This week, Twitter announced the launch of its Twitter Ads API to allow advertisers to manage Twitter ad campaigns programatically and at scale. Twitter also announced five initial partners who will use the Ads API to offer real-time Twitter advertising features to their customers. Among these partners are two of our very own partners: Salesforce and HootSuite. 

While the release of the Ads API promises to usher in a new era of “real-time marketer content to the platform”, the key issue facing advertisers now is how to optimize ad performance for a real-time, rapid-fire, interest-based network like Twitter. Relying on traditional web marketing and ad buying strategies will certainly not do the trick nor will replicating ad campaigns used on other networks like Facebook or Pinterest.

The key to ad success on Twitter will be for advertisers to match their campaigns and messaging to the life cycle of user engagement on Twitter. With the half-life of content on Twitter at around three hours, being able to predict what messaging and content will engage users within these brief engagement windows will be critical for effective ad performance. 

This is where TrendSpottr comes in. TrendSpottr’s real-time predictive analytics automatically identify and recommend the most optimal keywords, hashtags and content for any ad buying campaign. These recommendations are based on the projected trends, viral growth and social engagement on Twitter over the next engagement window. By using our predictive ad recommendations, advertisers will continually “skate to where the puck is going to be” and organically supercharge the performance of their Twitter ad campaigns.

TrendSpottr’s predictive ad recommendation technology will soon be integrated into social ad buying platforms. In the meantime, advertisers can get started today by subscribing to TrendSpottr Dashboard and TrendSpottr Alerts to surface predictive trending data that is relevant to their ad campaigns. 

It’s that time of the year when technology pundits, mavens and analysts gaze into their crystal balls and make their predictions and prognostications for the next 12 months.

One of the hottest technology sectors over the past year and one that most industry observers agree will continue to grow in importance and reach in 2013 is Big Data. Big Data is more than just a buzzword. It’s real, significant and is driving disruptive changes in major markets like healthcare, finance, retail, media and advertising. Gartner forecasts that in 2013, Big Data will drive $34 billion of enterprise spending. 

While the overall market for Big Data will grow by over 20% this year, many industry experts anticipate significant changes in the type of Big Data solutions that will gain market share in 2013. For example, Forrester Research predicts that “real-time architectures will swing to prominence in 2013.” Specifically, Forrester states that:

Firms will seek out streaming, event processing, and in-memory data technologies to provide real-time analytics and run predictive models…In 2013, enterprise architects will step out of their ivory towers to once again focus on technology — real-time technology that is highly available, scalable, and performant.

Forrester also predicts that in 2013 the demand for actionable insights and advanced analytics will require Big Data solutions to extend beyond simple rules-based models and incorporate sophisticated statistical algorithms. 

Advanced analytics uses advanced statistical, data mining, and machine learning algorithms to dig deeper to find patterns that you can’t see using traditional BI tools, simple queries, or rules. Big data is the fuel. Algorithms are the engine to explore virgin data, seek out new meaning and models, and deliver more personalized, contextualized customer experiences.

Investors are also predicting that 2013 will witness major changes in the way Big Data solutions are delivered and architected. For example, Hollie Moore Haynes, managing director with tech-focused private equity firm Silver Lake, predicts that 2013 will usher in Big Data’s second act. 

The second act of Big Data is about action. This time intelligence will go beyond reporting. It will live at the heart of the organization, not at the edges. It will involve moving from historical insight to predictive information, enabling managers to make smarter decisions.

So there you have it. Big Data in 2013 will continue to be a big deal. More importantly, the solutions that will likely win the day (or the year, as it were) will look a lot like TrendSpottr: real-time, predictive and algorithmic. 

Here’s to the pundits and to a fabulously successful 2013!  

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Salesforce.com to bring TrendSpottr’s real-time and predictive analytics service to thousands of Salesforce customers directly through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

Starting today, TrendSpottr will help Salesforce customers get “ahead of the curve” by identifying the most important emerging trends from their topic profiles. By using TrendSpottr, companies will be better positioned to anticipate crises and opportunities, optimize content marketing, identify real-time influencers with high viral influence, enhance social SEO strategies and increase their social and business intelligence capabilities.

TrendSpottr is available directly from the Radian 6 and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Dashboard and can be purchased via Salesforce’s new credits-based currency system. 

The TrendSpottr service automatically identifies the top trending links, hashtags and users from customers’ topic profiles. In addition, TrendSpottr expands shortened links such as “t.co” to reveal the source domain and URL for top trending links making it easier than ever for companies to gain useful insights from their social data. TrendSpottr can be used to view top trends by time period to allow for comparative analysis and insight.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new premium product TrendSpottr Dashboard, a robust real-time service that identifies top trending data for any keyword, topic or hashtag.

The Dashboard is specifically designed for enterprises, brands, news organizations, PR agencies and social media power users. Anyone who needs to continuously monitor and discover emerging trends related to their company, product, industry or topics of interest will love this new service.

Many companies are already using TrendSpottr Dashboard to enhance their crisis and issue management systems, optimize their content marketing strategies and increase their social and business intelligence. You too can use TrendSpottr Dashboard to get ahead of the curve with real-time and predictive trend analysis.

TrendSpottr Dashboard uses a familiar tab and column interface to allow users to easily create, organize and monitor multiple simultaneous trend searches. All tabs and trending searches are saved to enable continuous real-time trendspotting. Trending insights can easily be shared and posted to social networks and within the organization. 

TrendSpottr Dashboard is available as a monthly subscription at $99/per user and includes a 7 day free trial.

With TrendSpottr Widgets anyone can now customize and embed TrendSpottr trending content on their website, blog or social network page. TrendSpottr Widgets are ideal for publishers, bloggers and content sites that want to engage their audience with the most timely and trending content for any topic or keyword.

A sports website like Goal.com can now create a TrendSpottr Widget that will display the top trending real-time news and stories about the beautiful game. Or, a lifestyle blog like Jezebel can customize a TrendSpottr Widget that will display real-time trends about fashion and celebrities. TrendSpottr Widgets are also perfect for social media users that want to customize their Blogger or Tumblr themes with relevant trending content from across the social web.

TrendSpottr Widgets display “more signal and less noise” than a Twitter search widget by highlighting emerging stories, news and events with high viral potential rather than a chronological stream of tweets. TrendSpottr Widgets provide  a much easier way for your website visitors and blog readers to view and consume the most timely, important and engaging content right on your site.

Customize your own free TrendSpottr Widget and add it to your website or blog.  

Earlier this week, Fred Gallagher of Actian Corporation, wrote a guest post on GigaOm titled, “Big Data: The quick and the dead”. In the post, Fred challenges the conventional thinking about Big Data; specifically, “the implied premise that bigger is better and that adding more data will naturally produce insights.” Fred goes on to note that about 95 percent of data in a data warehouse is dormant and that adding terabytes or petabytes of unstructured data to this data warehouse is likely to make dormant data, dead data. What businesses need and what ultimately drives business value, Fred correctly notes is “live “quick” data not dormant or dead data.”

At TrendSpottr, we believe that one of the most disruptive Big Data opportunities is the real-time analysis of “live” data elements. More specifically, our focus is on identifying trends and predictive insights from real-time, incremental streams of Big Data; i.e, a predictive early warning system based on real-time pattern recognition and analysis of the velocity and acceleration of living data. The reality, as Fred notes, is that most of the data that is being analyzed today by Big Data implementations is dormant or dead. By focusing on only those data elements that provide the potential for insight and action, we can leverage the potential of Big Data by making sure it’s alive! 

Finally, a quick plug for TrendSpottr cofounder and CTO, Alain Chesnais. In addition to being the technical architect of the TrendSpottr service and the source of one of our favourite recent quotes, “What we’re doing is actually playing the role of an automated data scientist for you. Now you can consume big data without needing a Ph.D in statistics”, Alain also serves as President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific and computing organization.

This week, the ACM is in Warsaw, Poland hosting the prestigious and highly competitive International Collegiate Programming Contest. The results are now in and the winner of this year’s ICPC is St. Petersburg State University. The University of Warsaw came in second place and our very own University of Waterloo came in ninth place. Congratulations to all the teams and to the ACM and Alain for hosting this amazing event. 

We’ve received some great feedback and reviews about TrendSpottr since the recent update to our home page and the release of the latest version of our API. 

Last week we were profiled by French website Outilsveille which reviews consumer web applications and online curation tools. Their detailed review highlighted TrendSpottr’s utility and value in surfacing emerging trends from Twitter and Facebook for any topic or search term. The review went on to describe how TrendSpottr can be used to quickly identify relevant content, hashtags and influencers for trending news and events. The article concluded by stating: “If you want to track a live event or if you are interested in the latest buzzs on personalities, brands or things TrendSpottr is for you.”

This morning we were pleased to find out that we received a 5 star review from AppAppeal, a site that provides comprehensive reviews and rankings of web applications.  

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AppAppeal’s review focuses on the usability, design and core functionality of the TrendSpottr service. It  notes that “[TrendSpottr] has many uses and provides more detail than the typical search engine.” In addition to providing TrendSpottr with a 5 star review, AppAppeal recommends that: “TrendSpottr is a great resource for anyone who needs to track a topic. The application can also offer an interesting way to explore topics of interest for casual users. The service shows a variety of results, sorted by type. Users can also see trend strength to view the most popular content. A search is available as well as a list of popular search trends to help the user get started.”

While it’s great to receive positive feedback and reviews, we’re not taking anything for granted or resting on any laurels. Within the next few weeks we’ll be releasing some exciting new features and products that will extend the value and reach of TrendSpottr for both enterprises and consumers. Stay tuned!

A number of updates to our main site and our HootSuite app launched today. Our brand new home page provides more information about the use cases, value proposition and users of our service. We’ve put together an overview video that walks through all of the new goodness that’s now available on our HootSuite app.

Among all of today’s updates, there’s one feature in particular that we’d like to highlight. It’s called Trending Sources and it’s simply awesome. Trending Sources provides a real-time view of the top Twitter sources that are most active and mentioned for any keyword, topic or issue. Enter a search term or select a topic and Trending Sources provides an instant, real-time view of the top user accounts that are driving the most engagement and activity around that query. 

This morning searching for “Nike” using the brand new Trending Sources feature revealed that the top user driving the conversation around Nike at that moment was @kicksonfire, the #1 source for sneaker news. 

TrendSpottr is a great insight and engagement tool for brands, publishers and social media users, now made even more powerful with the addition of Trending Sources. It provides a real-time view of those users that are driving the most engagement around a product, news story or issue. 

Give it a try by heading over to HootSuite and adding the TrendSpottr app or use it on our main site.