Month: December 2015

Hotels or Hosts: Who will win the battle in the era of the sharing economy?

Posted on by mudramukesh

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Airbnb has been valued at over $24 billion earlier this year. Is that surprising, considering the company owns none of the rooms it “offers” on it’s website through the “hosts”? Perhaps a little. But these are the facets of the sharing economy that most of are a familiar with. Uber, Lyft, and TaskRabbit, have been around for a while, and the way they are disrupting their respective industries is old news. Take the acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts by Marriott for $12.2 billion. Was this move an attempt by Marriott to join forces with Starwood to reckon with the force that is airbnb or is that too premature?

Read the full post on Linkedin.

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Sentiment, Semantics and Some Snapdeal: A Brief Discussion on the Usefulness of Sentiment Analysis

Posted on by mudramukesh

So I have a new post about Sentiment Analysis. Excerpt below.

“One person’s data is another person’s noise.”
―  K.C. Cole (Author of the Universe and the Teacup)

The last couples of weeks I have been discussing Social Media Monitoring and Listening in my social media lectures. With so much content being created and shared on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Linkedin, brands need to constantly listen for relevant conversations, words, and themes to inform them of the sentiment around their products, brands and the organization itself.The listening has to be calibrated according to the goal of course: if the goal is awareness then one way of measuring it would be to see how many people are using the name of the brand in conversations across social and to what extent is the conversation positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis or opinion mining would fit in. Usually, considering the number of data points, sentiment analysis is performed by written programs. To perform it manually for 500 mn tweets sent out everyday would be humanly impossible. There is a range of tools available to track sentiment online…

Read the complete post on Linkedin.