Like lots of other families over the recent Thanksgiving weekend, we made our way to the movies. Our choice: Life of Pi. We’d highly recommend it, and according to the IBM Social Sentiment Index, as applied to Moviegoer Social Sentiment over the holiday weekend, so too would a lot of other folks. It earned a 90 percent positive rating.

IBM has engaged in the social sentiment index pursuit in some other endeavors – using its advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies to analyze large volumes of social media data, it had another recent take on Black Friday, for example. It tallied up that shoppers expressed positive consumer sentiment on promotions, shipping and convenience as well as the retailers themselves at a three to one ratio (see our story here for other takes on semantic tech weighing in on the holiday shopping season).

It’s also applied its social media analysis smarts to studying births of trends (cycle chic is on the rise), and which tennis player was on the hearts and minds of the crowd at the U.S. Open (Novak Djokovic and Laura Robson winning the love, with positive sentiment scores at 90 percent or better).

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Text and sentiment analytics for the masses. That could be a tagline for Semantria, which lets users put the technology to work in a pay-as-you-go cloud model. Not only that, but it lets customers deploy a plug-in to run analytics of unstructured content, extracting entities, themes, sentiment, categories, summaries, facets, and relationships, in one of the world’s most common user environments: Microsoft Excel.

More is on the way, too. This December should see the unveiling of a partnership with an as-yet-unnamed vendor to expand the applications with which its platform is compatible. That partner already offers data integrations with 300 applications; when Semantria becomes the 301^st, users will be able to universally and bi-directionally talk to the hundreds of other applications without having to do any integration work on their own.

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