CLARA Listens The Web Talking

By Miikka Kukkosuo, September 23, 2009, 7 Comments

CLARA is a Reykjavik, Iceland based young startup specializing in online business and marketing intelligence. The firm offers automatic monitoring and analysis tools for the web. With CLARA's solution firms can keep track of online discussions around their brands, products, and services on the web. CLARA's system brings data together from news, blogs, forums and comments, and other online content. The idea is to allow "listening" to the online discussion as it happens, and being able to see a clear summary to better understand the end customers.

CLARA uses advanced semantic analysis and data presentation methods to automatically and instantly analyze the attitudes, emotions, and user behavior online. This helps marketers to better target their messages, and discover new opportunities.

Using the solution, firms can analyze both the social media buzz and online mainstream media in order to respond properly to criticism in time, and build on positive traction without delay. Campaigns could be also tracked in real time to see how they are received by the target market segment.

The idea of CLARA is not exactly unique, as there are several other companies providing similar solutions also within the Nordic region. The team behind seems somewhat young yet ambitious, though. The CEO and founder Gunnar Hólmsteinn looking after the firm's 12-person team was previously Brand Manager at The Coca-Cola Company in Iceland, and the firm's business development efforts are said to be led by persons with longer management experience of many world-class brands.

Clara is a Reykjavik, Iceland based startup specializing in business and marketing intelligence.

TOPICS analytics business intelligence clara iceland marketing

7 Comments

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Sebastian Knopp, September 23, 2009

The URL to CLARA in the article is wrong, it points to clara.com but should link to clara.is.

Antti Vilpponen September 23, 2009

Thanks Sebastian, just fixed the URL.

Gunnar Holmsteinn, September 23, 2009

Hi Guys,

Thanks for a nice summary! Looking forward to meeting you here in Iceland in October.

Although not a unique subject - the way we approach things is mind blowing and still kept under the radar - We would love to leak things to you guys as we approach our next launch.

The best,
Gunni Holmsteinn
Team CLARA

Maggi Trymbill, September 23, 2009

To keep the FYIs going; The CLARA logo still links to Clara.com. Also, Reykjavik under "Recent Companies" on the right side of the page is encoded wrong :-)

Fantastic summary guys, looking forward to October.

Sincerely,
Magnus Ingi
Team CLARA

Antti Vilpponen September 23, 2009

Hey Maggi, we do have a problem with the encodings - let's see if Karri can do anything about this.

And now the image URL is also fixed :)

Jani Penttinen September 23, 2009

Just make sure to store and display everything as UTF-8 (which apparently is not the case right now). When everything is UTF-8, you will never have any encoding issues at all.

Karri Saarinen, September 24, 2009

Thanks Maggi and Jani for the heads up.

We have had some problems with ArcticIndex and Wordpress not playing nice with their encoding methods, but it should be fixed again for the time being.