ElectionTracker in the news

ElectionTracker was discussed in the Mint today in an article about digital tools built for Elections2009  that have other business applications.

Here's a small excerpt:

In April, Germinait Solutions Pvt. Ltd, an year-old Mumbai-based start-up, launched ElectionTracker, an online service that trawls the Internet for information on politicians and their parties, then aggregates and analyses such data to isolate the prevailing sentiment.

“Our work was primarily based on areas of AI such as machine learning and natural language processing, technology that can be applied very easily to understanding unstructured content on online sites,” says Ranjit Nair, CEO and founder, Germinait Solutions. The start-up had leveraged this tool to build applications for companies but was looking to showcase the technology with a high-profile application. “So when election 2009 was announced, we took it on as a challenge to see if we could adapt our platform to launch a tool for Internet users during the election.”

The Germinait Solutions team worked overtime for nearly four weeks before ElectionTracker went online, an offering that Nair expects will be of interest primarily to media companies and others looking for processed content.

You can read the whole article at: http://www.livemint.com/2009/05/18213141/Tool-track--Digital-engagemen.html

New Features

We've introduced a few new features in ElectionTracker over the last few days:

1. Occurrence count in online buzz: Now when you hover your mouse over a buzz word in the Online Buzz tag cloud, you get a tool tip message which tells you how often that buzz word occurs. For intance in the image below, the buzz word Varun appears 8494 times in articles about BJP.

2. Clicking on a particular buzz word in a party's tag cloud will take you to a new page with links to all the articles about that party. This can be interesting if you want to see examples of blogs and news articles where those buzz words appeared. For instance, if we click on the buzz word conviction in the tag cloud for SP we get the following search results:

3. We've introduced a feature on the main page called "Media Search" which allows you to search for articles in blogs and/or news about a particular party and on a particular topic. For example, searching for articles on the topic "Assets of politicians" gave the following results.

Search results can be filtered to based on media type (blog/news), party, date and topic.

ElectionTracker Chain Letter

(cross posted at http://germinait.com/blog)

Today I sent out my first ever chain letter about ElectionTracker to all my friends. I am posting the letter here below. If you have not yet received it, you can copy the text from here and mail it to your friends. Spread the word! Do let me know if you can think of other ways of getting the word out.

Fellow citizens of India,

* When was the last time you told the world what a wonderful MP you have?

* When was the last time you congratulated a politician for his creative use of the tax payer's money?

* When was the last time you shouted from every roof top about how much you agree with the ideology of XYZ party?

* When was the last time you cheered with your friends that your favourite party had stocked its candidate list with people with rap sheets longer than your... er... arm?

* When was the last time you let your favourite candidate know that you would give them your vote just like you had voted for their parents and grandparents before them?

* When was the last time you thanked our politicians for handing out liquor to people in their constituency or money to buy previously mentioned liquor? [Some would argue that you have to be drunk to actually vote].

If you answered NEVER to the above questions, I am truly shocked. The only reason I can think why you would be silent is that you thought no one cared. That your applause would get drowned in the din of traffic, that your words would melt away in the ether, that in a country of one billion, there was no one actually listening.

And that's where you'd be wrong. You'll be glad to know that ElectionTracker (http://electiontracker.germinait.com) does care and is listening.Listening, scoring and then reporting on what people like you have to say about their netas and wannabe netas. ElectionTracker gathers opinions from a variety of sources and then churns these opinions through Artificial Intelligence algorithms that detect their relevance, topic and sentiment, and finally displays the results in the form of pretty (and intuitive) graphs.

If you want your opinion to be listened to, send it in an email to

myvoice.electiontracker@germinait.com with the words "My Voice from ABC" in the subject where ABC is your location. We promise that we will not display your email address anywhere, nor spam you, nor share your email address with anyone (however much they plead). Alternatively, you can visit http://electiontracker.germinait.com and click on "My Voice" to share your opinion.

Apart from opinions collected from individuals, ElectionTracker crawls all the online news sites and blogs for content relating to the Indian elections. If you have your own blog that you think we are not crawling, please do let us know by visiting http://electiontracker.germinait.com and clicking on "Submit Source".

Just so that you know, we are not affiliated with any party nor do we love one more than the other. We love them all with equal passion. I only mentioned praise in this letter because it was inconceivable to me that anyone would feel any emotion other than adoration for our beloved netas. That said, ElectionTracker will record, analyse and display negative opinions too.

I will conclude in the vein of all well written chain mails:

1. Please forward this message to at least 10 friends to ensure that your friends also know that their opinions count. Also please make sure you share your own opinion by emailing myvoice.electiontracker@germinait.com with the words "My Voice from ABC" in the subject, where ABC is your location.

2. Rohit from Jaipur did not forward this message to anyone. As a result, his friends who received this from others realized how uncool Rohit was for not receiving the message. When Rohit convinced them that in fact he had received this email before they had, they branded him as "uncaring". Soon Rohit became the town pariah. His milkman and newspaperboy decided that such a person did not deserve to vote and so stole poor Rohit's voter id card.

3. The candidates from the constituency of Rampur (name changed) did not receive any opinions about them. They felt so unmotivated that they dropped out of the race and instead filed nomination papers in the name of the peepal tree (which everyone loves and some have even married).

4. Jency from Kottayam forwarded this message to all her friends on Facebook and Orkut and MySpace and Hi5 and... and even her old-fashioned email addressbook. Now all her friends on Facebook/Orkut/MySpace/Hi5/... think she's the cat's meow, and have voted her "Most likely to forward a brilliant chain mail".

So friends be like Jency and not like Rohit. And don't let your constituency go the way of Rampur. Spread the word and share your voice with us.

We're listening,

Ranjit Nair

http://electiontracker.germinait.com