TC50: Insttant Harnesses Twitter To Create A Real-Time News And Analysis Engine
September 15, 2009 at 17:55 PM EDT
Twitter has established itself as the best place to find real time information, but anyone who has tried using its native search engine at search.twitter.com has probably found that it leaves a lot to be desired — aside from the day's 'top trends', Twitter does very little to help surface results that are worthwhile. TC50 finalist Instattant may have the answer. The startup has built a new engine for monitoring real-time news, that can also be leveraged to track brands, ad campaigns, and basically everything else that pops up on Twitter. The site features an analytics platform that can perform semantic analysis on Tweets as they come in — in other words, it can tell what a tweet is talking about, and if it has a positive or negative sentiment. The site can also identify links and media that are rapidly rising in popularity, and displays headlines in real-time as they come in. For Tweets with media, the site allows users to view photos and play videos inline. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco