While web data, especially social media data, grows exponentially, the vast array of opportunities for using real-time web data to improve analysis and decision making is limited only by your imagination.  These days, companies must incorporate Web data into their intelligence and analysis tools in order to compete. In some industries it’s a matter of survival.

Real-time data is where the answers are.  It’s where market and customer trends are immediately identifiable.  It’s where deals will be won and where winners will claim their trophies.

Reality Buzz

We recently built something 30M Americans can relate to – a way to predict American Idol and other reality show results based on data harvested from popular social media sites.

Every week on American Idol, contestants perform, their fans dial-in their support for their favorites, and the next day contestants are voted off the show.  During the performances, and for several hours after, fans tweet about and discuss their favorites online, showing support for the ones they want to see voted through to the next show.

We scrape thousands of pieces of web data from twitter, Facebook, forums and discussion sites around the web, apply sentiment analysis, analyze the data, and make predictions about the person(s) to be eliminated from the show, all in the span of a few hours.

We built the robots (automated web data collection processes) in a matter of hours.  Now they are automated to collect the data, transform unstructured data into structured data, and load it into a MySQL database.

In the last two weeks starting with the top 12 contestants, we’ve successfully predicted the American Idol contestant to be eliminated hours before the elimination show aired.  For more information on our latest predictions and to learn more, please visit Reality Buzz on Facebook.

Imagine what you could do for your business with Kapow’s Web Data Server and a few hours creating Kapow robots.  Real-time web data can fuel predictive analytics capabilities to give your company an unfair advantage.

Over 400 Kapow customers are jumping in with both feet.  What’s stopping you?  Learn more on our Kapowtech.com website, or contact us for a Free Trial of the Kapow Web Data Server.

By:  Rick Kawamura