The Most Important Social Media Company You’ve Never Heard Of
Damien Patton has created a way to find out what is happening anywhere in the world–instantly. The inside story behind Banjo–and the gold rush sure to follow.
By WILL BOURNE Editor-at-Large, Inc.
April 2015
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201504/will-bourne/banjo-the-gods-eye-view.html
Damien Patton creates his own debris field. Stories swirl around him of smoldering vehicles, broken bones and shredded ligaments, a girlfriend launched “like a missile” into the Mojave Desert from the back of a dirt bike. Patton enjoys these accounts. Maybe a little too much. So it was with a mix of adrenaline and dread on my first day at his Las Vegas offices that I followed him and Stacey Epstein, his brand-new chief marketing officer, out to his truck: a Ford F150 Raptor 4×4, black as David Hasselhoff’s Knight Rider rig, with a SuperCrew cab, a super-juiced engine, massive custom suspension, and special software running the whole operation. “I brought you both a helmet,” he said, reassuring no one, as he drove over the curb and onto the access road to the highway leading out of town.
Half an hour later, we were doing 95 down a rutted dirt road cut into the rolling foothills, sagebrush blurring by, slowing to 50 to power through blind curves, taking out the occasional small tree. Now and then, Epstein, who’s no delicate flower, let out a low warble of alarm. I sat locked in a kind of waking rigor mortis, the windows in my corner of the cab steaming up as I pressed myself into the leather. “Don’t look over the edge!” said Patton, cackling as he slammed around another bend. Don’t worry.
It turns out that Patton is a damn good driver. And he’s not as reckless as he may seem. His biography might come across as a random walk through some highly improbable places, but there is a logic behind his recklessness: He always wanted to build something big.
Now, it appears, he has. This month–this story, in fact–marks the end of stealth mode for Patton’s new enterprise software, Banjo, an “event-detection engine” poised to disrupt industries all over the world. Banjo does something no one has managed to do until now, at least not in such an elegant, intuitive fashion: It imposes order on the vast chaotic cloud of social media and unlocks its power in ways we haven’t yet seen.
Through a Playskool-simple Web interface, Banjo turns a system built around “following” people into one organized by location. It shows only geolocated public posts made from mobile devices; those posts are drawn from what Patton calls a “world feed” he’s created by aggregating more than a dozen major social networks (and counting), from Twitter to Instagram to Russia’s VKontakte to China’s Weibo. So instead of letting your social stream simply wash over you, possibly filtered by a clunky grab bag of hashtags and keywords, you can work from the ground up, anywhere on earth. Interested in the public tweets coming out of Goldman Sachs’s headquarters in lower Manhattan? There’s hedge funder @norman_g sounding off about natural-gas prices. Want to hear what’s happening on Weibo around the Foxconn factory in Shenzen? Or see the many subspecies of human getting Instagrammed at this month’s Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, California? Plug in the location (plus keywords, if you want), and the map at the center of Banjo’s screen resizes to the relevant scale, with all of the public posts in that area appearing as pins on the map and as cards, complete with text, photos, and video, alongside it. All this in real time.
Patton, who designed the technology and is the company’s de facto CTO as well as CEO, thinks of Banjo not as a simple consumer product but as a platform, an underlying intelligence that others will come along and tap into, build on. And he’s right that the implications of Banjo’s technology are almost incalculable for businesses as diverse as financial services, marketing, insurance, news and media, public health, and beyond. Because it combines location, photo classification, analytics, and the ability to “rewind” each social media network in time–so you can see what happened just before, say, an earthquake struck–Banjo points the way not only to a transformation in how we consume social media but also to a huge escalation of its utility and value.
“Instead of ‘How do we mine social media?’ Banjo looks at it from the mobile phone, which is out in the real world,” says Noam Bardin, co-founder and former CEO of Waze, who’s been working at Google since the search giant bought his traffic app company for $966 million last year. “They’ve asked the question very differently: ‘How can we know what’s going on in a specific place at a specific time?’ They’re able to mine social media in real time.”
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