Lucky Sort, the Portland-based visualization engine for making sense out of live data streams, is announcing its first partner: StockTwits, a social network for traders that lets users share stock-related information in real-time. Additionally, Howard Lindzon, StockTwits CEO and co-founder, has now also invested in Lucky Sort alongside a couple of other angels, who, combined, have added an extra $100,000 to Lucky Sort’s earlier $500,000 seed round.
For background, Lucky Sort’s first product announced this February was TopicWatch, a service that lets users sift through live updates from social media, government filings, news and commentary, in order to find, summarize, and analyze text-based content. While that sounds somewhat similar to a sentiment analysis engine, the difference is that such a thing could be done on top of Lucky Sort’s platform, but is not the key product here.
“Our big plan is to partner with people who have valuable data sets and expose them in a way where they can be analyzed by people who are not wanting to do big data work, but just want to look at the results and do some analysis,” explains Lucky Sort CEO and founder Noah Pepper of why the company is now working with StockTwits. “We’re focused right now on the financial services vertical, so the first partner we’re going to announce is StockTwits.”
Through the partnership, Lucky Sort now has the entire historical database of StockTwits (everything that has been tweeted or shared within the community), as well as a real-time feed coming into its service. These data sets are now available in Lucky Sort’s analysis interface, allowing investors to come in and look how chatter in the StockTwits community has correlated with price action.
To use the service, investors log into Lucky Sort, select the data sets they want to work with, and then run queries. The data is read-only as well, for compliance purposes. Once logged in, investors can add stocks and keywords or phrases they want to research, which can be general terms like “short” or “sell” or specific phrases related to ongoing discussion within the community related to the given company. For example, a query for “want to eat” demonstrated to the StockTwits community that enthusiasm for Taco Bell’s new menu was likely temporary. (see example below)
Lucky Sort is charging fees for access both to its platform and datasets, and will have a self-serve license available for this soon. Currently, only enterprise licenses are offered. Prices are in the range of “low hundreds of dollars per month, per user,” says Pepper.
Over the next month or so, Lucky Sort will be adding other partners, also with a focus on the financial services space. Additional integrations will help investors better understand what consumers (as opposed to investors, as with StockTwits) are saying about companies on social networking services.
In a soon-to-be-released update, the charts and graphs Lucky Sort offers will refresh in real-time as new data comes in, but at the moment, users will have to manually refresh the data by clicking a button. More info on this service is available here.
