CoolPeople tells you who the cool people are – focused on your specific business needs. For example, it finds:
With a user interface as simple as a Google-like search box you can enter a person’s name – then CoolPeople will discover the social network of the person, combining all the digital traces of the person, be it in social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but also all the mentions of the person anywhere on the Web.
Alternatively, you can search for the key people on a certain topic, e.g. entering “entrepreneur of the year” will find the key entrepreneurs of the year. Or a CoolPeople search for “nanotechnology” will find the key researchers and entrepreneurs in this field.
System Requirements:
CoolPeople runs in the Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla Firefox 2+, or Safari Browser, with Java and Adobe Flash enabled. The results can be exported to Excel, PDF, and MySQL.
CoolPeople returns a social network graph, with the key people in the center, as well as the listings of the people found in the query. For example, the picture below illustrates the most important people on "one laptop per child", a project started by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab. Lou Jepsen is the CTO of the project. CoolPeople includes the "MVP rank" (MVP stands for "Most Valuable Person"), which ranks people by their social network position as well as the MVP rank of their closest friends.
CoolPeople also shows you a local view of each person, listing the friends it found for a person, the person’s attributes, and information collected from its own database, Wikipedia, and the Web. CoolPeople even finds the related concepts of your search topic, be it the attributes of a person, or the concept map of a topic. You can then use these concepts to further refine your CoolPeople search. The picture below shows the people linked to Nicholas Negroponte, as well as the terms related to "one laptop per child".