Luminoso brings its text analysis smarts to streaming data

Luminoso Co-Founders Rob Speer and Catherine Havasi

Luminoso, a sentiment analysis startup with DNA from MIT’s Media Lab, says its new product can take consumer feedback from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and potentially other feeds, and boil it into one stream to provide a near real-time look at how people feel (or at least talk) about a given topic.

Compass was put through its paces for the Sony One Stadium Live event associated with last year’s World’s Cup and is now coming to market broadly, Luminoso co-founder and CEO Catherine Havasi in an interview.

The company’s technology already let companies collect and analyze data from all those feeds but that’s more of a deep dive into static, archived information — Compass , available as a standalone product, is all about near-real-time analysis of streaming text, newswires, social media, Havasi said.

For the World Cup effort, Sony wanted to see (or hear) what people were talking about and because of the sheer number of games and locations and number of languages, it wanted to do that quickly, without requiring human moderators.

Typically, many sentiment or text analysis solutions require a human “expert” to keep entering and tweaking keywords, Havasi said. “If you’re a news organization following Ukraine, you add keywords manually so you don’t miss anything. That’s a very slow process and the queries get very large.” Compass automates that process.

Big advertisers — customers include REI, Intel, Autodesk and Scotts — can use Compass to watch how people are reacting to Super Bowl ads as the broadcast unfolds, to gauge the impact of digital marketing campaigns.

As collection of data — including that included in social media feeds — text analytics has become a vibrant field — other players include Lexalytics, Clarabridge and Digital Reasoning and others.

The company, which garnered $6.5 million in venture funding last July, said one thing that differentiates it from other text analytics vendors is that its technology knows, or can quickly learn, the difference between Shell, as in the oil company and a seashell. Or the husk of a peanut or a spent bullet casing. And it can perform similar context-aware analytics in most of the European languages plus Chinese and Japanese. (Oh yes and Emojis.) It also offers an API so companies can connect it up to internal, private data sources.

Pricing is based on the amount of data processed and number of languages screened.

 

luminoso emoji

You're subscribed! If you like, you can update your settings

Comment
Community guidelines
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
you are commenting using your account. Sign out / Change

Or comment as a guest

Be sure to review our Community Guidelines. By continuing you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.