First time attending Text Analytics Summit here in Boston and expectations (though high) were exceeded. Despite a late train and missing Conference Chair, Seth Grime's pre-conference workshop yesterday, it was good to see Nick Patience's workshop on vendor selection and do a little pre-conference networking. Since I am CT-based, it is always nice to see colleagues from Cary and now from Cambridge (excited about Teragram's release of Sentiment Analysis Manager today, which continues to be an application area of great interest).

Seth kicked off the conference with an opening session putting things into perspective historically and setting the stage for "Staying Ahead in Text." The Teragram and SAS keynote followed on Discovering and Driving Brand Activity in Social Networks. Social Media Analysis is the hot topic here with many talks providing interesting approaches, insights and applications. It was great to see Usama Fayyad present some of the ongoing work at Open Insights. Monster, Intuit, Jet Blue and others gave interesting case studies drawing on social media sources.

The technology and expert panels were also interesting--data visualization is clearly an area needing more attention. One of the favorite bits of humor shared in Verint talk on speech analytics (call centers trying to get customers to be more self-servicing): "Your call is important to us. Please hold until it is no longer important to you."

Looking forward to tomorrow's line-up. Given what JetBlue was able to do with listening to the Voice of the Customer to improve operations and customer satisfaction, let's hope the train back to CT is on time when the conference is over--or there will be some constructive voice-of-the customer suggestions on the potential to do better….