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Why Signoi? Why Now?
The rise of quantitative semiotics.

October 29, 2019by Clare Warren

There are no other tools that do what Signoi can do – suck in vast quantities of unstructured data and automatically deliver back valuable, intuitive actionable, meaning. So, why has Signoi appeared now?

The problem of unstructured data

Pioneering tools appear when two things coincide: the need for the tool and the technology that can bring it into existence. Ever since 1990 – when Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, popularising the concept of accessing data online – there has been an exponential growth of information held in digital form.

Today, we are drowning (metaphorically) in unstructured data. It’s estimated that by 2020, 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth. To give just one example of this eye-watering deluge of information: in 2018, Instagram saw its users post 49,380 pictures every minute.

As individuals we cannot hope to engage with more than the tiniest fraction of the information that’s out there. And for years, computer scientists argued that this unstructured data – images; audio; videos; text; feelings; opinions – was both too ephemeral and too difficult to analyse. That has now changed, thanks to Signoi.

Surfacing insights from unstructured data

Signoi is a platform that has been built to analyse huge amounts of both structured and unstructured data. We clean, crunch and categorise that data in ways that allow us to bring to the surface hitherto inaccessible insights and foresights.

Our unique, consistent analytical modules and metrics extract meaning from any form of unstructured data in a way that is rigorous, reliable and replicable. We call this quantitative semiotics: an entirely new discipline, in which semiotics is no longer restricted to small scale sample data. It’s fast; it’s affordable; it’s consistent and it can be quantified.

In other words, Signoi is a tool that answers a long unmet need – the desire to fish effectively in our seas of information and intuitively understand what we find there. 

Here are some examples of what Signoi can do

Signoi can:

  • Source and ingest all the publicly available data on an international brand and crunch it to uncover deep insights about how that brand is perceived; where it’s vulnerable to competitors and which future trends look set to challenge – or boost – its growth.
  • Analyse hundreds of thousands of customer comments to test marketing messages against peoples’ actual experiences. Signoi is able to reveal the implicit and measurable differences between what a brand is saying and how that brand is perceived.
  • Interpret the messages encoded in hundreds of thousands of pictures to understand the aspirations and values behind them: offering insights into the people who posted the images and the cultural motifs and representations implicit in those images.

Signoi: the future of data analysis

So, the answer to Why Signoi, why now? is a simple one. It is only in recent years that the technology has been available to allow a platform like Signoi to reliably approximate the way human beings understand and use language and visual metaphor.

But our journey is only just beginning. So far, we think we’ve only scratched the surface of what our platform can do. The impossible is now possible – the world of unstructured data is opening up for exploration in an intuitively human way.

Welcome to Signoi. Welcome to the future.