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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

I want to see what Palantir actually produces. Like does Coca-Cola get a monthly report that says "Hey, you guys should bring back Cherry Cola in Montana for an expected 4% increase in sales" or what? What does $1mil/month actually get you?

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>I want to see what Palantir actually produces.

SAR. Suspicious Activity Report. If you don't know what "fusion center" is - https://www.palantir.com/wp-assets/media/capabilities-perspe...

Huh. Kind of looks like ArcGIS.

That's what I thought. ArcGIS advises you to deploy more Cherry Coke to Montana.

Don't ignore the network visualization on the right. My understanding is that it's a slice through an ontology driven knowledgebase. Palantir provides consulting services on the ontology as well as the integration services to map customer data to that ontology. The tool provides a visualization of this knowledgebase.

It looks like exactly the same sort of data you would get from a customized ArcGIS system or one of the BI (with GIS) software packages (such as Alteryx and the like).

But why pay $250,000 for software and also hire a good consulting firm when you can pay $18 million a year for the same thing. (I have just realized that I have been grossly underpaid.)

And I'm sure all those engineers they hire make excellent geographic analysts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ooAUeTlzdU

here's a quick demo of one of their products

edit: this is 2012, likely way out of date

Oh my god, what the hell is that thing! For all that money, they couldn't have hired a product management/design team?

Note the timestamp on the video... their products look sweet now.

> Ethan Bond

> Palantir, Product Designer; Starting June 2016, New York City, NY

I realize you're not technically a Palantir employee quite yet, but there's definitely the opportunity for bias here.

Yes, true. I removed the claim re: the quality of the team, hopefully it's a bit less misleading.

By the way, if Palantir's product actually works, your manager already knows you're talking about them.

That wasn't the concern. I said the team is very good relative to my experience at other places. They know that I like 'em already, don't worry ;)

Do you have any recent pictures of the products?

You can find some public stuff here: https://dribbble.com/palantir

I don't have anything else to point you to unfortunately.

I have to say, this does look pretty clean. Well done!

Looks like the web-based client work has finally started to produce a client. Nice work!

live example: http://www.cartercenter.org/syria-conflict-map/

Here is a live version of a [Palantir product for the Carter Center](http://www.cartercenter.org/syria-conflict-map/). I'd say it looks quite nice for a digital map.

Wow this is incredibly fascinating, how were they able to talk publicly about this...?

I can't take anyone who pronounces Iran(ɪˈrɑːn) "Eye-Ran" as a serious person.

Even if they had auburn hair and tawny eyes?

For what's it's worth, this type of analytics and market research is what Nielsen (NLSN) has been doing for several decades.. Indeed they were the first real BigData company. They just don't charge monthly.. You buy access to a set of data (markets, products hierarchies) and often some level of custom reporting and scheduled updates on the data.

Palantir is much closer to Accenture than Nielsen.

For the most part, Palantir is helping you analyze data you already have, not providing you with new data.

Actually maybe they do - they just brought back Cherry and Vanilla coke in Canada. I for one will be contributing to an increase in sales.

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