We've released open source projects (most notably ElephantDB and Cascalog) in the past that are successfully used in production by us as well as other companies. You should check them out if you're interested in a measure of quality, though I understand your concern.
We're a startup — we're not going to write an academic paper supporting the claims in the post. Nevertheless, Storm's an exciting project many people are curious to learn more about; that's why we've written something about it now.
We have a demo coming soon, and Storm itself will be open sourced soon enough.
Since we're using BackType as well to calculate the score, it was easier to do both requests server-side. We pre-ran a long list of popular users and all of their followers, but guess we didn't reach enough people :(
The score's based on your use of GitHub, who follows you and your projects, as well as (this is where BackType comes in) how much they are shared on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, etc.
What you're seeing is Disqus' Reactions feature, which we help power. Part of our business is data services, which companies like Disqus, Bitly, The New York Times, SlideShare, etc use.
Our own product is a marketing intelligence platform; essentially, it provides analytics for social media marketing programs so brands understand what's working, what isn't and how to improve.
Many startups are C corporations which typically do not have a sole "owner" i.e. I'm an owner of BackType, I'm also an owner of Google if I buy their stock, etc.
Essentially, it's up to the immigration offer to decide whether a certain level of equity disqualifies you from receiving TN status. Much more scrutiny is applied to the actual proposed employment, your responsibilities, whether these fit in the TN status categories, etc.
The TN is obviously not intended for self employment, but that becomes subjective once you've grown beyond a company of size one.
Identifying influencers is important, but that's not the sole feature of our product. We already differentiate ourselves with other features (which Klout et al. don't offer): visit backtype.com and try it out. Thousands of people use it every day.
Aware of this, just less common. Usually startup founders don't have money of their own to make a "substantial investment." It's my understanding that the investment should exceed $200,000 USD, and some consulates require $500,000. The amount is also evaluated based on the type of business being invested in, etc.
We (BackType) don't power Tweetmeme's button — we offer our own, more accurate one. The counts we do are also available via our API, which powers Posterous' button.
We (BackType) track hundreds of thousands of blogs, as well as sites like HN, digg, reddit, etc. In addition to claiming your comments, you can use BackType Subscriptions to follow activity on the posts you contribute to. There's also an option to auto-subscribe:
We're a startup — we're not going to write an academic paper supporting the claims in the post. Nevertheless, Storm's an exciting project many people are curious to learn more about; that's why we've written something about it now.
We have a demo coming soon, and Storm itself will be open sourced soon enough.