Mr Benjamin Koe: The voices on the social media is only going to increase and services like JamiQ will be increasingly required by more and more brands.

Social networks and forums have taken the business world by storm with public chatter over the Internet taking place on almost every conceivable brand and organisation. JamiQ helps owners of these brands and companies monitor and analyse these conversations, particularly in Asia.

JamiQ’s core business is social media monitoring which in essence means using technology to help clients mine the millions of conversations taking place around their brands, collect and analyse the data so that they can derive insights from it.

“The reason this is important is because every single day, millions of people online talk publicly about brands, products, people, TV programmes and more,” said Mr Benjamin Koe, Head of Client Leadership, JamiQ. “This massive flow of information is so decentralised all over the globe that no one can make sense of it. Social media monitoring helps put all that in one place so that we can track it, trend it, and analyse it.”

According to JamiQ, this trend is only expected to accelerate as social media gains greater importance. “The voices on the social media is only going to increase and services like JamiQ will be increasingly required by more and more brands,” said Mr Koe.

While there are a multitude of social media monitoring tools from the United States (US), JamiQ saw an opportunity to localise what has largely been a North American-centric technology.

“We found a lack of social media monitoring tools for Asia,” said Mr Koe. “The tools that come from the US generally focus on monitoring data in their markets, and don’t have the capability to get the multilingual and local content
from Asia.”

For example, JamiQ’s unique technology is able to differentiate the origin of content even though they may be hosted on US-based servers with US IP addresses.
“If a blogger is using blogspot.com to host his blog, many US tools will see the blogger as from the US even though the reality is many from Singapore and all over the world use that service,” said Mr Koe. “Our system does deep mining of content to give our clients a more accurate picture of their markets of interests.”

“Many competitors in Asia are either focused on particular markets or resell generic and US-based solutions,” he added. “This makes JamiQ a strong and unique competitor in the region.”

Founded on 5 September 2008, JamiQ received funding from Singapore’s inter-agency Interactive Digital Media (IDM) Programme Office under the IDM Jump-start and Mentor (i.JAM) initiative. “As a result, we do get involved with Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore and Media Development Authority events for greater exposure and we now count a number of government agencies as our clients,” said Mr Koe.

With JamiQ's focus in technology and data analysis, the company believes it can take expand on its social media database and apply it to other areas beyond social media monitoring, said Mr Koe. “We are already talking to strategic partners in many different industries who can leverage our technology and data for their businesses.”