Listening to cats talk

It’s difficult to run a product analysis when the purchaser isn’t the end user, such as with children’s clothes or many gifts. It’s that much harder to understand your consumers’ opinions when they don’t speak English, or any known human language. This is a problem that pet food producers have to contend with. However, Luminoso … Read more

John Boehner has a bad day on Facebook

If you’ve ever accidentally hosted a political flame war on your Facebook wall, you might be in sympathy with House Speaker John Boehner right about now. On Wednesday afternoon, Speaker Boehner confirmed that the House of Representatives would vote on an agreement that would raise the US federal debt ceiling and end the government shutdown.  … Read more

Emoji and text analytics

If you write software that handles text, you should expect to have your fundamental assumptions about how text works shaken up about once per decade. It’s happening again around now. Suddenly, a large volume of text contains characters that not all software is ready to support. Three years ago, these characters didn’t exist, but they’ve … Read more

Enron: Evil vs. football

At Luminoso, we sometimes combine our serious analytics with something a bit more fanciful. We were pitching to a company that deals with internal corporate documents — there are lots of fun things we can do with text analytics and a lot of internal documents — but where on earth are we going to get … Read more