SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – May 7, 2013) - Topsy, the real-time social analytics company, today announced that users can now act immediately on insights they uncover in their analysis by engaging directly with their audience through Topsy Pro.

Topsy Pro already gives users the best way to spot trends, track sentiment, and identify key influencers relevant to their business; Topsy’s new functionality allows users to also reply, retweet or favorite key Tweets surfaced in an analysis. Topsy Pro customers can use these features to react in seconds to emerging PR crises, find and promote the most viral content, identify and engage with local customers and generally be one click away from taking action the minute they see an opportunity. Read more

A new article out of the company states that “Topsy, the real-time social analytics company, today introduced ‘Topsy Alerts’ and ‘Topsy Reports’, two powerful new alerting tools in Topsy Pro Analytics that instantly analyze billions of social conversations and deliver timely updates and early warning on relevant topics, breaking news and emerging trends via email or live dashboards. With ‘Topsy Alerts,’ users can receive immediate notification of a change in activity, sentiment or acceleration in any topic before it starts trending. For example, a news organization might identify breaking news by setting up alerts to track for accelerating conversations around key topics. A brand might get early warning on a major product issue by setting up an alert to detect a large drop in brand sentiment. Topsy automatically recommends appropriate alert thresholds to use based on historical data, such as the usual number of mentions for the terms you’re looking at.” Read more

Sunday night’s the big stroll down the red carpet for Hollywood’s elite — for the 85th time. But no need to wait until then to have some fun with old Oscar.

Some services with semantics and sentiment analytics in their genes have already begun. Here are a few examples:

Jinni, the semantic movie and TV Taste engine, has created a detail-filled graphic, based on analysis and cross-referencing it did according to its own Jinni Entertainment Genome (see its blog post here for a look at the entire graphic and more info on its creation):

Read more

There’s no such thing as too much post-election coverage, is there? Alright, maybe there is. But we couldn’t let things die down without at least a nod to those in our space that have delivered the semantic industry’s own take on the topic.

Here are a few you may want to review:

Twitris Election Insights:

“The Twitris system had an amazing night–while Nate Silver’s model might have received well deserved attention, Twitris gave better indications and insights and large majority of the polls,” wrote Dr. Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, in an email to us. The semantic social web application (first covered here) is a project of Kno.e.sis at Wright State University.

Read more

Topsy recently announced a set of new features for the company’s analytics tool, Topsy Pro Analytics: “These updates — Alerts and enhanced Geo-inference — allow any user to better stay on top of both what’s happening and where it happens. This type of insight could be applied to find headline news stories before they actually break, to figure out where stories are trending, or to better understand localized discussion around a brand. In this post, we’ll run through an example using chatter around a recently-funded startup company, RapGenius, to demonstrate Topsy Pro’s new features.” Read more

Real-time social analytics platform Topsy, which earlier this month debuted Twindex to provide insight into Twitterati sentiment on the presidential candidates, today unveils Topsy Pro Analytics. It delivers in-depth metrics based on the Twitter firehose via API to the general public. Previously, the company had API access for some metrics in a machine-to-machine interface, but nothing near the full interactivity nor access to all the measurements that are propagated into the new user interface.

Topsy’s technology was created to ingest huge amounts of authored content, with Twitter as its primary data source — all 400 million tweets a day, with an index that goes back multiple years. Topsy also does a full public scrape of Google Plus and indexes that data. It offers its own sentiment classification and dictionary scheme tuned for tweets, takes every link published in tweets and unpacks them to their native states to produce measurements around them, provides a geoinference model to see where people are communicating from (to the country level today but soon to city and state level), and also can deliver an influence and author graph.

Read more

Last week we reported here on the progress that Nova Spivack’s #OccupyTwitter petition was making in terms of attracting signatures, and on the petition’s request that Twitter clarify just what its intentions for the developer community are around its API. Many semantic and sentiment analysis applications, of course, depend heavily on the Twitter API.

Well, the end of last week saw a blog post from Michael Sippey of Twitter that provided some more information on the API issue. He wrote:

Read more

The U.S. is a mere three months away from choosing who will be its leader for the next four years. The semantic web is a supporting player in the action.

This week, of course, saw the debut of the Twitter Political Index (Twindex), a joint effort between Twitter, Topsy, and the Mellman Group and NorthStar Opinion Research polling groups. Since the Semantic Web Blog last spoke with Topsy execs here, the company has refined its sentiment analysis to the point where it could be released for the Twindex. The sentiment analytics engine ingests hundreds of millions of English-language tweets a day and computes sentiment for all terms in Twitter, though that’s not publicly available yet.

In its Twindex incarnation, Topsy aggregates the underlying sentiment score minute by minute, and then that is rolled up into an hourly and daily score for each candidate, says Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, co-founder and chief scientist at Topsy Labs. Behind the scenes, “that score is normalized so that it is on 0 to 100 scale comparing to all the other terms people talk about,” he says, which is important for keeping perspective on the candidates in context relative to whatever else may be on the mind of the collective social media conscience. It also is weighted to include the scores of the previous two days before its publication at the end of the day, and smoothed out so that it doesn’t jump around in helter-skelter fashion.

Read more

Russia’s leading search engine Yandex – which is collaborating with U.S. search engine giants in implementing schema.org and which last week partnered with Twitter to post tweets in real-time in search results – has made another deal this week: It’s working with Topsy Labs to enable social search.

Real-time search and analytics provider Topsy’s indexing and live-ranking will help Yandex search in Russia and Turkey identify and extract fresh and relevant results from social media sources. Vipul Prakash, Topsy’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, says Topsy’s corpus consists of about 100 billion tweets, and the page links and media referred to in them, all time-stamped and authorship-explicit. It does some amount of synthetic tagging to extract the topic from the tweet to make the topic searchable, as well as performs classification of content, where there’s more text to play with, for links referenced in tweets. It understands that the author is distinct from what is being discussed and who is referring to whom in postings, which feed into its graph of influence that ranks links in search results based on the influence of people talking about those links. That includes a global rank of a user independent of topic and terms and also keyword-level ranks based on what was in a tweet when they got attention for it.

Because it has such histories of people to extract from that a robust understanding of their network credibility, including how they’ve received attention from others in the past, Topsy does a really good job of getting rid of spam, Prakash says. That’s a particularly useful capability to bring to Yandex to weed out suspicious social tweets in advance of the controversial Russian presidential elections getting underway this weekend, as reports have noted that fake Twitter accounts have been created to drown out opposition voices by flooding Twitter’s hashtag service function. “In Russia there is a lot of precedent for political activism like that,” he says. “If something points out a problem with a candidate, they will have people start spamming it so you can’t actually find the real piece of information.”

Read more