Google is the scariest company in the world from the perspective of knowing the future. The information the company sits on - especially all those search queries and toolbars, not to mention Gmail, etc is enough to know what the world is thinking far before anyone else. The acquisition of Blogger and YouTube were aided in large part by competitive intelligence others just didn't have.
Now Blogger is the 8th most popular site in the world and YouTube is 3rd according to Alexa.
But in a world where Twitter, social networks and blogs are treasure chests full of information about the thoughts of the global population, are there other ways to tap into the global psyche? Yes. According to Jodange, they can scour the web and perform opinion and sentiment analytics. Here are more details from the company's site:
The technology behind Jodange's Top of Mind service uses linguistic analysis to extract opinion data from documents and identify the opinion holder and topic each opinion expression. The relationship between Opinion Holder, Opinion, and Topic is the central theme underlying all our applications. By identifying and isolating peoples' opinions and sentiments about key topics over time, we are able to understand who is worth listening to and how best to correlate their opinions to outcomes over time. We ignore any sentence or phrase deemed to be factual, and instead focus on phrases that are subjective in order to determine the sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) of the subjective statement.
The wealth of information that can be extracted from documents using Jodange's technology for identifying opinion holder, opinion, and topic can be used to answer questions such as:
- What do CEO's worldwide think about subprime lending?
- What companies mentioned research and development in their earnings reports last quarter?
- What does Steve Jobs have to say on the topic of innovation?
The company just received funding of $1.2 million dollars and while this isn't a bank-breaking number it sets a positive tone for tech investing and shows innovation will get funded.
But Jodange is a company that few have heard of and in order to get the word out about itself it should probably put out regular statements about what the global population thinks. Weekly swine flu and political alerts would be smart. How about some tea party sentiment alerts? Is the webosphere for or against these gatherings and in what numbers?
There is a lot of potential for this company to become a big player as the public conduit of information gleaned from the web... Hopefully some of these funds will be used for profile raising activities.
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