RAMPing up metadata

Startups & Venture Capital

Content optimization company RAMPs up

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By Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Friday, October 26, 2012

W. Marc Bernsau

Tom Wilde is CEO of RAMP, which uses metadata — data about data — to make digital content more useful and searchable. 

Digital text, audio and video content can be likened to a tree falling in the woods: If you have content, but no one sees it, does it really exist?
This is the premise that Boston-based RAMP is based on; as a content optimization company, its goal is to create, manage and ultimately wrangle rich metadata — that is, data about data — helping make digital content more useful and searchable.
Metadata has become much more complex, and ripe for exploitation, than in the past, said RAMP CEO Tom Wilde. “The more data we process every day, the smarter we get,” he said.
Launched in 2006, the company’s automated, cloud-based platform is built on a core technology developed at BBN Technologies in Cambridge that incorporates speech recognition and natural language processing. The 30-employee company now holds more than 20 patents, and has been backed by $35.45 million in venture capital — most recently, $15 million in a Series C round in September. Investors include Fairhaven Capital, Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Comcast Ventures, StarVest Partners and Hearst Interactive Media.
One of the company’s unique abilities is to create time-coded metadata in audio and video.
Although there are untold hours of online audio and video — and they’re the fastest-growing types of Web content, Wilde noted — they are, at the same time, “tricky,” “opaque,” and “lumpy.”
But RAMP has honed its ability to organize, index and search within video and audio, navigate with scenes and tags, and associate related content, essentially “taking it to this next level,” Wilde said.
As a result, RAMP customers have seen engagement rates go up anywhere between 70 and 300 percent, he said.
Entercom Communications Corp., for one — which operates WEEI, WAAF and WRKO locally, as well as more than 100 other stations across the country — has seen its number of referral visits through Google “skyrocket,” according to Tim Murphy, vice president of digital strategy and enterprise platforms.
On a given day, a search for “Red Sox” under Google News will yield an audio piece from WEEI high up in results, he said. RAMP’s technology is “fairly brilliant,” Murphy said.
Up to this point, audio has been behind the curve, he said, but because podcasts and audio are important in terms of news, there’s “no reason (they) shouldn’t be competing as vociferously.”
In June, the company moved from Woburn to Fort Point in Boston to get closer to the city’s talent pool, Wilde said. RAMP has reached profitability this year, he said, and its longer-term goals include expanding internationally.

Original story link here.