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Until July 2013, Santa Monica-based Totally.Dot was a place for individuals to track friends' various social media channels in one place. But the team found that this created too much data - almost 700 unique records, per user, per day - to turn a profit. They did note that in all of this data, there was an even bigger opportunity.
So in October 2013 they pivoted to Totally.me and offered a “Frontpage," switching the service from a page that displays multiple friends social happenings, to one that hosts the individual user’s personal social media updates.
Today, Totally.Dot is a social media solution for individuals (and now brands) to stream all of their social media channels into one, sleek-looking page. The multi-national company offers two services - one is Totally.me and the other, which is rolling out second quarter, is Totally.us.
The company, which closed a $225,000 seed round last September, is split between Holland, LA and India - though, after the team closes this next round of funding, CEO Arjan de Raaf said he'd like to cut the time difference and bring the team (plus some new engineers) to LA.
“What Google is for keywords, Totally.Dot is for Hashtags.”
One of de Raaf's goals is to become the next Big Data social media company. Right now, the site has two million unique hashtags and that number is growing by 10,000 unique hashtags each day (search hashtags like #technology and #LA here ). de Raaf said that to qualify as a Big Data search engine they would need at least ten million unique hashtags - a metric they’re on track to reach by the end of 2014.
de Raaf predicts that hashtag data will be valuable as it provides key insight into people’s interests and habits: “We think the Big Data sell will be our main revenue stream.”
A hashtag engine for breaking news coverage
Another goal for 2014 is to become an aggregator of live visual content for news outlets. During a recent shooting at Santa Monica College, de Raaf and his team closely followed local and national news outlets. These news sources were producing up-to-the-minute content, but the visuals didn’t keep up: images were the standard yellow tape and cop cars.
The ultimate vision is for outlets like CNN to incorporate a Totally.Dot hashtag engine into their breaking news coverage: “We were looking...at hundreds of photos of students who were locked down inside the school and they were sharing - that’s what the new generation does.
Whether used for breaking news coverage or for providing insight into people's lives, the value of Totally.Dot's hashtag mine doesn't need much justification in this day and age. de Raaf put it simply: "We want that data because, in the end, you’ll know a lot about people."
