The story behind the work.

1986–1991: Machines that fail in the field

Sten Franke started in electronics, industrial robotics and field service. The work taught a lesson that later shaped every company he built: a capable machine still fails when its sensors, its maintenance, the workflow around it or the people who run it fail. Capability is not the same as a working system. Much of what is said about AI today repeats that old confusion.

1991–1992: JEDE

As a service engineer and technician for vending systems at JEDE, he worked on technology that has to function every day, in public, with no engineer standing next to it. Uptime, not the specification sheet, decided whether a machine earned its place.

1992–1996: From the machine to the market

He studied business administration at the University of Siegen. Through STEIN Marketing he worked on technology promotion campaigns for Apple, Braun and Media-Saturn. The view moved from the machine to the market: how products reach people, and why some are chosen over others.

1997: media-time.de, the German web on one map

In 1997 he founded mediatime and started with media-time.de, a Yahoo-like web directory for Germany. The young German web was sorted into categories, so that people could find what existed and companies could see where they stood. It was his first market map. Multilingual search and internet marketing followed, at the moment when companies were learning to be found online.

1997–2005: 1a-Suchmaschinen.de

The next step was a commercial software service. 1a-Suchmaschinen.de helped companies get found in search engines and ran for several years as a paid SEO offering. Visibility soon raised a harder question: what do the people searching actually want, and what is the market around them doing?

2001: Gridpatrol

In 2001 he founded Gridpatrol, an early internet-monitoring service that used machine learning to follow what was said about brands online.

2005–2021: ethority

In 2005 Sten Franke founded ethority, a company for social-media intelligence, market research and strategic advice to international organisations, run from Hamburg as ethority GmbH & Co. KG. The guiding question sharpened: which decision should this information change? The brands, banks and industrial groups among ethority's references belong to this company and its years. They are listed with their sectors in our historical references.

2008: Working in public

In January 2008 he chaired the BITKOM working group Customer Satisfaction and wrote on brand management in user-generated media for the Marken-Management Jahrbuch 2008/09. Industry work meant testing ideas in public, with peers who were free to disagree.

2009–2019: The Social Media Prisma

On 21 September 2009 ethority published the first Social Media Prisma for Germany. It mapped the social web as German users actually used it, with the platforms German users chose: Xing, the VZ networks, Lokalisten, Wer-kennt-wen.

Then the map kept moving. Version 2.0 followed in April 2010, shaped by readers' suggestions. Version 3.0 came in September 2011, a Chinese edition and German 4.0 in March 2012, and 5.0 in September 2012. In October 2014, version 6.0 listed 261 platforms and tools, 117 of them new since 5.0. The 2017/18 edition, published in October 2017, found that more than half of the 2014 ranking had gone. The last version followed in 2019.

The map was also a working tool. By April 2011 ethority was showing teams how to use it to choose audiences and channels: start with where the people you want to reach actually are, then decide where to invest. That is the step from a picture of the market to a decision about it.

Each edition was a dated record of a market in motion. Taken together, they show what a single snapshot hides: in a young market, the list of relevant players changes faster than most planning cycles.

2019–2024: A research chapter

Sten Franke supported the Dr. Rurainski Foundation and contributed to research that uses AI and DNA-methylation analysis for early cancer-detection research, under the name EpiTrace.AI, with the DKFZ named in the scientific collaboration. It also brought the mapping habit into a field where the standards of evidence are strict and the cost of being wrong is high.

2023: ETHORITY & STEN.AI LLC

On 8 August 2023 the present company was established in Delaware as ETHORITY & STEN.AI LLC. It connects AI market intelligence, research and delivery across five stages: Discover, Create, Run, Improve and Grow. The name joins the earlier brand with the founder's AI work, but the company is new, and it does not claim the staff, the projects or the clients of its predecessors as its own.

2026: The Good AI Prism

In 2026 ETHORITY created the Good AI Prism and its 2026/27 market study. It maps 961 AI offerings across 24 topic areas, 8 data types and 6 technology layers, each with its source and the date it was read. AI decisions need more than placing a provider in a category. They depend on the task, the deployment, the data, the rights, the costs, the evidence and the people who stay responsible for the result. The Good AI Prism is built to carry those questions. It is a new artwork for a new market, drawn from scratch for AI. The old editions stay intact as dated originals. The lineage runs through the method, not the picture.

What connects the chapters

Read in sequence, the chapters show one habit applied to changing technology. Look at the field before choosing. Write down what is known and when it was known. Ask what has to happen around the technology for a result to change: the maintenance, the workflow, the people, the economics. A vending machine in 1991, a search campaign in 1997, a social platform in 2009 and an AI agent in 2026 fail for the same reasons when those questions go unasked. The current form of that habit is described in why ETHORITY maps before it advises.

Legacy, kept honest

Each chapter belongs to its own organisation and period. mediatime, Gridpatrol, ethority and ETHORITY & STEN.AI LLC are distinct companies, and their work is not added up into one total. Historical references belong to the company and the years in which the work was done. The Social Media Prisma editions remain as published. What carries forward is the discipline: a dated map first, then the decision.