FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT:

March 23, 2011 Rob Haralson

(703) 629-1291
rob@civicscience.com

WEB COMPANY RAISES MONEY FROM SOME PEOPLE

Funding will be used to end time-sucking fundraising, actually grow the business
 
PITTSBURGH, PA – 3/23/11 – CivicScience Inc, another digital polling company, today announced
that it landed a bunch of coin. Though the company refused to disclose the size of the investment, aptly-
named CEO John Dick remarked, “Let’s just say it’s somewhere between $1,199,999 and $1,200,001.”
 
The funding round included strategic investors like marketing research leader, The NPD Group, national
polling firm, ALR, and Kevin McClatchy of newspaper-company fame. Though the round did not include
any West Coast VC funds, CivicScience was pleased to announce that not a single check bounced.
 
The CivicScience IntelligentQuestion™ Engine, or iQ, was developed by a bunch of software engineers
from Carnegie Mellon who apparently couldn’t get into Stanford. Through a simple API, iQ plugs into
those dime-a-dozen polls found on thousands of websites, social networks, and mobile platforms. Since
most publishers think that writing poll questions every day is super-annoying, iQ dynamically delivers
contextually-relevant and editorially-designed questions to users from a massive, structured question
library. Users receive new poll questions every time they open a page containing an iQ-powered poll. The
technology has proven to increase same-site poll responses by up to 900%, while enabling editors to
spend more time snooping around on Quora.
 
“We really thought they were joking,” said the president of a major newspaper and one of iQ’s earliest
adopters. “We were all like, ‘Why would we ever need to know more than the five demographics we get
from our current web analytics tools?’ And they were all like, 'Whatever.'”  
 
Using machine learning and predictive modeling algorithms to analyze the results, iQ can then segment
site audiences on up to 150 demographic and profile categories, as well as hundreds of brand and issue
preferences. Reporting tools are made available to publishers who can then easily share insights with their
advertisers and editorial team.
 
“Social disruptive network effects Lady Gaga,” remarked Mr. Dick (seriously, that's his name). “Game-
changing location-based Charlie Sheen.”
 
CivicScience offers the iQ API free of charge. Like every other digital company on the planet, the
company believes they can make money by selling the data they collect. Too lazy to do it themselves,
they set up a network of channel distribution partners to productize and sell the aggregate data into retail,
financial services, public affairs, and the apparently-massive Groupon-endorsed yoga studio vertical.
Qualified publishers who use iQ can even earn a revenue share from CivicScience after a few months of
data collection, perhaps even more than the $3-per-month remnant ads now sitting on their sites.
 
CivicScience indexed only 70 Million polls in 2010 and is on pace to collect just over 600 Million
responses in 2011, far from the 10 Gazillion polls cited in the company's three-year projections. The
aggregated data, combined with various data analysis buzzwords, can be used to measure consumer
sentiment in real-time, across thousands of brands, celebrities, issues, and topics.
 
“At first we had no interest in this investment because we fully expect the land-line telephone to make a
huge comeback any day now,” said John Anzalone, a principal at ALR and the pollster best known for his

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT:
March 23, 2011 Rob Haralson
(703) 629-1291
rob@civicscience.com

work on behalf of President Barack Obama. “But when we saw how good their engineers were at beer
pong, we just knew that the board meetings would be awesome.” 

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