Apple announces record sales for iPhone 4s — confirming value of Topsy’s sentiment analysis

This past Tuesday, Apple announced its earnings for Q1 2012 (running from late September until the last day of the calendar year of 2011). Apple disclosed record profits of $13 billion, much of it credited to sales of the iPhone 4S launched in October. More on that, here and here.

Last November, we wrote a blog post on the iPhone 4s. Our sentiment numbers reflected consumers were very happy with the phone during the unveiling of the phone and shortly thereafter, in contrast to the initial lukewarm response from analysts. Apple’s stock took a dip right after the announcement on October 4th, and recovered shortly after the phone went on sale 10 days later, hitting records sales. More on that particular analysis found here.

This shows just how incredibly valuable analyzing the social content produced by millions of Twitter users can be; in particular, when deriving social sentiment from it. In related news, this past week, we were featured in a Bloomberg Business Week article on predicting the Netflix stock movement from public sentiment on Twitter. You can read all about it here.

Our engineering team here at Topsy continues to work very hard to perfect our sentiment algorithms, tuned specifically for the more informal and shorter form often found in social content. We are excited about the many insights we can gain from doing this and the range of applications these can be used for.

Comments are closed.