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4iP Invests In Edinburgh Festival Twitter Aggregator FestBuzz

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4iP sure likes little Twitter-based start-ups: Channel 4’s public service new media investment project has invested a small amount in FestBuzz.com, which aggregates punters’ Twitter comments about shows at the Edinburgh Festivals.

The site simply collects Twitter messages on individual shows and re-posts them as well as writing the odd longer review.

Earlier this year 4iP funded Hashdash, which similarly aggregates tweets about specific events and was working on branded Twitter clients for TV producers to promoted their shows such as Big Brother. The first 4iP investment was a Twitter aggregation platform from Myfootballwriter.co.uk founder Rick Waghorn.

FestBuzz is run by Edinburgh University-based start-up Affect Labs and 4iP’s digital commissioner Ewan McIntosh says in a blog post that the site can make money through charging for access to its API and through “an analytical dashboard that shows performers, venues or show management how their performances were received each day.” Of course, it can only do that for the weeks when the festival is on…

Patrick Smith
@psmith Aug 11, 2009 3:29 AM ET

Festbuzz.com

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Posted In: Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Venture Capital, Companies, Channel 4

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  • Hi, it seems you've kind of missed the point of FestBuzz and why 4iP has invested in us.

    "The site simply collects Twitter messages on individual shows and re-posts them"

    there's a little more to it than that. What is at the core of FestBuzz is a sentiment analysis engine called Benchmark7. It was developed during co-founder Jennie Lees' PhD research in Natural Language Processing at the University of Cambridge.

    It's a bit like search engines - it's quite easy to make a crude search engine, but there is only one Google (and Bing). Same with sentiment analysis - it's quite easy to make something crude - for example just looking for emotive words - but to build something that understands that subtleties and nuances of language (especially that used online) requires serious research and development.

    So 4iP has not invested in us for "gathering tweets" - they have funded us because of our sentiment analysis technology, which we happened to have piloted at the Edinburgh Festivals, using aggregated Twitter messages as our test material.

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