Cambridge-based text mining company Linguamatics has demonstrated how to leverage Twitter and other social media to provide early warning in near realtime of economic or security problems.

 The breakthrough stemmed from a study by Linguamatics on the power of external chatter – such as Twitter and blogs – funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board.

Linguamatics, notching its 10th anniversary, is expanding its reach both in technology and territorial terms and now employs 50 staff – 35 in the UK and 15 in Boston in the US.

Traditionally, applications for its software range from R & D to commercial and competitive intelligence in the Life Sciences and related fields. But, as the TSB-funded study proved, the power of the text mining platform has far wider potential application

Guy Singh, senior product marketing manager who led the study for Linguamatics, said the Twitter project had a few notable outcomes.

He told Business Weekly: “The project succesfully showed how we could eliminate noisy data and interpret the meaning of the text. For example, we showed case studies on who was taking the ’flu vaccine and what was influencing them.

“We ran a project during last year's election to analyse the Twitter feed during the live televised debates between Brown, Cameron and Clegg. By analysing the trends in popularity and extrapolating on the results we predicted the outcome of the election (in terms of percentage votes each) very close to the actual result. It was then featured in Business Weekly, the BBC’s news site and the New York Times.

“We now have customers using our solution to monitor Twitter feeds.”

Linguamatics has achieved rapid growth without external investment, based on software and consulting revenues, and has been consistently profitable from day one. Notably, the company continues to grow despite the current challenging economic climate.

Phil Hastings, SVP, sales & marketing, who joined the company from Accelrys, has overseen the rapid expansion of worldwide sales, including new customer acquisition in North America, Europe and the Far East. During this time, the company established a second office in Boston, MA, reflecting the continually growing customer base in that region.

Linguamatics’ core I2E technology was developed in-house by the original four founders, three of whom remain within the leadership team. I2E is now the leading natural language processing-based text mining software for knowledge discovery.

Its flexibility and capability are such that it could benefit any company ororganisation, but it first found success in the pharmaceutical industry, where competitive advantage is clearly based on exploiting internal and external knowledge.

Now used by nine of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies, I2E is also proving popular with healthcare organisations, government, research institutes and academia.

David Milward, CTO and co-founder said: “We knew that language processing could get people relevant information much faster than traditional searchmethods.

“However, previous systems needed reprogramming for different questions: we wanted to give users the flexibility to extract any information they wanted.”

Executive chairman John Brimacombe added that the company's goal was to provide “the text mining platform that you simply can't afford to live without.”

Loyalty among Linguamatics'customers is strong, with licence renewals year-on-year running at anexceptional 95 per cent of the customer base.

Roger Hale, chief operating officer and co-founder, points out: “We provide an exceptionally high level of customer service to very successful organisations, who expect the highest standards ofprofessional and technical capability.”

The software is backed by stringent quality processes. Head of QA and co-founder, James Thomas, knows better than most that behind every great software platform are the people, processes and procedures required to ensure successful delivery.

“We have to work hard to keep up with the range of demands for the product, which is challenging but exciting work. As a result, we find that we can attract some of the most highly qualified and experienced technical professionals in our market.”

• Photograph shows: David Milward, CTO and co-founder of Linguamatics