| Company | Bluefin Labs |
| Address | One Kendall Square B 1700 Cambridge, MA 02139 |
| Founders | Deb Roy & Michael Fleischman |
| Founded | June 2008 |
| Funding | $ 20.4 million |
| Employees | 55 |
| Website | www.BluefinLabs.com |
| Rating | 7 bits |
Bluefin Labs is a venture-backed private company, developing a social TV analytics platform that is being used in the television and advertising market. Since the start of TV consumers have been talking about what happened on a particular show, a sports event or a documentary. In the past consumers used to this at work at water cooler or at the pub. TV networks, operators or brand agencies had to find out about what the consumer opinion was via traditional surveys which took time and were expensive.
Nowadays, we tweet and Facebook constantly while we watch TV. We tell our friends and network what we are watching and what we think about it. We participate in real-time debates and we want to be heard. All this information provides extremely valuable data for TV Networks, Operators and Branding agencies. Bluefin Labs claims to have developed the technology to provide them with real-time insights and knowledge that they can use to evaluate and further develop their content.
Bluefin Labs calls it Social TV Analytics and for sure the available data will change the way consumers watch TV as well as how TV content is produced. How does their technology work? Their technology has been developed together with the TV advertising industry to better match their needs. The provide information about TV shows as well as TV advertising, according to their website they are the: [] only social TV analytics platform that brings the entire social TV landscape into focus. Bluefin Labs is using deep machine learning to ground the meaning of comments placed on social networks. This technology is the result of Deb Roy and Michael Fleischmans PhD work at MIT to apply concepts for child language acquisition to broadcast video.
The technology of Bluefin Labs makes it possible to place generic comments made into the right context. So a generic tweet with no reference to a TV show or ad can be linked to that show or ad by looking at date, time, connections of the user, messages of those users etc. This is definitely a new way of analysing social media comments as it goes much further than just analysing key words related to a TV show or ad mentioned in comments and link those to the respective show or ad. The natural-language analysis provides TV Networks, Operators and Ad agencies with much more detailed information about audience size, type and sentiment.
At the moment Bluefin Labs is in the transition of a pure academic research at the MIT Media Lab to a venture backed private startup. Next to 19 million in Seed Capital and Series A & B capital, they also received $ 1.15 million funding from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR). Their venture capital is provided by Time Warner Investments, Redpoint Ventures, SoftBank Capital, and Lerer Ventures. They have won several important awards, among others the ad:tech Innovation Award, Social Media category (Nov 2011). They have at least one patent and two patents pending.
So, it looks like Bluefin Labs has developed a machine learning algorithm that seriously can help TV Networks, Operators and Ad agencies improving their content to better match the consumers. However, at the moment they only cover Facebook, Twitter and GetGlue. Of course there are many more social networks and blogs around where people also talk about TV shows and Ads. It would be interesting to see if Bluefin Labs started incorporating other social networks as well. Nevertheless, they have an amazing product and we give them a 7 bits rating.
Update: On February 5, Twitter confirmed that they have taken over Bluefin Labs. Bluefin Labs is said to be priced at $ 80 million. Twitter did not confirm how much they have paid for it.
