Walden International, an international venture capital firm headquarted in San Francisco but with a strong foothold in Asia, has invested S$2 million – Singapore Dollars – (approx. US$1.35 million) in Brandtology. The company, which has its headquarters in Singapore but boasts more offices in China, Malaysia and Australia, provides business and brand online intelligence services out of specialist-manned ‘Command Centres’.
Despite its military-sounding name, these centres actually help Brandtology customers make ‘timely and informed strategic decisions’ based on an advanced online conversation tracking system, which mines blogs, forums, micro-blogging services etc. for opinions, aided by specialists who monitor the system for clients around the clock.
Brandtology in a statement said it will use the fresh capital to further expand its services in North Asia, where it sees most opportunities for growth.
The investment in Brandtology is the first to come out of the early-stage fund Seed Ventures IV Pte., a $13.3 million venture fund Walden International set up as a vehicle for small-scale financing rounds. The firm’s funds total over US$1.9 billion in committed capital.
Here we go again, more on-line brand monitoring that no one cares about. The whole herd (and I do mean herd) of companies that offer brand monitoring services don’t add up to a hill of beans and the market is infinitesimally small compared to standard brand equity services from the leaders.
I agree.
People can simply use Google blog search, Google web searche etc. to track these things, or if they want something more sophisticated, they can use something like Yauba http://www.yauba.com
All of this is free. No one will pay money for something they can get for free on a service like Yauba.
Well i never heard of this company. but congratulations.
Social media tracking and reporting will be the next big thing as far as usage if internet is concerned by corporates. We have worked with some clients on similar projects and see an increased interest from clientele.
Great to hear a local startup in Asia got funded. But I must say that I agree that such tools are pretty meaningless. There are just too many free tools around to help with the tracking.
I met the folks before and the difference they have is the way they mine the collected data and present it in a meaningful ways to its clients.
They got really good traction in Asia too
not surprised that Walden did the deal.
Google is reality to most people. When people test proprietary search tools, such as this one, they inevitably find things that it “missed” compared to Google Alerts. That missing alert is what they fixate on. We learned this over the last few years in the monitoring industry.
The other issue is cost. Proprietary search engines are expensive machines to run, which leads to high prices for the user. We’ve seen monitoring tools with prices up to $20,000 per month for a single account.
After exploring different aspects of this market, we learned that the sweet spot is being a Google Alerts add-on, which is what we built with our htto://www.alertrank.com tool. If you use Google Alerts results, it is impossible to miss anything that Google has. It also lets us price accounts very competitively at just 3 cents per search term.
Adam Green
http://www.AlertRank.com
http://twitter..../mrgooglealerts
And your marketing strategy is to spam the comment sections of popular blogs? Good luck with that.
congrats to Brandtology – being a singapore startup can be a hard mountain to climb – this investment suggests that social media activity will become massive and require “sophisticated” monitoring systems. In times of recession, investment companies don’t throw money at ventures that would be wasted… the reality and truth social media exposes, companies need to know about, understand and take meaningful actions.
The whole thing is crap; not because there are free tools, but that the whole concept of CGM influence is untenable as a steering metric for brand owners.
The entire industry of text mining for brand monitoring is flawed. The target should be intermediaries – retailers, multi-line distributors.
It is a fractional, non-standardized industry with each SM monitoring agency coming up different results for the same corpus.
my report: http://www.scri...qlau7b8pnrghofp
Thanks for everyone’s comments and well wishes.
We’re a relatively new company and would welcome what experts such as yourselves think about what we should be doing to bring more value to organizations.
Before we started the company, we asked ourselves the exact same question: Would organizations pay for such a service when there are free tools out there? We found that the extra values of running this as a service helped justify our costs to the customers.
We don’t have all the answers and we’re adapting as we navigate the different markets and learn more from prospects and experts in these fields.
Alan, I must say that I’m very impressed with your report on the industry which was well planned and analyzed. We would be glad to engage you in conversations and hopefully gain more insights from your expertise. We’ll be dropping you an email on this.
The following is an interview done by SG Entrepreneurs with me where I explain some of our differences:
http://sgentrep...of-brandtology/
If anyone would like to explore something we can do together, please feel free to drop me an email.
Sincerely,
Kelly Choo
Co-founder & Product Development Director
Brandtology
kelly.choo[at}brandtology .com
brandtology.com may already be worth $1 billion since they are a leader of the globalist, web 2.0 revolution. No recession for them. No doom and gloom. http://iamned.com/blog/ keep buying stocks