Midyear Product Review: The Adventure of Base Operations

Building a product is an adventure.

Over time, an inkling of an idea becomes an essential tool in people’s lives. After four years working in Mexico City, I imagined a product that could decode the threat landscape around me so I could make data-driven decisions instead of relying on mere assumptions. Turning that idea into a transformative product used by the world’s leading security departments has been an exciting journey. 

Base Operations has completed two significant milestones, catalyzing a paradigm shift in the security industry. In our third development phase, we’ve set our sights even higher. As we pass the midyear mark, I’m reflecting on the state of the Base Operations product— where we’ve been and where we’re going— on this great adventure.

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‍Phase 1: Building the Treasure Map
Cataloging and Processing the World’s Threat Data

The first phase of our journey was cataloging the world’s publicly available data and bringing it all together in a single map. While this may sound straightforward, anyone working with this kind of data knows it is anything but. We conducted requests for information to uncover hidden datasets. We tracked down tens of thousands of sources, writing retrievers and processors to refresh the data in our maps as soon as it became available. We began pulling text from tens of thousands of local media sources. We used natural language processing to turn text into precisely plotted pins on a map. We did all this at scale, generating ongoing ingestion of hundreds of millions of incidents. 

However, that data was still far from usable. We built a cutting-edge data processing pipeline to turn that jumbled mess into a clean, consistent dataset. On a daily basis, we validate source quality and cleanse the data with deduplication, cross-source pattern matching, domain heuristics, and other techniques. We deduce fields that are either absent or incorrect with inference based on context clues.

We now offer our customers the ability to spin around the globe and zoom in on any street corner, an unparalleled level of granularity. We amassed and mapped a quantity and quality of threat data so enormous that people couldn’t believe their eyes. And we were just getting started.

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Phase 2: Decoding the Labyrinth
Building a Cutting-Edge Threat Analytics Hub

The second phase was decoding our avalanche of high-quality data into meaningful intelligence. We worked closely with customers and prospects to understand what analysis they needed to protect their business. What information could they not access that they needed? What was sucking up their time on a daily basis? What held them back from positioning the security department to company leadership as a value add to the business instead of just a cost center?

We launched a Hub for our analytics, in which our customers could quickly determine what threats drive the security ratings in different neighborhoods, peak hours for incidents, seasonal changes, and more. We applied clustering techniques for heat mapping and scaling large numbers of locations. For the first time, we allowed customers to export the data via API and soon via formatted or customizable reports.

Base Operations became the largest repository of quality global threat data and the preeminent technology for interpreting that data to extract insights that keep people safe and businesses running smoothly. 

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Phase 3: Unveiling the Crystal Ball
Emerging Trends and Forecasts

Now we’ve mapped the treasure (threat data) and decoded the labyrinth (data processing pipeline and analytics hub). The next step is to unveil the crystal ball and better anticipate future events so our customers can prevent, not just react, to security incidents. That means helping them realize the goal of being proactive instead of just reactive.

We're taking the work out of geographic threat assessments at scale by bringing the most important insights to the forefront. We can upload customers’ locations and asset footprint and programmatically generate threat landscape insights and forecasts for them. We detect meaningful changes and trends in the data and recommend measures to avoid damage to people and assets.

Before Base Operations, many of our customers had to rely solely on human intelligence or spotty data to make major decisions. Core to the success of Base Operations is making our groundbreaking applications of AI simple and accessible to our customers to accomplish the greatest goal: keeping each other safe.

Our customers have been essential to this adventure, guiding us in the right direction and propelling us forward with their deep needs and innovative ideas. While the adventure of building the Base Operations product is far from over, it’s important to look around and take stock of how far we’ve come.

Now, back to work.