Technological MIDI incubator is selected at Startup Brasil

Project Aquarela Trends aims to improve mechanism
of sentiment analysis of fashion consumers on social networks

 
With the proposal to build a market intelligence tool, initially focused on the fashion sector, Aquarela Inovação Tecnológica do Brasil – a company incubated by the Technological MIDI, an incubator managed by the Santa Catarina Association of Technology Companies (ACATE) and maintained by Sebrae/ SC – was the only one selected in the South of the country in the relocation for the second group of the Startup Brasil 2013 program. The solution, called Aquarela Trends, proposes to analyze trends in sentiment, behavior and perception of users in social media. For the incubated's finance and operations director, Joni Hoppen, the tool's differential lies in the use of web 3.0 technologies for linguistic/semantic processing of citations extracted from social media.
 
Aquarela Trends will be aimed at the fashion and clothing sector, involving clothes and accessories, seeking to become a kind of fashion IBOPE. According to Exame magazine, this sector is the one that most interacts in the networks, with an index of 25.5%, followed by electronics, with 14.3%, and communication, with 11.3% and moved approximately R$ 136 billion in 2013, n Brazil. "The volume and consistency of the data entered into the system is the main input for the success of this project. We want to take our solution to companies in the textile sector, stylists and developers of fashion products, marketing agencies and specialized consultancies", explains Hoppen. The intention is for the tool to be available for web and mobile platforms.The director believes that the solution will also support e-commerce platforms, as they will be able to automatically reorganize their virtual storefronts, according to identified trends.
 
The computational analysis is done directly from the text in Portuguese and not only in hashtags. Based on this, patterns will be identified and predictions will be made. "We have already worked with a functional prototype, which has been analyzing around 500,000 posts a day, extracting intentions from texts available on social networks in specific areas", he says.
 
Aquarela was founded in 2010 and entered the MIDI Technological incubator in 2012, with the aim of fostering innovation in the market through web 3.0 technologies. The project selected in the 'recap' process of Startup Brasil 2013 is the result of more than five years of research and development, in the master's courses of the founding partners, both in Brazil and in the Netherlands.

The Technological MIDI Incubator helps technology-based ventures, supporting the development process of nascent companies. In almost 16 years, MIDI has already contributed to the arrival on the market of 73 companies and, currently, it has 17 incubated companies, being six resident and 12 virtual. In 2008 and 2012, the incubator was elected the best technology-based incubator in Brazil by Anprotec's National Innovative Entrepreneurship Award.