About Us

What does HotGrinds do?

HotGrinds delivers multi-lingual opinion mining as an on-demand service. HotGrinds uncovers consumers' emotional connection to brands and products, providing actionable feedback for improving reputation, refining product or marketing strategies, retaining loyal customers and identifying new opportunities.

HotGrinds' customers include consumer products companies, corporate brand managers, publishers, online communities and political organizations that need to track opinion closely.

What is the Opinion Grinder™?

HotGrinds' automated, web-based Opinion Grinder™ technology is at the core of its opinion mining offerings. The Opinion Grinder uses patented technologies to uncover the important concepts and detailed emotional context around products and brands. It delivers results at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional market research techniques.

How does HotGrinds differ from web analytics and other 'buzz' solutions?

Traditional Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 analytics companies track behavior statistics. They can tell you when and where a user clicks. Other solutions may monitor click counts and 'buzz' – but fall short of giving you meaningful, actionable insight into what to do with that information.

HotGrinds helps you understand not only what people are saying, but also how they feel about your product, brand or reputation and why. It is uniquely able to deliver:

• Key concept recognition: HotGrinds Opinion Grinder identifies the important concepts relative to your product/services, and the often unexpected links between those concepts.
• Emotional connection analysis: HotGrinds Opinion Grinder analyzes and identifies the emotional context for user-generated content, so you understand not only what people think but how they feel about essential attributes of your brand
• Opinion benchmarking: The Web Barometer benchmarks your results against your industry, so you can see where your competitive strengths and weaknesses lie and where industry opportunities can be found.

How is HotGrinds linked to social media?

Individuals are increasingly using social networks and online forums to express their opinions and share information with other like-minded individuals. This user-generated content represents a rich and valuable source of market data for businesses, government organizations and others. By analyzing content on the web and social media, businesses can spot problems before they lose customer loyalty and align strategies to ensure a strong connection to the market and customer.

HotGrinds helps you find the actionable information you need from social media and use that insight to improve your messaging or reputation.

What kinds of applications can use HotGrinds opinion mining?

Companies and organizations of all types are using HotGrinds opinion mining for functions including:

• Public relations/reputation management
• Product/service messaging
• Product innovation or changes
• Competitive analysis
• Industry benchmarking
• Political analysis and polling

How can I get started with opinion mining?

By offering this technology as an on-demand service, HotGrinds makes advanced opinion mining accessible and practical for companies of any size. Sign up for a trial Sentiment Dashboard. Or, you can try our low-risk, introductory subscription to discover the power of HotGrinds for the low cost of $1000 per month.

What exactly is a HotGrinds Web Barometer?

Web Barometers use the HotGrinds Opinion Grinder to deliver packaged, at-a-glance insight into how people feel about your product/services, and how you compare to the industry as a whole. Web Barometers are quick, intuitive, and cost-effective.

A Web Barometer provides analysis along up to six conceptual dimensions, which will vary according to your industry. It also compares your performance with the average positive/negative responses for similar businesses in your industry along each dimension.

A Web Barometer can be packaged and white-labeled for distribution as your own content in a specific industry.

What exactly is a HotGrinds Sentiment Dashboard?

A Sentiment Dashboard offers deep insight into exactly how your core audience feels about products, services, or other concepts. You can track opinion patterns across topics, sources and time.

A Sentiment Dashboard gathers and analyzes data along an unlimited number of dimensions, with the ability to drill down to specific comment, by sources and attributes. The graphical dashboard supports interactive analysis and drill-down to specific comments. In addition to the online dashboard, HotGrinds delivers trend analysis reports, and can prepare custom reports for your needs.

You don't have to wait for expert analysts to tell you what the data says – you can see it immediately in red and green on the dashboard.

Can I conduct opinion mining in different languages with HotGrinds?

Yes today, you can use our services in English, French and Japanese. Other languages will follow.

OUR TEAM

HotGrinds has assembled a handpicked team, led by recognized experts on semantic analytics. The HotGrinds team combines in-depth experience with linguistics and analysis technologies with vertical industry sales and marketing backgrounds.

Claude Vogel, CEO

Before co-founding HotGrinds, Claude was co-founder of the International Institute of Multimedia in Paris, then co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Semio Corporation, a text mining company. Claude was also the inspiration behind Convera’s “Excalibur” project, a web-scale 3.0. service. He has a background in Anthropology, Semiotics and Artificial Intelligence, and has published nine books in the field. He also owns several patents in the fields of semantic indexing and sentiment analysis.

Alkis Papadopoullos, COO

Co-founder and COO Alkis Papadopoullos has more than 15 years of experience in applied mathematics, software development, product and engineering management. Before HotGrinds, he was Vice President of Engineering at Convera, focused in web-based vertical search offerings. His previous roles include Vice-President R&D and Director Linguistic Technologies at start-ups based in Montreal that were successfully acquired by US based firms. He has a Masters in physics from the National Institute for Scientific Research and is fluent in four languages.

		Sanford Cameron, EVP Sales
		EVP of Sales, Sanford Cameron brings over 12 years of experience working in the market research industry at firms such as Datamonitor PLC., and Abt Bio-Pharma Solutions. He has coordinated numerous global research projects involving key opinion leaders, consumers, and industry stakeholders providing actionable analysis to his clients. Sanford also has significant experience in text mining technologies having served as Director of Worldwide Sales at both Semio Corporation and Inxight Software.