Podcast Content Studio

Unstruk Data with Tech Entrepreneur, Kirk Marple

Kirk Marple is interviewed by Ryan Treasure on “Finding Your Frequency.” In this interview, Marple retells his journey to where he is now, the founder of Unstruk. Diverse experiences throughout several industries has inspired Marple to start Unstruk and he discusses with Ryan Treasure its potentials, the lessons he had to learn, and how running a business requires flexibility and endurance.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How Marple’s experience in media entertainment blends with Unstruk’s industrial target audience 
• Explanations and applications of unstruk and how they organize unstructured data
• Leveraging Unstruks infrastructure with Machine learning 
• Hedging your bets and remaining agile throughout changing markets
• “Falling up” learning from struggles and mistakes and transforming them through perseverance 
• Shifting communication models with new generations of tech users

Good Question & Answer 1:

Treasure:

So are you guys using artificial intelligence in anything that you do? Or just machine learning? Give us a little insight into that because I know those are huge button buzzwords, right now …So what are you guys doing to leverage that technology within your infrastructure?

Marple:

Yes, we’re leveraging today “Azure cognitive services”, which is a bundle of different computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning APIs and it’s really cool. You can give it a document and it’ll extract the words out of the document, and then look for entities in the documents- you can find like people, places, things, in a document- we can give it images or video even, it’ll identify objects in the image. So you could give it, a construction site, it’ll know that there’s a truck there, and a building there, and dirt and all these kind of things. It gives you back a couple dozen tags from anything that you identify. Even audio, like text extraction, you can give it a zoom meeting and you can actually extract all the words and find the entities from that. So the idea is we’re extracting, essentially, this structured taxonomy; a set of tags, from documents, images, videos, whatever, and then creating edges between them. Basically, I mean, tying together those tags and the media, and say, “look, here’s a company name, I heard somebody speaking in a meeting, I saw it in a document, I literally saw this on the side of a building in an image.” That’s where we can create those edges and automatically build up that knowledge base. That’s really multimedia.

Good Question & Answer 2:

Treasure:

As I’m thinking about the implications of your product that you’re working on, is this product, something that could be leveraged for DevOps teams as well to help organize all of the data points that come with a given website build?

Marple:

That’s an interesting point. Technically at its core, it could be. We’ve started off with more of an opinionated model of tracking more geospatially and temporally, over time. So we’re focused a bit more on almost like an outdoor use case- things that happen in the environment and are tracked over time- but technically, like I said, I started with this podcast discovery idea that the engine that we built, the Knowledge Graph could actually be applied to a lot of different areas. We actually just got an inbound lead from a guest, a medical company doing biomedical stuff, and they need to build knowledge graphs between patients and drugs and different things from all the data they have. It’s not our sweet spot today but technically if we wanted to spin off a new product line eventually we really could because the core of what we build has a ton of different applications, not just where we’re headed right now.

Additional topics discussed:

• Marple’s path from originally pursuing culinary school to founding his own tech company.
• Potential expansions of Unstruk’s focus
• Fundraising and managing future movements with the potential of the technology

Host / Podcast Bio: Ryan Treasure has been in the Audio/Video Production field for over 20 years. He started out in terrestrial radio in the late 90’s but quickly moved into “New Media”. Ryan has been in many facets of the industry, including audio and video post-production editing, live audio production, and interactive web content delivery. “Finding Your Frequency is about more than just content and code. It is more than just philosophy and polishing your image. It’s about both failure and success, the difference between the two and all of the steps in between!”

Guest Bio: Kirk Marple is the CEO of Unstruk. He began his career in Media Management and entertainment, owning a transcoding company. After selling it to diversify his prospects, Marple found inspiration within other areas of data management such as the automotive industry. To Marple, the use of data for car imagery and closed captioning had parallels in “time based telemetry.” However, Marple noticed problems within the storage of unstructured data and metadata within file based formatting and decided to expand into the business of optimizing a system to store, organize, and analyze metadata within pools of stored information. 

Resources and links mentioned in the show:

• https://twitter.com/kirkmarple?lang=en
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkmarple/
• https://www.unstruk.com/