The social Web is alive with data that hints at insights and customer sentiment. It just might represent the most voluminous verbalized source of collective thought, desire, and need in human history. And it's spawning a cottage industry of growingly sophisticated tools capable of extracting crucial evidence of past behavior and future direction.

New players seem to emerge daily. One such company is DataSift, which is in the business of mining social media information and then providing that information in a way that lets organizations extract meaning. DataSift caters to social media monitoring companies, business intelligence companies, news organizations, and financial organizations (which rely on a steady insight into the news).

In this episode of Valley View, we spoke with DataSift CEO Rob Bailey, who talked about what makes DataSift different from competitors and provided a quick demonstration of how the technology works. Watch below.

Fritz Nelson is the editorial director for InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV.

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