Aaron Zinman from MIT Media Lab built a new project, called Personas. It takes the name, and searches the web for relevant context around it and grab the words and sites to build a profile of the person.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Even this project aims to build authoritative profile of people, it also works for company profiles.  If you are new to China wholesale shopping business, and trying to research the websites, you can simply put the website’s name, like “DHgate” or “Lightinthebox“, into the Personas Box, and it will automatically generate you a cool profile report. Trust me, it is REALLY REALLY cool!