Recorded Future is a temporal analytics engine that attempts to predict the future by understanding the past and the present. It does this by analyzing archived data, partly to look for recurring patterns that lead to predictive outcomes, but also by focusing on language that points to time, possibly indicating intent. Weather forecasting is an obvious area in which this kind of calculation already takes place, with historical and real time data combined to predict short and long term weather patterns. The company behind Recorded Future is taking a similar approach, but seeks to apply it much more broadly.

The technology Recorded Future employs is reminiscent of a search engine with three fields: What, Who/Where, and When. When these are completed, the engine attempts to answer the query, displaying a visualization that shows historical data, current trends, and forecast events or patterns. It costs 150 USD per month to use the search engine and visualization tools, but "future alerts" are provided free. These alerts are basically "blind searches" as you're using the search engine, only getting the results emailed to you one at a time as they are predicted.

In using this service over the past several weeks we've noticed a mixed record in terms of accuracy.

Searches fall into different categories, which are Financial Markets, Industry Analysis, Geopolitics, Technology, Public Figures, or yourself. You can target a company or industry and Recorded Future will alert you to their future plans or intentions. If a targeted company has said it will release a new product in the fall, then you'll get an alert predicting that in the fall the company will release a new product. In many cases it's as simple as analyzing the language to detect future intent and framing that as a prediction. With things like financial markets it is a bit more complicated, but the company's slogan is "What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens," and so they have some leeway with their predictions.

Both Google and the CIA have recently invested in Recorded Future, and it will be interesting to see how these relationships transform the infrastructure of the different groups. Recorded Future is still a small start-up with 15 employees, but now that they're backed by Google, and would therefore have access to Google's flow of information, they will be able to dramatically refine and develop their temporal analytics engine.

Google already has a trends service that has been influential in things like detecting flu outbreak and influencing how companies create and deploy their products/services. With an inside look at Recorded Future's analytics engine, they will be able to expand this and begin predicting the future, which will certainly aid in their quest to organize the world's information.

Other companies are obviously interested in predicting the future - the derivatives and futures markets have already spent massive amounts of money on this kind of artificial intelligence and really what we're seeing is the evolution of the concept of the search engine. Google is the obvious leader, but this is an area where other companies do have the potential to challenge Google, especially a company like Microsoft, with their Bing "decision engine". That's probably why the company is so eager to fund tech like Recorded Future. Imagine if Facebook started doing temporal analytics which told you what your friends or co-workers will do next week. Or if Facebook took that data and sold it to your employer, so your boss could have the inside scoop on what you'll do next week!