Recorded Future, a Boston-based firm was founded in March 2009, markets what it calls a “proprietary temporal and predictive analytics machine: that sifts through large quantities of information to help predict future events. The company boasts proprietary software that can sift through 300,000 documents an hour, such as those gathered from news sites, blogs and other social media, to look for patterns, such as shifts in the stock market, public demonstrations, or even cyber attacks. The company says its technology has possible applications for the intelligence community, law enforcement, and financial traders. In 2010, In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, announced that it had invested in the firm, making it part of growing portfolio of companies that can sift through social media and other online sources.
In the video below, Recorded Future software was used to map the spread of the 2011 Occupy protests.
Source(s): Recorded Future, In-Q-Tel, Nature, Sharon Weinberger 2011 interview