Brand sentiment tool, Wise Window, unveils free service

Provider of business intelligence tools launches MOBI for smaller companies

Monitoring what consumers are saying online to gauge demand and sentiment isn't new. But understanding the millions of voices across the Web and analyzing trends based off that information continues to be something companies are iterating on and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to perfect.  

Wise Window is one of those companies iterating on this service since 2007. It currently offers such business analytics or intelligence to large corporations in 14 verticals, such as automative and electronics.
As of Friday, the Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based company is opening up its service to a broader audience by allowing anyone to sample its analytics engine. 

"MOBI (Mass Opinion Business Intelligence) is an entirely new source of business intelligence, a new gauge for consumer sentiment," said Sid Mohasseb, founder and CEO, in an interview with me. "We have been getting requests from a wide variety of potential users...  So we decided to build a store and provide the data for people's use and experimentation and make it free during the Beta phase. 

"Additionally, I think folks who are spending endless hours now trying to get to sift through key word driven none industry specific data from tweeter firehouse providers and other listening technologies can get access to much more accurate and relevant data that can actually be actionable and beneficial faster - I guess we want them to taste the 'real' thing!"

Since inception, the five-year-old company has targeted large customers, such as Hyundai, Mazda and Reuters, just to name a few. Customers have been paying anywhere between $100,000 and $140,000 annually to get access to the data, which is aggregated from millions of sites. 

The system is pretty complex and flexible. 

As an example, if you want to understand what people are saying about BMW, Audi, Acura and Honda in the context of fuel economy, the system will show you which brand has the lion's share of consumer mindshare and how that breaks down into positive or negative sentiment. See image below.

Now Wise Window hopes to expand its customer base by offering a free version, in hopes of upselling in the future. 

Whether it's enough of an offering is yet to be known. Buzzlogic started off as a social media monitoring service only to re-launch as an advertising network. 

Regardless of the model, clearly, the market for analyzing the Web is pretty large. Wal-Mart recently bought Kosmix for $300 million. Kosmix had technology to categorize and organize information on the Web that could help Wal-Mart recommend products to its customers. Five months later, Walmart went on to snap up OneRiot to put more tools in its social commerce tool chest.