If you have recently visited the website of our product Textalytics you may have been surprised by the change of appearance… and name. After commercializing Textalytics for a year and a half and receiving a continuous feedback from our users and customers, we have decided that this new iteration is more “substantial” and help us to bring us closer to the product you are demanding.

During this time, we got thousands of customers around the world using our APIs in business-critical applications. We would like to thank each one of them for trusting us and we assure them that the migration to MeaningCloud will be simple and clear.

There are no major conceptual modifications: we want MeaningCloud to remain the most simple, safe and economical way to convert your unstructured content to actionable information, and so we will keep applying a cloud-based model of APIs. But with this change we want to redouble our commitment to simplicity and personalization, and it results in several improvements.

An enhanced product

The most important aspect to emphasize is that all the APIs of Textalytics will remain operational until June 1st, 2015, so at the moment you don’t need to make any changes.

On the other hand, all the functionality of Textalytics you have been using (Text Classification, Topic Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, etc.) has been replicated in MeaningCloud –although with the inevitable change of name in the access points–, so the migration effort is minimal.

But there are also some significant developments: the main one is constituted by the new customization functionalities. The most important thing we have learned with Textalytics is that the key success factor of a semantic analysis application lies in the customization of the tool depending on the customer’s domain (brands, products, departments, competitors…). And, also, that our customers prefer to be autonomous in said customization and to incorporate their dictionaries, models, etc. in a simple way.

That is why MeaningCloud incorporates some new and powerful customization tools based on graphical user interfaces. With this release we make public a tool for creating customized classification models, while tools for the creation of dictionaries and custom sentiment analysis models will be added in the coming weeks. Our intention is to empower users to make them completely self-sufficient, enabling them to customize their analysis without having to learn complicated configuration languages.

Other significant new features, aimed at achieving greater simplicity within the product, are a new user area with a better access to the documentation and the personal settings, and an easier management of consumptions and license keys (which now becomes unique).

Finally, a change in a significant aspect of the service which will be very well received: its price. We have modified the pricing scheme, which now uses the number of requests as billing driver. In this way, we use a unified billing criterion for all APIs. And as a side effect, when it comes to process medium or large-sized documents (i.e. in all cases except Twitter) the charge per request results in a higher volume of processed text. In addition, we extended our Free Plan (which with 40,000 requests per month is the most generous in the market) and introduced an entry step with a lower price, $99. This way, anyone who wants to evaluate or prototype on MeaningCloud, or use it in commercial applications, will not find an impediment in the price.

A renewed website

In response to your requests, we have redesigned our website (both in interaction and information architecture and graphic design) to simplify and optimize the experience of visitors and users.

Besides the mostly informative and open area, there is a section for developers which includes the APIs’ and the integration tools’ documentation, and gives access to a renewed private user area.

We also want to provide you a better experience not only when you access the information about MeaningCloud (its benefits and the solutions that can be developed on it), but also during the subscription process. Now, for the standard subscription modalities, the process is completely automatic and you can pay using PayPal.

A new identity

Last but not least, we have decided to change the name of the product. We had the impression that the name Textalytics was too associated with a single functionality, text analytics, increasingly more standardized.

Our vocation is to extract meaning from content, i.e. go beyond the recognition of entities or the basic classification –which constitute the standard functionality of text analytics– to analyze sentiment, profile users or detect intentions.

And the possibility of having these capabilities from the cloud and integrate them easily into any application using SDKs and plug-ins –in short, our concept of Meaning as a Service– is such a clear and disruptive value proposition that deserves to be included explicitly in the name. Hence MeaningCloud.

I am a user of Textalytics, what should I do?

If you are a current user of Textalytics, you’re might be wondering how this change will affect you. We explain it in the following post.