Today JamiQ headlined Marketing Magazine’s breaking news. In terms of effective and targeted PR, this is as good as it gets. Within minutes of publishing, we received a tsunami of congratulations and new enquiries.

Mentioned in the comments of the article was tk@marketing-interactive.com saying:

…This will be a very interesting field to follow, I predict strong growth here and then a serious shake out in a few years time when marketers decide who they trust and more importantly who gets results for the right price.

We hope this prediction is true too.

Today JamiQ put out its first official press release to announce the launch of JamiQ Insights, our customized opinion mining and sentiment analysis service that creates critical marketing and business insights from the millions of opinions online.

This is a significant milestone for us because we’re making our service offering official. There’s no going back now, only onward with the highest quality reports and best insights from online opinion. To reach this point where we’re confident of both our technology as well as our team in just 5 months of development is an amazing feat that we’re proud of.

While we’re happy to have had a great week of media coverage, we’re looking forward to a lot more in the coming months as we show the world a revolutionary new way to gain deep and critical insights from online opinion.

To all our customers and fans, we also want to let you know that we’re working on some new technology that’s way beyond and more incredible than our current offering. Man, even I’m impressed. Got to love the R&D team.

This week was fantastic for JamiQ. In the spand of two days we were published in two national papers here in Singapore.

We were interviewed for an article on mining online sentiment in The Straits Times Digital Life on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 and again for an article on startups in TODAY, Friday, 16 January 2009.

This is a great step for JamiQ, considering we haven’t even put out our first press release.

There’s more exciting developments to come, so watch for it!

UPDATE: One more piece of coverage in The Sunday Times.

JamiQ would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! And, to make it really fun, here’s a wishing sphere that I scribbled up -

2008 has been an amazing year for the company. The company has grown from a concept by two ambitious persons to an exciting company that a team of five work full time at. Almost everyone that I speak to are amazed of what we are doing.

In 2009, we will continue to improve our technology. In January, we will unveil our first stable release that we will serve our first clients with. This will be an important milestone for us. It will also be the first glimpse of our products that our clients will have.

We will also work to make our technology relevant to our clients. This is perhaps the most important work that we do at JamiQ - Yes, we have the technology but how can our technology work for our clients to help them make their decision? The empowerment that technology gives to our clients in not useful if our clients cannot make better decisions quicker.

So, in this slightly challenging New Year, JamiQ will strive to help you make sense of the massive amount of information generated by the minute faster, easier and cheaper.

Semantic technology builds on meaning, not keywords. And so it doesn’t matter if your followers say, “The new Batman movie is going to be awesome” or “You have to see the ‘Dark Knight’ trailer”; semantic buzz tools will tie the conversation together.

Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular tool in the marketer toolbox. And its next generation will look at the entirety of a comment or an article, from whom it came and to whom it was directed. It will use natural language processing and analysis of meaningful relationships to distinguish the “good” comments from “bad.”

I admire the insights given by Marta Strickland in her recent article in AdAge on what the semantic web can do for marketers.

But as a practitioner in this emerging field, there are significant limitations to this utopia which I’m sure we are all trying to overcome at this very moment:

1. Only Google comes close to the complete social media universe. Seriously, I’ve tried many social media monitoing services with laughable results. If your customers are being influenced by what they find on Google, tracking and understanding this influence should require us to look at the same universe.
2. Multi-lingual natural language processing. English is great, but the largest internet user base is still China and the most connected cities in the world are Seoul, Korea; Taipei, Taiwan; and Tokyo, Japan.
3. A.I. that goes beyond the Turing test. We’re not just asking computers to mimic a human in conversation, but to think, understand, and make recommendations like one.

Well, that’s the whole fun of taking on this emerging technology and I’m glad to be in the mix of what they’re calling “Web 3.0″.

Found this quote on B.L. Ochman’s blog and thought it was lovely how The Economist managed to put it so aptly. If raw web sentiment is black gold, then JamiQ is a massive drill.

It’s not my birthday and it sure isn’t Christmas, but I’ve been getting many surprises.

For one, while the team here is focusing on our public facing flagship product to go on JamiQ.com, I’m getting so much interest from everyone else for custom reports pertaining to their brands and products.

In fact, as I write this post our engine is doing some serious processing for our very first client and tomorrow I’m off to meet another client to get the low down on what he wants a report of.

While most people envision winning clients as slog, slog, slog, for the money, I’m having a ball of a time! You see, helping others do opinion mining and sentiment analysis of what everyone is saying online is pure discovery. Every project is filled with surprises. No one know what’s the most talked about product, no one knows which of the product’s features is the most loved, no one knows anything until you put it all together.

This is so much fun and its slowly turning into something awesome! What more, it’s even better to know that this information we produce is not just another fun fact, but true and honest insights that these companies are going to use to make some serious decisions with.

Dang, now I’ve got to put together a product offering so I can charge everyone fairly and make this demand operate like clockwork. Wish me luck!

Welcome to The JamiQ Report. This is our first blog post and an exciting day for JamiQ. After months of planning, development, and sacrifice, we’re nearing the exciting launch of the company and our first product.

While I can’t spoil the fun and tell you what the product will be, I want to introduce you to what JamiQ is all about.

Web 1.0 showed us that computers connected to the Internet was fun; Web 2.0 showed us that creating content and sharing our opinions online was awesome; so that got us thinking that there’s bound to be lots of things said about every brand, product, place, and possibly every person somewhere online. Good opinion, bad opinion, kind words, nasty words, etc. But how do we make sense of all that?

This incredibly growing universe of shared opinions has given rise to many new questions, both from consumers and corporations, that are could be really helpful in making decisions. For example, do the customer reviews of the Linksys WRT300N Router on Amazon.com reflect what users in say Malaysia have experienced? Did you know that it’s 802.11n settings have problems working with Mac OS? What do people mostly use it for? Gaming? Office? Home? Firmware hacking? What are people’s favourite features? Range? Speed? Firewall?

The answer to these questions help consumers make better buying decisions, and help corporates understand their customers better.

In a nutshell, we at JamiQ are interested in discovering what everyone is saying about… well, everything! We believe there’s collective wisdom when we can see what everyone is saying about a particular topic. Not just your favourite forum, not just Amazon.com, not even your country. Everyone.

If you still can’t wrap your head around what we do, well, think of us as a market research company. Only difference is that we don’t just want to survey a small sample of people, we care about everything that’s said out there on the Internet.

Stay tuned for more updates!