Oh, there is interest in Pinterest, the visual social sharing site. But is the site that, in its first month, became the #1 source for referring web traffic (over Google+, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined) a “colossal waste of time,” and “only good as a platform for scrap-booking,” or will its “stellar design” help it keep moving it into the #2 social site? A few interesting findings to make you sound smarter at the water-cooler: The conversation is US-centric – Over [...]

My grandmother always said that the most important thing in life is health, and I couldn’t agree more. However, in this day and age, you can’t just worry about your physical health; you have to worry about your digital health as well. Having worked in Silicon Valley for over 20 years, and more recently in the Natural Language Processing business, I’ve discovered how important it is to know when something is sick because it’s super cool vs. when it has [...]

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting with Rachael King, an extraordinary journalist from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, who has been working on a story on sentiment analysis. Thanks to Seth Grimes of Alta Plana, Rachael and I got the chance to sit down and talk about everything from NetBase to diapers, beer, and iPads. Being the roving reporter that she is, Rachael asked for a custom Brand Passion Index on the big tech companies about which Bloomberg routinely writes. Our [...]