Sentiment analysis

Twitter has sold its old tweets to DataSift, a company that plans to analyze the tweets for marketing purposes. DataSift is the first company to get access to these tweets which go back two years. According to one article, DataSift has “launched a product called DataSift Historics, which lets companies extract insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion, a rep says. DataSift will analyze public tweets, not private ones. If you delete a tweet, it’s deleted from DataSift’s archives.” Read more

If you’ve redeemed points at the Chase Ultimate Rewards web site or booked business travel through American Express’ AXIOM service, you’ve already had some experience with Rearden Commerce’s Deem e-commerce services platform. In the not-too-distant future, such marketplace experiences may be even further informed by semantic technology to add even greater personalization.

VP of analytics Steve Bernstein’s duties include leading traditional quantitative analysis and predictive modeling – the kind of work that last week resulted in the company providing an analysis of ten years of big data on domestic flight performance to discover everything from the best day of the year to fly (Oct. 3, thanks to only7 in 1,000 arrivals or departures being late, cancelled or diverted to the worst arrival performance for a major airport (EWR, in Newark N.J.). But he spends the rest of his time working with other parts of his team to structure unstructured data with the help of semantics and natural language processing technology so that it can serve as input for predictive modeling purposes.

Today, structured information for traveler services that use the Deem platform come from third-party feeds, such as hotel information from providers like Orbitz that consist of a couple of hundred pieces of information on over 100,000 hotels. That’s helpful for pinpointing users to guest accommodations at their preferred location or price, for instance, but not so much for helping them book a quiet hotel room. That’s where his team’s work crawling and capturing over 5 million user-generated hotel reviews, loaded up into a Hadoop file system, can come into play to better serve users’ needs.

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Manu Sporny writes, “Google is building a gigantic Knowledge Graph that will change search forever. The purpose of the graph is to understand the conceptual “things” on a web page and produce better search results for the world. Clearly, the people and companies that end up in this Knowledge Graph first will have a huge competitive advantage over those that do not. So, what can you do today to increase your organization’s chances of ending up in this Knowledge Graph, and thus ending up higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)?” Read more

Image Courtesy: Flickr/substack

A new report from the Institute for Global Futures, Global Futures Forecast 2012, lays out the top trends that it believes will shape the coming year. It’s looking ahead to a future that it says may be characterized by complex trends, accelerated change, hyper-competition, disruption, innovation and uncertainty, and that will demand a new way of operating.

It recommends continuing investment in innovation in the U.S., as that is the central driver of US and global competitive advantage, and a requirement for achieving more stable growth. And it advises that organizations’ leaders need to do a better job becoming long-range thinkers given that the accelerated pace of change means that the future is coming at us faster than ever before, and with change comes risk.

What do such things have to do with the Semantic Web and semantic technologies? Apparently, quite a lot.

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Ryan Kim recently spoke to Zemanta CTO Andraz Tori regarding the company’s role in the growing smart personal assistant field. Kim writes, “When I first heard of Zemanta, I thought of it as a great tool for bloggers, helping recommend links, content and images. And it does that quite well, helping some 80,000 active users. But after talking with Zemanta’s CTO and co-founder Andraz Tori, our conversation turned to the bigger picture of what New York-based Zemanta is doing. And it’s really in a similar vein as Apple’s Siri, IBM’s Watson and other services. We’re now entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests and questions in real time.” Read more

Semantic social web application Twitris, a project of Kno.e.sis at Wright State University, recently added to its social media analysis event lineup coverage of Occupy Wall Street, and Election 2012 is set to debut in the next couple of weeks.

These join earlier efforts such as the India Against Corruption Twitris site, and across all of them users can explore the popular topics about the event in the Twittersphere for that day; see related information by clicking on a tag; browse topics by location and see how they trend across different segments of society; search and explore questions related to a topic; view sentiments associated with a particular entity in the topic set; and more.

Leading the effort is Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar Dr. Amit P. Sheth, who coined the term citizen-sensing and has written on the topic of continuous semantics to analyze real-time data.

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A new article reports that Siri has found its first real competitor in Evi: “Evi, which went live on Monday evening, is not the creation of a Google or a Microsoft. It’s the brainchild of William Tunstall-Pedoe, a British start-up entrepreneur who until a few years back taught computer science at the country’s august Cambridge University. ‘Evi Lives!’, his start-up, True Knowledge, announced on its blog Monday evening, as the app first became available for download for iPhone and Android users. Within hours it had shot to being the top download in the lifestyle category of Apple’s App Store, crashing True Knowledge’s servers.” Read more

Twelvefold Media (previously BuzzLogic) today introduced the Mindset Index, a tool “to help brands better understand the intent and motivation of their target audiences. The Mindset Index analyzes the top 12 motivations that drive consumer action, in relation to a brand, product or topic. These include: Information Seeker, Review Seeker, Expert Advice Seeker, Looking to Shop, Deal Seeker, Affinity For, Excitement, Enthusiast, Early Adopter, Trend Follower, Planner/Planning For, and Activity Taker. The results deliver to advertisers a clear understanding of what is motivating a target audience, and how this compares to competitors and online averages. By understanding mindset, advertisers are able to define and execute media strategies that leverage an increased understanding of what drives their consumers.” Read more

Mark Walsh reports that Healthline Networks has made a deal with Drugs.com to sell targeted advertising on the site exclusively. Walsh writes, “The partnership expands the reach of Healthline’s HealthWeb to nearly 55 million unique monthly visitors, or roughly half the audience seeking health information online. Under the agreement, Healthline will sell direct response and brand advertising on behalf of Drugs.com, as well as create sponsored content areas on the site and enhance ad opportunities on Drugs.com’s mobile properties.” Read more

A leading biopharmaceutical company has chosen Semantelli’s CoProtect software to manage its online and social media reputation. The article reports, “Semantelli’s compliance ready, life sciences specific social listening solutions have helped top companies uncover previously unknown threats and opportunities emerging from web and social media… In August of 2011, Semantelli launched AETracker to help pharmaceutical companies monitor and manage adverse events reported on company owned Facebook pages and other social media outlets. Since the launch, AETracker has been deployed by top 10 pharma and OTC companies to manage and protect brand sponsored social media outlets.” Read more