Digital Dawn is proud to announce that it has been selected to work with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) on two of projects aimed at improving public media’s digital capabilities.

“We are extremely honored to have the opportunity to help shape the future of public broadcasting in the United States,” said Andrew S. Feigenson, Managing Director of Digital Dawn. “Since Public Broadcasting isn’t tied to legacy advertising models, it is in a great position to lead the industry in new directions and to meet audience demands in innovative ways.”

One project involves defining the next version of public media’s metadata standard, PB Core, in order to facilitate the interchange of content with entities both inside and outside of public media and to pave the way for the creation of the American Archive. “While metadata sounds like technology, it is really a fundamental business concept,” said David Garland, Partner at Digital Dawn. “Metadata helps a media organization to maximize the value of content, by enabling reuse and wide distribution. At the same time, it helps to reduce costs, by enabling all-digital workflows.”

The other project will be aimed at developing an investment strategy for increasing the overall efficiency and capabilities of public media stations’ Web operations. “Public media has more than 1,100 stations, ranging in size from small university licensees to large national producers,” said Mr. Feigenson. “It is important for the country that all of these stations are equipped to meet the needs of an increasingly online and digitally savvy audience.”

Founded in 2008, Digital Dawn has built a team of professionals with expertise in almost all aspects of media, from content programming to operational management to information technology and metadata sciences. With these CPB projects, Digital Dawn continues to grow as an integral participant and leader in the evolving Media Industry.

About the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)

CPB is a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in 1967 and is steward of federal investment in public broadcasting. It helps support the operations of more than 1,100 locally-owned and -operated public television and radio stations nationwide, and is the largest single source of funding for research, technology, and program development for public radio, television and related online services.

About Digital Dawn

Digital Dawn (www.digital-dawn.com) provides management and technology services that help Media, Entertainment and Technology clients build for the future, while increasing current business results. Clients include major technology companies, large media conglomerates, venture capitalists and early and late stage start-up companies.

Digital Dawn’s team of professionals has both strategic and practical experience as senior executives at some of the world’s leading firms, which allows us to deliver results that are forward thinking and, at the same time, achievable. The company is based in New York City and has professionals located in cities across the United States, Europe and Asia.

Media Contact:

Digital Dawn, LLC

info@digital-dawn.com

646-355-8082

(Washington, DC) – - The Corporation for Public Broadcasting today announced the launch of the PBCore 2.0 Development Project.

The PBCore 2.0 Development Project will expand the existing PBCore metadata standard to increase the ability, on one hand, of content producers and distributors using digital media to classify and describe public media content (audio and video) and, on the other, of audiences to find public media content on a variety of digital media and mobile platforms.

The PBCore 2.0 Development Project will also work to enhance the PBCore standard to ensure that it will be able to satisfy the demands of multiplatform digital content as well as an evolving World Wide Web. Since PBCore’s development in 2005, it has become not only one of the most widely-used metadata standards in the world, but also the basis of other metadata standards. At the same time, in the last five years, the number of digital media applications that would benefit from PBCore has grown significantly. An updated PBCore will benefit not only public broadcasters, but all users of metadata standards based on PBCore.

PBCore 2.0 will be managed by WGBH, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions and Digital Dawn. More information on the PBCore 2.0 Development Project will be available at http://www.pbcore.org starting in mid-April. Please refer inquiries to Marcia Brooks of WGBH.

(Click Here for Full article)

Congratulations to Jack Welde and Smartling for raising their Series A.

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Without Health Reform, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow
by David Leonhardt
Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Original Article: http://finance.yahoo.com/insurance/article/108403/without-health-reform-americas-innovation-gap-will-grow?mod=insurance-health

Greg Woock is the chief executive of Pinger, a fast-growing Silicon Valley company that makes iPhone applications. So Mr. Woock spends a fair amount of time interviewing job applicants. In almost every interview, he told me recently, the applicant asks about Pinger’s health insurance plan.

Now think about that for a minute.

In the cradle of American innovation, workers are making career choices based on co-payments, pre-existing conditions and other minutiae of health insurance. They are not necessarily making decisions based on what would be best for their careers and, in turn, for the American economy — that is, “where their skills match and where they can grow the most,” as another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Cyriac Roeding, says. Health insurance, Mr. Roeding adds, “is distorting the decision-making.”

It is impossible to know how much economic damage these distortions are causing, but they clearly aren’t good. Economic research suggests that more than 1.5 million workers who would otherwise have switched jobs fail to do so every year because of fears about health insurance. Some of them would have moved to companies where they could have contributed more, and others would have started their own businesses.

This link between insurance and innovation isn’t relevant merely for the obvious reason that Congress is in the late stages of debating health reform. It is also relevant because the United States is suffering from an innovation deficit.

Even before the financial crisis, the decade that will end later this month was on pace to have the slowest economic growth of any since before World War II. The No. 1 reason, I’d argue, was our innovation deficit.

For most of this decade, the rate at which companies eliminated jobs was actually lower than in the 1990s (despite the stories you sometimes hear about the United States having entered a new era of economic instability). The problem was that companies weren’t creating enough new jobs. The rate at which existing companies added jobs declined 14 percent from the end of the 1990s to 2007, according to the Labor Department. The rate at which start-up companies created jobs fell even more: 24 percent.

Given the consequences of the innovation deficit — slower growth, fewer jobs, lower living standards — you would want to look for every possible solution, wouldn’t you?

You’d want to allow more talented immigrants to become citizens, so that the next Sergey Brin, Liz Claiborne or Andy Grove, immigrant entrepreneurs all, didn’t end up starting their companies elsewhere. You would want to clean up the tangled corporate tax code. You would want to finance more basic research.

And you would want to make people feel confident that they could take risks — start a new company or join a young one — without worrying about whether they would still receive adequate medical care.

Congress is now close to passing a very promising health reform bill. Neither the bill that the House passed last month nor the bill being debated in the Senate is good enough yet. But they are close.
More from Yahoo! Finance:

Ultimately, health reform will be judged by two yardsticks. The first will be whether it begins to shift medicine away from the corrosive fee-for-service system that leads to uneven results and soaring costs. The second will be whether people can easily buy insurance even if they don’t work for a large company or qualify for Medicare or Medicaid.

Silicon Valley, with its network of venture capital backers, figures out a way to get most of its workers some kind of health insurance. But many other entrepreneurs have a harder time of it. Only 46 percent of companies with three to nine employees offer health insurance, down from 56 percent a decade ago, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Why? The administrative costs of insurance are high when they aren’t spread over a large group of workers. Insurers also know that the individuals and small companies who sign up for health plans tend to be the ones with the most medical problems, pushing premiums for such plans even higher.

So unless the government steps in to create a large pool of workers who can then buy insurance more cheaply, many small companies will go without it — and some workers will find themselves tethered to the safety of a big company.

As Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told me, “There clearly are people who choose to stay in their jobs due to the fact that they don’t have insurance portability.” Just consider the economic research showing that people married to someone with health insurance are more likely to work at small companies than people who aren’t so lucky.

The path to a health bill that begins to solve both core problems — access and cost — is fairly clear, numerous health economists say. It involves combining the Senate provisions on cost and quality control (and, ideally, strengthening them) with the House provisions on insurance access. Ezra Klein, the blogger and health policy writer, refers to it as a “health care reform fantasy draft.”

The House bill does a good job of creating affordable insurance plans for the uninsured but does little to attack fee-for-service medicine. As a result, medical costs are likely to stay high for everyone.

The Senate bill, by contrast, has the “essential elements of a successful, fiscally responsible reform strategy,” according to a recent letter from 26 economists, including four Nobel Prize winners and two former directors of the Congressional Budget Office. But the Senate plan is too rough on the newly insured. It would force many of them to pay thousands of dollars a year out of pocket, on top of their premiums, for care.

“Take the Senate on cost control and the House on affordability,” Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T. argues, “and you’ve the best possible bill.”

And what if Congress — distracted by hot-button issues like drug imports, government-financed abortions and the so-called public option — produces something short of best? Should we then hope that it gives up and take another crack at health reform in, say, 2025?

Well, remember that this process was never going to be easy and was always going to be messy. But in the coming days and weeks, the choices before Congress will be straightforward: How can the bills still be improved? And once all the negotiating is over, will the final package seem likely to do more good than harm?

Last week, Medicare’s chief actuary came out with a report that offered some useful guidance on that second question. The report became fodder for critics of the bills because it estimated that the current Senate plan would raise national health spending slightly. Without health reform, the country would spend $4.67 trillion on medical care in 2019. With it, we would spend $20 billion more, a total of $4.69 trillion.

If you dug into the report, however, you discovered the main reason for the projected increase. Vastly more people — about 33 million — would have insurance if the Senate plan passed. “There are more people insured, and more people getting treatment,” the actuary, Rick Foster, said.

Yet health spending would rise by just 0.5 percent. The cost of insuring a given individual would be significantly reduced, in other words, and millions of people would no longer have to worry about whether they were insured.

Maybe one of those millions will end up starting the next great American company.

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Testimonial of Andrew S. Feigenson

Managing Director, Digital Dawn

Before the New York Council Committee on Technology and Government

Hearing on Promoting the High Technology Business Sector in New York City

December 16, 2009

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Members of the Council:

Good morning and thank you for inviting me to testify today. As a proud New Yorker and a supporter of the local technology industry, I appreciate the opportunity to offer my thoughts about how to continue growing our high technology economy.

To begin with, New York is a unique place, a huge economy and a powerhouse for many industries. However, it is still a disproportionately small player in the emerging technology sector. And since many of its core industries, like Media and Finance, are being actively challenged, it is more crucial than ever to address this gap.

While I can’t pretend to have all of the correct answers, I would like to offer six thoughts on what New York might do to create a more robust environment for high technology businesses.

Addressing (and Accepting) the Cost Issue.

Cost is an unavoidable issue for New York’s businesses.

Our real estate costs, living costs and salaries are among the highest in the country. And while a number of recent initiatives have begun to address this through things like incubator programs, New York’s overarching cost issues are based on macroeconomic variables that probably will not change in the near term.

If we accept this premise, then the local economy needs to find ways to compensate for its cost disadvantage by creating incentives, building better infrastructure, and opening new opportunities for revenue and idea creation.

Building Links to Industry.

New York is home to a disproportionate number of large companies, with the Tri-State area accounting for almost 18% of the Fortune 500 list.

While some of these companies and industries invest in research projects amongst themselves and run small venture funds, few have committed to helping build local technology communities.

More direct support from these established companies may create stronger incentives for high technology firms to locate themselves in New York and may help these very same industries find ways to re-invent their own businesses.

Developing New Funding Mechanisms.

Two problems face technology companies which are looking for capital in New York. First, there isn’t enough of it (as documented by the Council for the Urban Future). Second, the current Venture Capital model has been suffering since the dot.com bubble and needs to be tweaked to support certain types of emerging businesses.

Just a few examples of where I see gaps are: Niche Plays, which are companies that will never result in $1 billion IPOs but which represent solid and sustainable innovations; Creative Concepts, such as publishers and video creators, which have a hard time finding funding because of the seemingly speculative nature of their businesses; and Clean Technologies, which require large up front investments and have longer term payback horizons.

With all this said, I applaud the impact of local VCs like Union Square Ventures, RRE and the New York Angels for playing an invaluable role in growing New York’s technology community. And also call attention to some of the newest government programs like NYSeed and NY Accelerator for Renewable Economy.

Improving Access to Universities and Engineering Talent.

As home to some of the world’s top universities, one would expect more success in growing our technology industries directly from academic institutions, a point which is also noted in the Center for Urban Future’s report “Building New York City’s Innovation Economy.”

Taking this a bit further, I recently had the chance to visit China and was struck by the degree of emphasis that their country’s educational system places on building engineering talent.

In contrast, many of our brightest students find themselves creating new financial instruments or managing funds, which can be very lucrative professions but which bring little long-term value to the economy.

So, we would stand to benefit by improving technology transfer and by developing our engineering talent.

Fostering an Entrepreneurial Community.

New York’s entrepreneurial community has evolved immensely over the past decade, and it still has a way to go.

Groups like the NY Tech Meet-Up and its various offshoots are great venues for furthering our entrepreneurial spirit.

These groups should be encouraged and supported and would likely benefit from central, physical locations where entrepreneurs can cluster to share energy and ideas.

Facilitating International Partnerships.

Finally, New York’s technology companies exist in a global economy. Many of them outsource pieces of their development, sales and operations abroad. And, many of them also have opportunities to generate revenue by selling into foreign markets.

Smaller companies often find it difficult to source and negotiate international business relationships, due to a variety of complexities ranging from distance to language.

Understanding this reality, New York might be able to initiate programs that leverage its international status to assist in the globalization of its high technology companies.

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In conclusion, I would like to thank the Committee once again for giving me the opportunity to be here today. As founder of a company which works with large and small, Media and Technology businesses, this topic is very important to me and to my team. So, I hope that my testimony was has been helpful.

The book features a similar cover to Palin’s book, so similar, in fact, that many news sites have mistakenly interposed the two book titles and images. Fox News, for example, erroneously used the wrong book image twice during an interview.

Having had time to speak with one of the company’s founders, Colin Robinson, I am impressed by the company’s approach and results for a few reasons:

Speed to Market

• They went from concept to publication in approximately six weeks!
• This opens interesting opportunities to publish rapidly based on current events and market trends.

Distribution Strategy

• They have sold many thousands of books through a destination website, even before going through the major distribution channels at Amazon and Barnes and Noble
• Since they still plan to go through the major distribution channels, they have essentially windowed the publishing world in a manner similar movie releases, first selling it through their own channel (the most profitable channel) and later through Amazon and B&N

Customization

• When somebody orders a book, it is custom printed and shipped and the margins are STILL much better than mass book publishing (think of a world with now returns!)
• This opens mass customization opportunities that would be difficult for bulk publishers to provide.

Marketing

• With less money spent on distribution, OR is able to spend much more effectively on Marketing, which is evidenced by the huge amount of publicity around Going Rouge (Although, as a note, their marketing success is much more attributed to the creative marketing techniques of their team than to the size of their budget, which is still small in comparison to most major book releases).
• Since each order is a personalized order, the publisher now has a list of customers – something typically reserved for the distribution outlet!

While it is clear that not every genre lends itself to the same type of model pursued by OR Books, I do think that their success points towards one potential scenario for independent publishers – a scenario that is similar, in some ways, to the the highly publicized success of music artists which have gone direct-to-consumer, like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

The publisher of Palin’s book, Harper Collins, ma tend to agree, since they have reacted directly to OR Books by taking out ads on Google to direct buyers to the “official version” of Palin’s book.

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original article link: http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/creative/features/e3i26911e62ce1ee0f7aacab342156f4a5a

Crowd Control
Is turning to the masses for creative input a quick fix or the way of the future?
Nov 2, 2009
- Eleftheria Parpis

HP tries to stand out from the crowd.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky recently ignited an online debate and protest campaign on Twitter when it crowdsourced the design of a product logo for Brammo, an electric motorcycle start-up. Criticism mostly focused on the high-end agency taking such a low-cost route, as well as its putting creative into the hands of outsiders when experts were not just available, but the very ones passing it off.

For Brammo, crowdsourcing was more than just a way to stretch its budget. “We wanted to blur the line between [who works for Brammo] and [our] products,” says Brian Wismann, the company’s director of product development. “And it created its own buzz.”

Crowdsourcing creative — which includes user-generated contests, and receiving input on briefs and designs — is an increasingly popular option for marketers that want to add a consumer-engagement punch to their campaigns. It’s also controversial. Detractors call it gimmicky, say it encourages low-quality creative, and eschews strategic thinking and relationship management. But love it or hate it, this much seems clear: Not only is crowdsourcing here to stay, it’s picking up steam.

HP, for one, recently doled out $300,000 in prizes for its You on You Project, which asked participants to create Web videos in the style of its campaign, “The computer is personal again.” And Microsoft, pushing the idea that its users contributed to the development of its Windows 7 operating system, is asking for 7-second video demos for a Web series highlighting its features. Gayle Troberman, gm for advertising and consumer engagement at Microsoft, says, “The masses are the best way to deliver a message.”

But ad professionals who view crowdsourcing as a gimmick say these exercises are nothing but sweepstakes for the digital era. And because they’re driven by a desire for consumer interaction, they note, they’re more about the process than the final product.

“I’m interested in the high end of marketing creativity and production, and don’t think you can get anything high end” with crowdsourcing, says Benjamin Palmer, co-founder of The Barbarian Group. “By definition you’re asking people [to contribute] who are not at the top of their field.”

Some, however, believe creative does not have to suffer. Last month, Unilever, after working with Lowe London for the past 15 years on Peperami, decided to turn the brief for its next campaign over to members of ideabounty.com. “We felt we could get … even better content by opening up the brief to more people than we would typically get from an agency or agency team,” says Matt Burgess, managing director at Unilever U.K. So far, he adds, they’ve received 1,200 submissions.

Others point to Frito-Lay’s Doritos consumer-generated ads for the Super Bowl — the last one of which topped the USA Today poll that many marketers use as a metric of game-day success — as an example of crowdsourcing that delivers if not quality creative, qualitative success.

Economic motivators may certainly help drive the growth of crowdsourcing. For a brand like Brammo — which gave $1,000 each to five winners of its contest — crowdsourcing meant the agency could provide a service the client might not otherwise have been able to afford. 

Burgess says Unilever sees huge cost savings with crowdsourcing. Ideabounty, he explains, told them to “put up $10,000 … as the appropriate reward, which is well below what you would pay an agency for their idea.” Unilever will produce the winning idea with a production partner.

“We would not have done this just for commercial reasons alone,” Burgess adds. “It’s to get our advertising from good to great.”

Not everyone claims savings: Doritos’ director of marketing, Rudy Wilson, says, “At the end of the day, we’re spending money to get awareness of this program out. The money we’re saving is being repurposed.”

Steve Simpson, partner and creative director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an agency whose clients include Doritos, HP and Netflix (which also has done consumer-generated content), says crowdsourcing is slowly maturing. “As crowdsourcing [grows] from being a gimmick, a big sloppy hug of Web 2.0 openness, the products and the process will become more professional,” he says. “The crudity of the pioneers will be scorned and the work will begin to show more finesse.”

A few ex-Crispin staffers are so confident in the wisdom of crowds that they’ve just launched Victors & Spoils, a shop based on the principles of crowdsourcing. On his blog, co-founder John Winsor describes the creative department as being staffed with traditional art directors and copywriters as well as “a global digital community.”

Of course, the more crowdsourcing grows in popularity, the more the “crowds” may demand more than a stack of cash for their contributions.

“Who knows how many of the ideas that don’t win prizes nonetheless influence a company’s thinking down the line — without payment to the contributors,” says Simpson. “Crowdsourcing is here to stay, but expect both parties to it to begin to cast a colder, more businesslike eye at the other.”

Here is the original article from TechCrunch…

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by Erick Schonfeld on October 9, 2009

The problem with magazines is that they are so very expensive to produce. All those writers, editors, photographers, and designers cost money. Even original news sites require a lot of resources to run. That is why Hearst is taking a different approach with a new site launching today called LMK (Let Me Know). It brings in a river of news and photos on 2.3 million people and topics from authoritative sources. In other words, Hearst is getting into the news aggregation game, but with its own high-design twist.

Each page, whether it’s about a celebrity, athlete, or company, pulls in news feeds and photos from the AP and Getty about that topic. LMK is licensing semantic filtering technology from Evri, which parses through the feeds and photos to help create the automated topic pages.

But LMK will also have specially curated pages which will have its own freelance editor and designers. The first enhanced topic page it will be launching is for U.S. college football. Bob Roe, a former assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated, is the sports expert who will be overseeing the sports pages. Once the best sources for stories about each team, player, and coach are selected from both major news sites to fan blogs, Evri’s technology does the rest.

Whenever there is game against another team, LMK will also show the most authoritative news sources for that team in a “behind Enemy Lines” column. Each page will also show stats, photo galleries, and interactive data modules which illustrate information such as which starting players have injuries. Just mouse over their position, and you can see if they are scheduled to play and what injuries they have. Or check out the “big fat number,” which compares the total weight of each team’s offensive line.

The site also lets you drill down into individual player or coach pages, which again show a feed of the most authoritative news about that person and fun stats such as how much more each college football coach makes in salary than the head of the school where he works.

LMK is the first business to come out of Hearst Entertainment’s new digital incubator under deputy group head George Kliavkoff (formerly the chief digital officer at NBC, where he helped create Hulu). Hearst Entertainment manages the company’s stakes in various cable channels, but is also now incubating and investing in startups. Kliavkoff boasts that LMK has only one full-time employee. “There is no variable cost in this business.” LMK will launch other channels around reality TV, financial news, medicine, and more.

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Original Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html
August 24, 2009
Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

By ALEX WRIGHT
Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

Yet many companies struggle to make sense of the caterwaul of complaints and compliments that now swirl around their products online. As sentiment analysis tools begin to take shape, they could not only help businesses improve their bottom lines, but also eventually transform the experience of searching for information online.

Several new sentiment analysis companies are trying to tap into the growing business interest in what is being said online.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, top executives “are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”

Scout Labs, which is backed by the venture capital firm started by the CNet founder Halsey Minor, recently introduced a subscription service that allows customers to monitor blogs, news articles, online forums and social networking sites for trends in opinions about products, services or topics in the news.

In early May, the ticket marketplace StubHub used Scout Labs’ monitoring tool to identify a sudden surge of negative blog sentiment after rain delayed a Yankees-Red Sox game.

Stadium officials mistakenly told hundreds of fans that the game had been canceled, and StubHub denied fans’ requests for refunds, on the grounds that the game had actually been played. But after spotting trouble brewing online, the company offered discounts and credits to the affected fans. It is now re-evaluating its bad weather policy.

“This is a canary in a coal mine for us,” said John Whelan, StubHub’s director of customer service.

Jodange, based in Yonkers, offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets them incorporate opinion data drawn from over 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

Based on research by Claire Cardie, a Cornell computer science professor, and her students, the service uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders.

Jodange, which received an innovation research grant from the National Science Foundation last year, is currently working on a new algorithm that could use opinion data to predict future developments, like forecasting the impact of newspaper editorials on a company’s stock price.

In a similar vein, The Financial Times recently introduced Newssift, an experimental program that tracks sentiments about business topics in the news, coupled with a specialized search engine that allows users to organize their queries by topic, organization, place, person and theme.

Using Newssift, a search for Wal-Mart reveals that recent sentiment about the company is running positive by a ratio of slightly better than two to one. When that search is refined with the suggested term “Labor Force and Unions,” however, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments drops closer to one to one.

Such tools could help companies pinpoint the effect of specific issues on customer perceptions, helping them respond with appropriate marketing and public relations strategies.

For casual Web surfers, simpler incarnations of sentiment analysis are sprouting up in the form of lightweight tools like Tweetfeel, Twendz and Twitrratr. These sites allow users to take the pulse of Twitter users about particular topics.

A quick search on Tweetfeel, for example, reveals that 77 percent of recent tweeters liked the movie “Julie & Julia.” But the same search on Twitrratr reveals a few misfires. The site assigned a negative score to a tweet reading “julie and julia was truly delightful!!” That same message ended with “we all felt very hungry afterwards” — and the system took the word “hungry” to indicate a negative sentiment.

While the more advanced algorithms used by Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift employ advanced analytics to avoid such pitfalls, none of these services works perfectly. “Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 percent accurate,” said Ms. Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes.

Translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science, however. “Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of the suburban Maryland consulting firm Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “ ‘Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad). But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of gray.

“We are dealing with sentiment that can be expressed in subtle ways,” said Bo Pang, a researcher at Yahoo who co-wrote “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis,” one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

To get at the true intent of a statement, Ms. Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?).

For example, a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

As sentiment analysis algorithms grow more sophisticated, they should begin to yield more accurate results that may eventually point the way to more sophisticated filtering mechanisms. They could become a part of everyday Web use.

“I see sentiment analysis becoming a standard feature of search engines,” said Mr. Grimes, who suggests that such algorithms could begin to influence both general-purpose Web searching and more specialized searches in areas like e-commerce, travel reservations and movie reviews.

Ms. Pang envisions a search engine that fine-tunes results for users based on sentiment. For example, it might influence the ordering of search results for certain kinds of queries like “best hotel in San Antonio.”

As search engines begin to incorporate more and more opinion data into their results, the distinction between fact and opinion may start blurring to the point where, as David Byrne once put it, “facts all come with points of view.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 27, 2009
An article on Monday about an analysis of the emotional slant of Web postings described incorrectly the National Science Foundation’s relationship with Jodange, a company in the field. While the agency awarded a grant to Jodange, it did not invest in the company. The article also misstated the origins of Jodange’s software. It was created by Claire Cardie and her computer science students at Cornell University; Jan Wiebe of the University of Pittsburgh was not involved. And the article misstated Professor Cardie’s job status. She is a current — not former — professor on the Cornell faculty.

At the end of the interview session, he did an impromptu discussion about his view on the state of the online video industry, which unfortunately isn’t included in this video. There were three items which I thought were worth mentioning from that discussion:

First, a quote for the millions of ad networks and technologies which are trying to change the advertising industry. Jeremy indicated “We learned early on that a technology company can’t really drive ad formats.”

Second, he pointed to TV Everywhere as the key for moving the industry forward, capturing the bulk of the mass video audience.

Third, his take on over-the-top TV is that it is still far away and will only become reality when standards are put in place for interactivity and advertising.

Enjoy…