We are releasing version 3.7 of Brandwatch this week. In fact we release new functionality and enhancements every other week, as part of minor releases. But this week’s update wraps up nicely the last four month’s work - and it is a nice time to look back and see the changes Brandwatch has been through.
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Over the last 30 years, many tasks that humans once performed have been automated, encoded and passed over to computers. It’s the drive for efficiency that Bill Gates still talks about today. The internet however, never started off as a human-powered system so there was nothing to automate. But recently we have been witnessing the emergence of human-powered applications such as Social Search that are in some way competing with fully automated systems.
I hear this question quite often: how is the housing market doing? Let’s try to answer that.
First, define what precise information you want to know: whether the cost of buying (or renting) a property is going up, or down, and by how much, in a particular area (say Brighton). (more…)
When compared to certain parts of the internet, spam is a beautiful, poetic and inventive thing. It really really is.
In some (lots of) parts of the net there is a tipping point where spam has more going for it than human utterances. Spam is more open to new ideas, more thoughtful, less repetitive, less myopic than lots and lots of forums and blog sites, online culture magazines, etc. And it’s getting more complex and more inventive, while some blogs and forums are beginning to feed off themselves and on themselves.
Using machines to understand text is a big part of what we do here at Brandwatch. And sentiment analysis is part of it. As wikipedia nicely puts it;
“Generally speaking, [sentiment analysis] aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic”. (more…)
Seth Godin wrote a moving post yesterday about worthiness. He writes almost as a stream of consciousness and makes some great points. I like the last one best
“The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.”
Which leads to the question how good is good enough. How quickly should you release. In particular, this applies nicely to software. How many bugs are acceptable before making a release? Or what level of bug is acceptable to let through? (more…)
