sentiment

For better or worse, the buzz on social media could be your guide to when and how to trade stocks.

Since last summer, Derwent Capital Markets has been using Twitter sentiment to help drive its hedge fund, as its algorithms sort out the ups and downs of people's chatter on the social network.

Now, Derwent is ready to share that ability with you. The firm today announced it's working on an online retail trading platform with a "built-in social media sentiment analysis research tool" -- which will track social media data from Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--It looks like sentiment analysis is becoming an interesting business for start-ups. After talking with Jared Goralnick from AwayFind, at the 500 Startups event, I ran into Guy Hirsch, of Saygent, who's also launching a company to help businesses mine sentiments of their customers or potential customers.

The product will be a partly automated voice survey tool. Clients will create survey questions and come up with a list of desired respondents, and then a machine will poll these people (via phone, unfortunately) and collect their voice responses. It will take the answers it gets and farm them out, via Mechanical Turk, to a panel of humans who will determine the sentiment of the respondents, as well as other factors that can't easily be determined by transcripts of responses.

Why not just do surveys the old-fashioned way, and ask people what they think? Hirsch says that getting an excitement (or anger, or frustration, etc) level on responses is both more valuable in marketing surveys and less expensive. All the human listeners have to do for Saygent is determine tone, not spend time transcribing.

Saygent correlates sentiments with the demographics it has from its clients' target lists, to determine, for example, if women or men are more interested in particular products or ideas.

Hirsch says his tool will also be usable for recruiting, especially for hiring phone workers. For example, if you want to hire people with friendly voices, or accents that resonate with particular customer demographics, this tool can help you find them.

I can't see Saygent replacing traditional phone surveys, but it does sound like a good way to get additional data points from a survey process.

Other sentiment-based services: • E-mail anger meter gets sensitivity training • When Exaudios is in use, it pays to get angry… Read more

Lymbix is releasing a more accurate version of its e-mail sentiment analysis app, ToneCheck, today. If you're an Outlook user and haven't checked out this service, give it a whirl. It's one of the more interesting Outlook plug-ins.

ToneCheck monitors your e-mail's composing window for potential errors of tone, just as spell-check scans for errors of spelling or grammar. The plug-in will tell you if there are sentences in a message that are likely to come across as aggressive, or likely to cause the recipient to feel sad, or fearful, or humiliated.

If ruining someone's day is what you want, though, ToneCheck won't actually change anything for you. Nor does it attempt to rewrite your messages. It just alerts you to the potentially troublesome emotional backlash you may be setting yourself up for.

The Outlook plug-in is easy to use and unobtrusive. A little meter stays out of the way, only blushing red with a "Tone Alert" when your message goes off the rails. When you click through, It tells you how, flagging sentences with words like "Concerning," or "Upsetting."

You get the chance to correct your tone before HR gets wise to you. And make no mistake, the HR department and other corporate overseers are the intended customers for this service. While the individual plug-in is free and kind of sick fun for a while, Lymbix's goal is to sell corporate versions of this app, as well as API access to its service, to businesses and development shops that support them. The idea is to bake this engine into CRM and other outbound messaging systems. The API is also being used, currently, to add outbound sentiment scanning to Twitter via the HootSuite enterprise Twitter management system.

… Read more

Normally, PR firms are pitching us start-ups, not creating them. That's not the case with Twendz, a new Twitter tool from the folks at Waggener Edstrom. It pulls in the latest tweets on any given topic, and shows you what the overall user sentiment is, be it positive or negative.

This is cleverly wrapped up into an ever-flowing stream of new user tweets, the speed of which you can control anywhere from a slow crawl to two new tweets per second. It's also able to dig up a past history of how many people have posted something on … Read more