A SCOTTISH internet entrepreneur who founded news site Mashable when he was a schoolboy is to expand into television.
Pete Cashmore, whose site attracts 45 million visitors a month, believes data on what people share online can be used to create popular programmes.
Staff at Mashable have developed a "robot" that analyses why some news articles or videos "go viral" and are shared by millions of internet users across the world.
Mr Cashmore, 30, from Banchory, near Aberdeen, said the robot could also predict what was likely to go viral in future.
He told a Sunday newspaper: "It's almost 90 per cent accurate. These days we don't always know which signals it's following. It's all artificial intelligence. When it gets one wrong it changes the algorithm. It learns itself.
"We have an audience and they decide whether our stuff gets popular or not. We really have to deliver to them stuff that's valuable and that they want to share with their friends.
"There are many many more people that watch TV than ever read print journalism. People are watching TV.... on sites like ours. What does that mean? There's just this huge opportunity."
Mashable, which is already producing videos for its website as well as businesses such as car companies and credit card firms, is understood to have received investment of some £20 million to develop a range of proposals with some of the finance from television giants Time Warner.
Mashable started as a schoolboy’s blog written from home which explained how to use the latest gadgets and technology. Mr Cashmore is now based in New York and by 2013 he was said to be worth some £60 million.
He has also previously been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
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