DataSift, the ‘social data platform’ that provides developers and third parties with the ability to access and interrogate Twitter, Facebook and other real-time social sources, is continuing its march on Wall Street: The company has launched DataSift Financial, a prepackaged historical and real-time social feed designed to help the finance industry to identify and analyze stock and company information so that they can make more informed trading decisions — faster!
Not dissimilar to Twitter’s own ‘Cashtags‘, which in turn were inspired by StockTwits, the new social feeds aggregate public tweets that mention a stock symbol, and classify tweets to identify articles from news-providers, positive or negative mentions, and “chatter” from market analysts.
In addition, and this is undoubtedly the bit that financial organisations will pay for, DataSift Financial allows its prepackaged social feeds to be integrated into those organisation’s own systems to “filter out the noise” and get a historical and real-time overview of companies, stocks and trends. So, for example, a fund manager could choose to track financial news related to Apple through its stock symbol and aggregate additional information on the company to better understand its market performance and sentiment around its products or news (new iPhone!).
As we reported, DataSift recently beefed up its Wall Street play with the hiring of two veterans of the finance industry. Robert Passarella, previously of Dow Jones, was appointed as DataSift’s Managing Director of Finance where he’ll lead the company’s financial industry initiatives and build on its existing financial product offerings. And Paul Balser joined from StockTwits to take up the role of DataSift’s new Managing Director of Financial Institutions Sales.
DataSift, which now has offices in the UK, San Francisco, and New York, raised a hefty $7.2 million in a follow-on Series A round from existing investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures in May. This brought DataSift’s total funding to $15 million.