Westbury tech guru builds word search software
Photo credit: Dick Yarwood | Mark Fasciano (March 10, 2004)
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Long Island technology guru Mark Fasciano has just started his third tech company, this one designed to tell businesses what consumers are saying about them - positive, negative or just neutral - on the Internet.
General Sentiment, in Westbury, operates a software program that analyzes about 30 million Web sites daily.
"It [the software] reads every story, every blog, even the story you're writing now, and it will extract the topic, sentence by sentence, and will get an opinion and [determine] whether that opinion is positive, negative or neutral," Fasciano, 41, said.
The program, Fasciano said, identifies certain words. In a sentence like "Tiger Woods disappointed his fans with his infidelity," the word "disappointed" is negative, and so sponsors like Nike could see people's reactions to Woods' situation.
General Sentiment was born at Stony Brook University. Professor Steve Skiena, general architect of the program, worked on it for about five years and is General Sentiment's chief science officer.
Fasciano said the company will be operational in January, using off-site servers to scour the Net. General Sentiment has six employees, and Fasciano is chairman.
Fasciano helped start FatWire Software in Mineola, now a $40-million company, in 1996. He later started Karma411, another software company, in Port Washington.
What's next? Fasciano says he wants to start a venture capital group to fund Long Island tech start-ups.
"We've seen there's a lack of institutional investing in start-ups," Fasciano said.
Mitch Pally, a well-known and highly respected figure in Long Island's business community, said he would be receptive to talking to a Long Island Association search committee about replacing Matt Crosson as president when Crosson steps down in September after a 16-year reign.
Pally was with the LIA for 21 years, serving as a vice president under former LIA president James Larocca and under Crosson, before leaving in 2006 to practice law at Webber Law Group in Melville.
Pally was considered by many to be a replacement for Larocca, but the LIA board chose Crosson.
"People have asked me if I would be interested," Pally said earlier this week. "I said, 'If they would be interested in talking to me, I would be interested in talking to them.' "
"You don't spend 21 years in an organization without feeling very good about the organization," Pally said.
A search committee, headed by Bethpage Federal Credit Union chief executive Kirk Kordeleski will begin interviewing candidates early in 2010. In a statement, Kordeleski said that "many good candidates have expressed an interest in the position" and Pally "would certainly be a strong candidate." He encouraged other "qualified candidates" to apply at the LIA's Web site, longislandassociation.org.
