One of the more intriguing companies I stumbled upon in the last few weeks is called YouNoodle. The company’s key product is called YouNoodle Score: a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 0 to 100, of a start-up’s progress and traction based on its traffic, funding, employees, buzz and other activity. The score is based on information pulled in from thousands of online sources: traffic sources, mainstream media, funding sources, the blogosphere, conversations on Twitter, and other key factors.

In other words, the company takes a mixture of structured and unstructured data (including 150,000 + stories a day), applies an algorithm to it, and comes up with a single score that ranks the potential of each start-up they look at (40,000 and counting).

I have no clue how good it actually is right now (if anyone could let me know that would be great), but at minimum I think it’s a very cool idea. And I’m particularly intrigued by the idea that such an approach could be applied within a big enterprise to assess the potential of various ongoing projects.

Think about it: companies have (or should have) far more structured data about their own employees than YouNoodle has on start-ups; the unstructured data on the web is open to them as well. Now imagine if a company was using all the collaborative platform tools that are potentially at their disposal in order to know what people are working on, have worked on, how they’re connected together, etc. Might there be a way to take all of that information, and use it to come up with a per-project “YouNoodle Score”? And if there was, could you imagine how valuable that might be?