Repustate - What the web is thinking
To kickoff the launch of Repustate.com's new natural language processing API toolkit, the company is holding a contest dubbed "So You Think You Can Mash?", offering a free trip to Kenya, courtesy of Intrepid Travel, and a $250 cash prize to whomever can create the most unique mashup using Repustate's API and any other public APIs available. The contest runs until July 1st when a winner will be announced.
As the proliferation of social media and user generated content continues, the need for tools to harness all of this data grows, too. Nowadays, information is just a commodity; the true value lies in extracting out valuable insights from all of the noise. To meet this challenge, Repustate.com, a Toronto-based natural language analytics firm, is launching a completely free and open API toolkit to allow market research firms, PR companies and enterprising developers that ability to crack open all of the hidden bits of useful information. Repustate's API provides an easy way to extract sentiment, related entities and keywords from any content or data source. With these powerful tools, interesting information can now be attained. An example query could be: "Show me all companies that are mentioned in articles that are negative about the iPad" or "What is the probability that a review for the new iPhone will be negative?".
"Most companies in the field of semantic search and sentiment analysis always provide these walled-garden solutions - pay us first and then we'll let you in," says co-founder Martin Ostrovsky. "At Repustate we wanted to do things differently. We're providing companies with the tools they need to build creative, unique solutions for their marketing needs. Since our API is free and open, any developer can build his or her own product and in turn sell it. Or a market research firm can use its own in-house developers to build innovative products for their clients. We want others to piggy back off our technology."
Like other popular web-based APIs, such as Facebook's and Twitter's, Repustate's API is easy to use and takes no time to get started, requiring just a unique key obtained for free by signing up at Repustate.com. As for future developments, Ostrovsky explains, "We're working with marketing and PR agencies to understand what kind of tools they need and which analytics are important for them. We'll continue to add these to our API so that everyone can share in the process and expand their offerings."
To continue to build and expand upon the company's offerings, Ostrovsky says Repustate is adopting a unique approach never tried before. "We're crowd sourcing our feature set. We want our developer partners to tell us which functions they'd like to see us build into the API and then we'll build them, free of charge. It's like having your own development team for free."
