FEATURE28 May 2019

The buzz on the street

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

Asia Pacific Data analytics Europe FMCG Features Impact Latin America Middle East and Africa Mobile North America Retail Technology Trends UK

Founder and CEO of Streetbees Tugce Bulut talks to Jane Bainbridge about algorithms, data collection and monitoring the mood of the nation via its army of ‘bees’.

IStock-1067244106 Supersmario

Tugce Bulut started her career as a strategy consultant but, when working with clients, she repeatedly found data quality a problem. So, to meet her need for qualitative insights at scale, she ditched her job and set up artificial intelligence and tech-based market research company Streetbees in 2015.

Research Live: How did you build the technology behind Streetbees?
Tugce Bulut:
The hardest bit was formulating exactly what our clients needed. When I first started, we didn’t build in technology for about nine months. We did it all manually to see if it worked – we used WhatsApp to distribute and Google to analyse the data. We didn’t even have a dashboard.

Initially, every algorithm was being run by a data scientist, whereas today we’ve automated that. We now have 1.2bn data points in the database that we analyse. We built the team of machine-learning researchers, who invent new algorithms, a few years after we started the business.

How has this developed since?
We are training ...