SIOP 2013 DiscoverText Sweepstakes 

I would like to invite you to enter the SIOP 2013 DiscoverText Sweepstakes. All you need to do is sign up online for a free, 30-day, no obligation trial:

https://app.discovertext.com/Home/SignupContactTrial

It should only take 60-90 seconds to sign up. The deadline to sign up is April 19^th, 2013 to be entered in this round of sweepstakes. This drawing is not limited to SIOP 2013 booth visitors. You can tell friends, colleagues, professors and students, family, everyone you work with, and anyone else you like about the trial and sweepstakes.

Users report that they love DiscoverText (http://discovertext.com/testimonials.html) and the sweepstakes winner will get a valuable prize.

If you have any questions once you are in the free trial, or about text analytics more generally, I would be delighted to hear from you.

To watch a brief DiscoverText customer testimonial, please visit:
https://vimeo.com/55175059.

As of today, DiscoverText is part of a larger company: Vision Critical, a market research technology provider that works with more than a third of the world’s top 100 brands. The thrill of joining a successful and growing firm headquartered in Vancouver is amplified by my pride in what DiscoverText can bring to Vision Critical’s customers, and by my excitement about what we’ll be able to offer our existing customers now that we are part of Vision Critical.

I am personally joining Vision Critical as Vice President for Text Analytics, and while I will still be based in western Massachusetts, I’ll have a chance to work with Vision Critical staff and clients at the company’s offices across North America and around the world. My task at Vision Critical is to work with every colleague to add a new analytic dimension to the integrated product suite. We will further develop DiscoverText so that it becomes a seamless, world class text analytics solution for Vision Critical customers and research personnel.

To that end, we have started drawing on the software engineering expertise and market research experience of the Vision Critical team. As we move deeper into 2013, current DiscoverText and Vision Critical customers will benefit from a growing array of powerful tools, scientifically-informed methods, and access to new data types, all backed by a robust IT infrastructure. Whether you are working with panel survey data, emails, customer service data, or one of the many Gnip-enabled premium social media feeds, my job is to shorten the time it takes you to reach valid and reliable, data-driven insights. “Better insights faster” is the operative theme.

I am honored and deeply grateful to have this opportunity to join Vision Critical. On a personal note, as someone who grew up in Vancouver (and has fond memories of tossing Frisbees with my family on Spanish Banks), it’s wonderful to be joining a company that is one of Vancouver’s great success stories. While it’s now truly a global company, with half its employees based in offices as far-flung as New York, London and Hong Kong, I look forward to regular visits to Vancouver HQ.

The top priority now is to bring a rigorous and innovative approach to the analysis of text into an elegant and ever more useful software framework. I am confident that DiscoverText will continue to grow more powerful in many interesting an unexpected ways. On behalf of my colleague and trusted Chief Technology Officer Mark Hoy, I can say unreservedly we are pumped up to be a part of a vibrant organization like Vision Critical.

Smoking Hot Data and Text Analytics: DiscoverText, Gnip, and the Health Media Collaboratory from Stuart Shulman on Vimeo.

New collaboration brings greater social data coverage to research, education, and commercial users.

Texifter, a text analytics start-up, is launching access to two new major blog data streams as part of its collaboration with Columbia University: the WordPress fire hose, which gives access to every comment or post on every WordPress blog, and the Disqus PowerTrack, both provided by Gnip, the world’s largest provider of social data.

“We provide the tools that allow Fortune 1000 companies and market research firms to analyze the massive amounts of unstructured data available from blogs, social media sites, surveys, and email,” says CEO Dr. Stuart Shulman. Dr. Shulman is also a political science professor and director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “We are excited about the collaboration with Columbia University and the acquisition of two vibrant and important blog data streams.”

 Texifter provides cost-effective web-based software for text analytics using unstructured data. Its flagship product, DiscoverText, is a cloud-based software solution that supports advanced filtering, clustering, human coding, and machine learning with unstructured text data. Commercial enterprises, education institutions, and government agencies use DiscoverText for storing and sifting through large amounts of social media data from sources like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. DiscoverText users develop custom, reusable machine-learning text classifiers, which provide fast and valuable insights. The text analytics process reveals common themes in unstructured data as well as unique, infrequent, or unanticipated findings.

At Columbia University, researchers are utilizing these data to study the role of opinion leaders and other intermediaries in the spread of news links via social media.

“By using DiscoverText and Gnip data streams,” notes Dr. Augustin Chaintreau of the Computer Science Department, “we understand this behavior better and can model the role of social networks in creating contextual meaning around important news events.”

Founded in 2009, Texifter‘s current clients include: Google, Volvo, QVC-UK, the National Library of Norway, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Comptroller of the Currency.

Website: http://texifter.com

“The October 30, 2012 Sentiment Analysis Symposium in San Francisco will be the 5th instance of a premier business-focused conference, the only conference that will teach you about technology and solutions that help you discover business value in opinions, emotions, and attitudes in social media, news, and enterprise feedback.

Should you attend the symposium? Yes, if you want to lead the competition – in customer satisfaction and support, brand and reputation management, financial services, product design and marketing, and an array of other business processes – if you understand the advantage you will gain in understanding customer, market, employee, investor, and political sentiment, emotion, mood, and opinion.”

Over the final month of the US election, we will be testing and refining statistical language models that capture the use of political fear words in social media. A sample of the words in play is shown here.

Check back on October 30, when we will be launching a new political fear index days before the 2012 presidential election.

Texifter

This is, however, a very fast-moving landscape for for social #bigdata. We are quickly transitioning from the alpha “Snaphot” tests to the beta of a cradle-to-grave system for building estimates for the cost of text analytic projects that feature either the real-time day-forward, Gnip-enabled Power Track (the Twitter fire hose), or the new historical Power Track. So if you have ever wished you could go back in time and collect all the tweets from an epic moment in history, your wish just came true. Contact us if you have any questions and submit a request for a free estimate today.

Early attempts to list useful social media metrics quit counting somewhere beyond 100 different measures, yet the quality of these online analytics has been questioned from the start. More often the concern has been about return on investment (ROI) and marketing potential. Last month in Chicago, I assembled a panel of experts to sort out what journalism and mass communication professors should be teaching their students about measurement.

Jeremy Harris Lipschultz, Professor and Director
University of Nebraska at Omaha’s School of Communication

This was a very bright group and the discussion was excellent.

We are building up a pool of coders for some new projects. If you are good at labeling text this may be an excellent opportunity for you. Graduate students are particularly welcome to join the pool. Coders accepted into the pool get free access to professional level DiscoverText during months when they are coding. Get paid to learn to use state of the art text analytics software. To apply, please visit http://bit.ly/U6yPzD.

Never miss a tweet. Full coverage with no rate limits. Powerful search rules, text analytics, clustering and machine-learning via custom machine classifiers.

Would you like every tweet from @GOPconvention, #RNC2012, #Romney, #TeaParty, or any person whose Twitter bio contains “Romney”?

This will be the most social media-driven convention in political history.

These are just a few of the possible queries you can capture during the GOP convention next week using DiscoverText and the Gnip Power Track for Twitter.

We are offering an election special through Midnight EST Sunday August 26th, 2012. If you purchase access to the Gnip Power Track as well as at least a 1-month Professional DiscoverText license, we will cut the Gnip access fee in half and double the number of free Tweets you get with access to 200,000.

This is half off the normal access fee and double the free tweet quota.

To take advantage of this election special, please contact us this weekend.