Breath of Mountain Air for Microsoft

Microsoft has acquired Swiss social listening and analytics specialist Netbreeze, for an undisclosed sum. The firm's services include data mining, transactional and text/language analysis capabilities.

The software giant says the deal will boost its vision to help businesses analyze and act on market intelligence from conversations, including measuring sentiment across a wide array of social media channels. As part of the deal, Netbreeze's team of analytics scientists will join Microsoft.

Netbreeze technology combines Natural Language Processing (NLP), data mining and semantic text analysis to support 28 different languages. Microsoft claims this is a huge benefit over competing solutions that translate to a common language and then analyze sentiment from there. Additionally, the firm offers its customers the ability to monitor social media channels including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as 6,000 online news web sites, 18 million blogs and 500,000 message boards.

In a statement, Microsoft said: 'The way we will make this technology available makes this acquisition even more compelling. We are going to provide access to this rich data across marketing, sales and service teams so that each and every person using a firm's CRM system can have this consumer insight at their fingertips. Delivering these capabilities is a critical part of our social strategy.'

Web site: www.microsoft.com and www.netbreeze.ch .