- NetBase Solutions, Inc.
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NetBase Solutions, Inc. 
Type Private Industry Natural Language Processing
Social Media Measurement
Market ResearchFounded 2004 Founder(s) Jonathan Spier and Michael Osofsky Headquarters Mountain View, CA, USA Area served Worldwide Key people Peter Caswell, CEO
Mark Bowles, CTO
Lisa Joy Rosner, CMO
Dr. Wei Li, Chief ScientistProducts NetBase Insight Workbench Employees 50 [1] Website netbase.com NetBase Solutions, Inc. is a Mountain View, CA based developer of natural language processing technology used to analyze social media and other web content. The technology is used in a subscription-based social media analytics product that was created in partnership with five of the top ten Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies, including The Coca-Cola Company and Kraft.[2][3][4]
Contents
History
NetBase was founded by Jonathan Spier and Michael Osofsky, both of whom were engineers at Ariba, in 2004 as Accelovation, based on the combination of the words “acceleration” and “innovation.”[5][6]
Prior to co-founding Accelovation, Michael had the experience of working on a product development project at Ariba for a year before it was scrapped. He realized the importance of aligning problems with the potential products that can solve them. Accelovation was founded to help companies find a way to identify what customers really want and what they’re saying about products.[7]
Example of NetBase’s monthly Brand Passion Index
- February, 2008: Accelovation changed its name to NetBase[8][9]
- October, 2009: IDC named NetBase an Innovative Information Access Company Under $100 Million to Watch.[10]
- March, 2010: NetBase launched analytics tools that access ConsumerBase, the NetBase datastore of social media consumer opinion. Shortly afterward, the company began using this information to publish monthly brand passion indexes (BPI) showing how brands compare in a specific category on the company blog.[11][12]
- March, 2011: NetBase Insight Workbench was released
- Today: NetBase works with universities such as the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the NYU Stern School of Business and Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management to give students hands-on experience doing market research and social media work using NetBase software.[13]
Funding
The company has raised a total of nearly $20 million in funding primarily from Altos Ventures and Thomvest Ventures.[14] This includes $3 million in 2005, $4 million in 2007, $9 million in 2010 and $2.5 million in debt financing in 2010.[5][11][14] In September 2011, Netbase received an undisclosed amount from In-Q-Tel, a CIA-based nonprofit, in order to fund the development of next-generation semantic search capabilities with potential to assist the intelligence community.[15]
Leadership
The current CEO Peter Caswell, former Siperian and Advent CEO, was appointed in April, 2011[16] The company’s marketing advisory board includes current and former executives from Taco Bell, PepsiCo, Yahoo! and Procter & Gamble.[17] Former TIBCO co-inventor, patent author and CTO Mark Bowles is now the CTO at NetBase and held responsible for many technical achievements in scalability.[3] Computational linguist Dr. Wei Li leads natural language processing development. NetBase CMO Lisa Joy Rosner, former Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at BroadVision, is an ARF Great Minds award winner.[15]
Products & Services
Screenshot of NetBase Insight Workbench dashboardWith licensing costs for NetBase products and services estimated to be around $100,000 USD, their softwares are primarily a social media measurement solution for enterprise level companies.[18] NetBase sells a tool called NetBase Insight Workbench that gives market researchers and social marketers a set of analytics, charts and research tools on a subscription basis. ConsumerBase is what the company calls the back-end technology that crawls, indexes and analyses information on the Web using natural language processing. The tools are used by market research firms like J.D. Power & Associates and GfK.
ConsumerBase indexes up to 12 months of online activity and uses natural language processing to consolidate and report on thematic sentiments, opinions and brand perspectives.[19] Natural language processing uses “stop-words” such as “because”, “by”, “for” or “after” that traditional search engines such as Google ignore.[9] For the average NetBase user, 12 months of activity is twenty billion sound bites from just over seven billion digital documents. The company claims to index 50,000 sentences a minute from sources like public-facing Facebook, blogs, forums, Twitter and consumer review sites.[2][4][20]
Generally NetBase is known for its level of sophistication in natural language processing that understands words in context. For example, the word “burn” can be negative in some contexts, but users of mouthwash often describe a burning sensation as a confirmation the mouthwash works. Many are skeptical computers can be effective in interpreting intended meaning of sentences. Insight Workbench competes with tools such as Radian6, Scout Labs, Sysomos or Alterian that are intended to respond to individual digital conversations.[3][19]
NetBase’s natural language processing technology is also white-labeled by Reed Elsevier in a product called illumin8.[21] illumin8 uses NetBase’s technology on Elsevier’s database of academic periodicals, journals and scientific research content for R&D professionals, especially in medical, science and technology fields.
Uses
NetBase markets itself to insight professionals, brand and marketing managers, R&D innovation heads and product managers as a market research tool. While some use it as a social media monitoring product, J.D. Power & Associates said that they expect NetBase and similar tools to replace focus groups and traditional market research, because it is faster and cheaper than traditional research methods.[22]
Kraft also uses NetBase to measure customer needs and create products to match.[23]
Some interesting applications:
- One blogger showed that only 51% of online conversations on Listerine had to do with killing germs. The product was also being used to kill toenail fungus and as a mosquito repellent.[19][24]
- In 2009, a large consumer company asked 100 research firms why men wear facial stubble. NetBase found 77,000 mentions of stubble in six seconds and within an hour had ranked the reasons in a chart. The top reason was men felt it was sexy.[4]
- According to NetBase, people hate Wal-Mart but love Costco.[25]
- In 2011 the company released a report based on 18 billion postings over twelve months on the most loved tech companies. Salesforce.com, Cisco Systems and Netflix were among the top three.[26]
- Also in 2011, NetBase determined news of Osama Bin Laden eclipsed the royal wedding and the Japan earthquake in online activity.[27]
- The Facebook-funded smear campaign against Google in 2010 made major headlines, but had no lasting effect on either brand for more than a couple days.[28]
Competitors
- Crimson Hexagon
- Collective Intellect
- Radian6
- Attensity
- Networked Insight
External links
- NetBase Corporate Site
- NetBase Blog
- NetBase 11for11: Netbase's educational social media webinar series
References
- ^ NetBase LinkedIn Profile
- ^ a b By Neil Glassman, Social Times. “What Every Social Media Marketer Should Know About NetBase.” August 24, 2010.
- ^ a b c By David F. Carr, InformationWeek. “How Much is your Brand Loved (or Hated)?” June 16, 2011.
- ^ a b c By Ryan Flinn, BusinessWeek. “Wanted: Social Media Sifters.” October 21, 2010.
- ^ a b By Matt Marshall, VentureBeat. “Accelovation Raises $4M for online software for IT market research.” December 3, 2007.
- ^ BusinessWeek profile
- ^ By Jennifer Zaino, netnography.com. “What’s The Inspiration for Semantic Web Innovation?”
- ^ By Barbara Quint, Information Today. “Elsevier and NetBase Launch illumin8.” February 28, 2008.
- ^ a b The Economist. “Improving Innovation.” February 29, 2008.
- ^ Press Release. "NetBase Named an Innovative Information Access Company to Watch by a Leading Market Research Firm". January 12, 2010.
- ^ a b NetBase Timeline on Crunchbase
- ^ By Rachael King, BusinessWeek. “Most Loved -- And Hated -- Tech Companies.”
- ^ Press Release. NetBase. “NetBase Brings Social Media Smarts to University Classrooms.” June 30, 2011.
- ^ a b By Jon Xavier, BizJournals. “NetBase filters social media for what clients need to know.” June 3, 2011.
- ^ a b By Elizabeth Montalbano, InformationWeek. "CIA Invests in Semantic Search, Wireless Networking." September 28, 2011.
- ^ San Jose Mercury News. “People on the Move.” May 15, 2011.
- ^ Advisory Board Page
- ^ By Eric Schoenfeld, TechCrunch. "NetBase Offers Powerful Semantic Indexing Platform That Reads The Web." April 22, 2009.
- ^ a b c By Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer. “ConsumerBase Makes Market Research Faster, Cheaper.” May 24, 2010
- ^ By Tom Anderson, Next Gen Market Research. “Part II: NetBase Responds.” May 24, 2010.
- ^ By Barbara Quint, Newsbreak. "Elsevier and NetBase Launch illumin8." February 28, 2008.
- ^ By Jon Xavier, BizJournals. "NetBase filters social media for what clients need to know." June 3, 2011.
- ^ By David F. Carr, InformationWeek. “How Kraft Foods Listens to Social Media.” June 30, 2011.
- ^ Slideshare: Listerine Assessment on Social Media
- ^ By Eric Lam, Financial Post. “New social media index tracks ‘brand passion’.” May 26, 2010.
- ^ By Ryan Flinn, Bloomberg. “Tech companies measure online sentiment.” May 19, 2011.
- ^ By Geoffrey Fowler and Alexandra Berzon, Wall Street Journal. “Social Media Buzzes, Comes Into Its Own.” May 2, 2011.
- ^ By Lauren Indvik, Mashable. “Facebook Smear Campaign has no Lasting Effect on Facebook or Google.” May 19, 2011.
Categories:- Computer companies of the United States
- Natural language processing
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