed to venture capitalists, financial traders, and other business professionals. The firm is already providing custom solutions for a handful of customers, though it's not disclosing how much it charges.
EverString is currently part of Microsoft Ventures Accelerator program in Beijing. Part of the team is in China and others are in Mountain View, Calif. It has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Sequoia Capital, IDG Ventures and Farallon Capital.
Martinchek showed us some of the maps. Here's the Technology Galaxy:
Each dot represents a company, with larger dots representing more influential companies.
Each color represents a different industry, with different shades showing variation in that industry. Martinchek confirmed that pink represents cloud-based companies; orange is search-related; magenta shows enterprise; green relates to social networking.
The companies near the edge of the galaxy are typically newer. The larger, more established industries cluster toward the center of the galaxy. The lines show connections between companies and industries.
We'd show the maps in more detail if we could, but that's proprietary information for EverString.
Below is the same map more clearly grouped by industry. Google is the largest not, indicating its dominant influence. EverString customers, however, are more interested in the smaller circles and clusters on the edge, showing companies and industries that are just emerging. The online education industry, for instance, is growing in influence, with hot companies like Coursera, Udemy, and Udacity.
Let's zoom in on the "Social network" category. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Twitter reign supreme here. Even though MySpace's heyday is long gone, it's actually still relevant and influential in the industry. 
The travel and rental industry appears toward the edge of the galaxy, meaning that it's not nearly as influential as something like social networking. Still, we see some familiar companies like HomeAway and Airbnb with a significant influence in the growing industry.
So now that you've seen what the Internet galaxy looks like now, here's a view of what the Internet looked like back in 1984. Not much going on then.
In 1998 & 1999, Google was founded and a few more tech companies entered the mix.
As new industries and companies emerge, the technology galaxy will continue to grow and reveal new, untapped markets.
In the near future, EverString will allow its customers to overlay the galaxy with real-time information from Twitter. That real-time Twitter functionality will allow customers to understand which companies are generating conversation at any given moment.
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