It seems every start-up and their brother is rolling out a sentiment solution these days. A small sample of them (thanks to David Barrowcliff for these) includes:

• Skygrid

• Parnassus Group

• Sentinews

In general this should be a good thing for those that wish to leverage sentiment technology, because the influx of “newbies” in the space will force those of us that have been at it since the dawn of time to focus on staying ahead of the curve. In that, all these new entrants have certainly succeeded, we’re putting a good bit of energy into improving our sentiment analysis, and fully expect that our next generation will a significant step forward. My concern is (its a blog… gotta have a concern) that if these new entrants aren’t up to snuff, then we may all get painted by the “automated sentiment doesn’t work” brush, which would be a shame because many of the vendors that have been at this for a while have made some nice strides in both the accuracy and ability to tune the sentiment scoring for vertical markets. My advice to anyone looking for sentiment analysis is to do your homework, and look at a bunch of the vendors and see if they’ll let you try it out for yourself.