#AI everything, #AR services, #VR games, #ML algorithms, #Data everything, #Smart this and that #Robot my life & work. As expected, those are the keywords of Slush as far as I experienced it. My colleagues asked me to look for Analytics businesses and share information about them.
To begin with, I was surprised to see that analytics businesses were still very prominent, but this year many of them presented with more differentiated and focused approaches. I’d like to share my understanding of some of these companies I met and try to categorize them Data Science, Customer Experience, Text Analysis, Machine Learning, etc… There is a lot of information, so I might need to revisit this blog to add or remove some details.
Text Analysis and Sentiment Analysis
Feelingstream – Will give it a try!
The first one to introduce is Feelingstream Oü, the winner of 400,000€ pitch competition! We know who provides the drinks. Feelingstream is delivering productised models for text analysis. On top of the sentiment analysis they provide models for spam detection, risk detection, buying intentions, customer happiness, and more. Their services range beyond text analysis to supplement solutions such as chatbots. With this suite of customer analysis products they seem a pretty cool vendor at least in the pitch competition.
Wonderflow – Visually easy to use sentiment analysis
Two Italian guys in smart suites and wide smile. Nothing can go wrong! Emiliano and Giovanni had travelled to Finland with the Italian delegation and it was nice to have them here. Wonderflow is very typical text analysis company in a sense that they don’t provide Finnish language by default. Their process to build a new language requires a few months pilot period after which the ability to answer business questions with their tools in weighted. They caught my attention when they explained that they can pull in categorisation of the text about what the topic is about whether it is about product complaint, new product feature suggestion, or customer satisfaction. The Wonderflow interface was very easy to use and intuitive so I can see companies liking to use them.
Customer Experience Solutions
Forethink Oy
Forethink has developed something very simple yet useful to improve customer experience in ecommerce and catalog browsing. They are providing Nextflix-like gallery or carousel of product catalogs that makes users browsing experience easy to use and very clear to navigate. I could see the application of this service used in restaurant menus as well. View demo to see it. Seems too simple to get interested at first, but once you test it, it is very intuitive.
Signifikant
The video at the booth promised so much that I needed to ask for more. Signifikant is apparently in the business of making automatically amazing advertising and a whole lot of conversions. Their USP is to revolutionise mass media advertising. Only problem is that I still do not know how. The founder promised to explain me better over a Skype call.
Snov
Ukrainian startup Snov provides marketing automation and lead building tool to boost your sales. The service core feature includes email finder plugin for chrome, email automation solution and social media management. If this is something you are looking for, then you might want to test it.
Eeedo
“Customer Service 360” was the feeling I got of Eeedo. They have connected all customer feedback loops, both inbound and outbound to one single solutions with their aim to make the daily work easier for customer service representatives (and customer happier I guess). I can see a lot of potential for this kind of service on the global market.
Alpha Blues
When the chat agents entered the market we saw a strong growth in faster customer case resolutions and higher conversion rates for those companies using chat for their digital services. Chatbots have made their coming and there are already several applications of these, such as Energy Bot or Sähköbotti by Enefit. This Energy bot is created by an Estonian company Alpha Blues. Go and visit Enefit’s site to see how Alpha Blues bot works in action. I like it!
Customer & Employee Experience Research
Emteq VR
Phew! These guys do something so cool that it blew me away. They are using VR to improve in-game experience by analysing the users emotions while they play the game. Ok, this needs a little bit more explanation. Emteq will use the users’ heart rate and facial expressions as the input data to train the machine learning algorithms to understand what people really like and dislike on a game environment. This study can then be utilised to developed more engaging and inspiring game experiences. Way cool!
Vibe Catch
Out of many of the customer analytics services, Vibe Catch was fresh blast to provide employee satisfaction analytics solution. They use QWL survey method and Pulls Polls to gather real-time data on our feeling at work. The methodology itself remained still unclear for me, but the topic is worth studying further.
Machine Learning
Simanalytics
One of the coolest Machine Learning applications was Simanalytics. They have designed a solution that can almost with 100% certainty predict paper machine defects. Their model can be used in most of the process manufacturing businesses such as paper industry, food products, chemical production and similar. Strong recommendation for anyone in ML field to meet and learn.
BI & Dashboards
Super Metrics
This company does not need that much of an introduction. With Super Metrics solution you can pull in data from several data sources to Google Sheets, MS Excel and Google DataStudio. We use Super Metrics daily in our business to help our customers to organise and analyse data from digital touch points.
Dear Lucy
Founder of Sympa HR has also founded another cool solution for management BI. Dear Lucy is a very light weight application which can be used to view the highest level KPI’s, click on it and you can dive deeper into the data that KPi is built of. Visually beautiful, fast to use, very good first impression. Slightly like the solutions we reported earlier – RoamBI and PushBI by Tibco. No idea of how the implementation process and pricing applies.
There are probably many more promising data-related startups but the time to meet them all was limited. During day 2 I will be adding more details to either this blog or make another similar post. I hope this post gives someone some new intel. To be continued…