Can you really use anti-terrorist technology to choose better wine?

(WP) - A few weeks ago I got this off-the-wall PR pitch: use counter-terrorism tech to pick better wines! So, obviously, I had to learn more. Turns out, Alex Fishman is excited about the world of wine — so excited he launched a wine app called Delectable which claims it’s approaching 1 million users and has “the world’s largest database of over 2 million wines.” He’s also a former “forward deployed engineer” for behemoth data mining intelligence firm Palantir.

And during an interview with The Switch, Fishman spent more time talking about Palantir than the app itself — although that could be partially attributed to the questions asked. Of course, many of the technologies developed initially for the national security space eventually are adapted for the consumers space, like say, the Internet. But it’s a telling statement about the level of notability and notoriety Palantir has achieved that even the most seemingly divergent uses of data mining developed by former employees are trading on its name.

Started in 2004 by former Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings, Palantir derives its name from the crystal ball-like stone spheres in the “Lord of the Rings” series. In Tolkien lore the name literally means “farsighted” or “one that sees from afar,” which pretty aptly describes how Palantir software combines intelligence sources and databases to derive detailed maps of how people and companies are connected.

If you in live the D.C. area, you’ll be familiar with at least with the name of the company if not its products thanks to the Palantir ads that frequently plaster metro stops — especially those near the Pentagon. And with good reason: A recent Forbes profile of Karp, currently Palantir’s chief executive, described the company as the “go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications.”