A new website from economists at the Technical University of Munich is using Twitter as a stock performance predictor and it might actually work. Plus, if you’ve got a baby on the way, you might want to keep your eyes on Baby Connection
Get on top of the market with social media
Next time someone tells you all people do on Twitter is talk about what food they’re eating, don’t bother to fight back with evidence that you’re preparing to master the stock market. After all, their loss is your gain, right?
Let them yuck it up while you read more from VentureBeat about how the Technical University of Munich has gone from publishing a study on stocks trending on Twitter, to creating a website to help gauge where they might end up in the near future.
According to the VentureBeat post, TUM’s study analyzed not only mentions of a company’s stock symbol, but also sentiment related to any mention of the company whatsoever. Looking at such a broad range of tweets, rather than just tweets pushed out by stock experts, showed that Twitter was serving as an adequate gauge of a stock’s future performance.
Of particular note is a line in the story that reads “Higher volumes of tweets about a particular stock were also related to higher next day trading volume of that stock.”
Which leads us to the website, TweetTrader.net, mentioned in the post. As someone more qualified to discuss the sort of stock you put in a soup, than the kind you find on the trading floor, the website doesn’t exactly strike me as user-friendly for stock market novices.
Still, if there is a true correlation between Twitter sentiment and stock market performance, that could open up an entirely new avenue for social media.
If only pregnancy were as carefree as Angry Birds
Nutricia Baby Connection isn’t necessarily an interesting app because it’s about pregnancy. Search for “pregnancy” on Appolicious, and you’ll find an astounding numbers of apps that help expecting mothers track their bumps and fathers-to-be prepare for the heir to their throne.
What’s most interesting about Nutricia Baby Connection, as described in a story from TechCrunch, is that it’s actually two apps in one.
One half of the app helps the soon-to-be-mom understand the various stages of her pregnancy by describing what exactly is going on under the hood, while the other half caters to the dad, letting him know what sort of things his partner might need from him at this point in time. Mom can even note her mood on her side of the app and have an alert immediately sent to dad’s app so he knows ahead of time how nurturing he needs to be.
That this app essentially functions as two separate entities working towards the same common goal seems like a remarkably great idea, especially as it relates to pregnancy. Unfortunately, as the TechCrunch story notes, the app is currently only displaying text in Dutch and French. I suspect it won’t be long though before an English language update hits the App Store.
