Exclusive: TrustYou brings semantic analysis to US hospitality industry, acquires Review Analyst

You’re a US hotel and you need to know what customers think of you. Are bed bugs a bad thing? Did they like the bidet?

German Radian6 competitor TrustYou purchased Review Analyst and received a $5 million first round of funding today to help hotels make the most of their reviews.

TrustYou analyzes the thousands of hotel and restaurant reviews made available through sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp. The company focuses on sentiment analysis, … Continue Reading

ImagePulse "sees" how you feel about brands

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? ImagePulse measures how consumers feel about brands based on photos in which the brand is included. It uses a mixture of text, sentiment and image analysis to measure if the image is positive or negative and the emotions involved. What does it mean to the brand when people take pictures of themselves at a Nike store or having coffee in Starbucks?

The more photos people take, the … Continue Reading

Social media popularity can predict stock prices

A new study conducted by a doctoral student at Pace University, in association with Famecount (which tracks how popular brands are according to social media) concludes that social media popularity can reliably predict daily stock prices.

The study tracked three brands, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Nike, over the course of 10 months in 2010-2011. The number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers and Youtube views were used as measures of each brand’s social media popularity. This … Continue Reading

Saplo's API reads text so you don't have to

Imagine a technology that can read and “understand” any block of text. That’s what Swedish startup Saplo does. It’s a sort of “Pandora for text” whose ultimate aim is to filter articles, tweets, ads or any other types of text based on your preferences. It can also group together similar text items, find related ones and even judge whether the text expresses positive or negative sentiments.

The company just released a new API that lets … Continue Reading

300 million tweets reveal the afternoon at work is the unhappiest time of day

If you go by tweets, Americans are happiest in the early mornings and then gradually become more negative as the work day progresses, according to researchers at Northwestern and Harvard universities.

A team of five researchers at the two schools studied 300 million U.S. tweets from September 2006 to August 2009 and performed sentiment analysis on them. They found that the evenings (presumably when people get off work and are socializing with friends) and early … Continue Reading

Sentiment search engine RankSpeed puts spotlight on products

If you go by tweets, Americans are happiest in the early mornings and then gradually become more negative as the work day progresses, according to researchers at Northwestern and Harvard universities.

A team of five researchers at the two schools studied 300 million U.S. tweets from September 2006 to August 2009 and performed sentiment analysis on them. They found that the evenings (presumably when people get off work and are socializing with friends) and early … Continue Reading

Facebook tells us how happy we are

If you go by tweets, Americans are happiest in the early mornings and then gradually become more negative as the work day progresses, according to researchers at Northwestern and Harvard universities.

A team of five researchers at the two schools studied 300 million U.S. tweets from September 2006 to August 2009 and performed sentiment analysis on them. They found that the evenings (presumably when people get off work and are socializing with friends) and early … Continue Reading