The sentiment-based information on hot topics and securities will be accessible through Interactive Data's cloud-based platform.

The offering covers a broad range of global securities and financial market information, including individual stocks, indices, commodities and currencies, and provides access to two types of analysis. Users can stay up-to-date on topics trending in the social media networks, and also gauge current sentiment on a particular stock, index or sector. Several views such as topic flows, charts, tag clouds, and 'top flop' lists are available to help visualize current movements and monitor how crowd-sourced topics and sentiment indicators develop over time.

Interactive Data's customers will be able to offer social media sentiment indicators as part of a compelling analytics package to their website visitors. Together with global financial market data, comprehensive statistics for watch-lists and portfolios, or information resulting from website data, such as "most traded security" or "most searched today" they can be displayed in the appropriate context.

"Sentiment analysis has become an important source for investment professionals to assess financial markets and stocks, and we observe that it is increasingly influencing the investment decision-making process," says Joachim Lauterbach, President, Interactive Data Managed Solutions. "We are pleased to provide our customers with the opportunity to offer additional insight by integrating social media analytics from Sowa Labs, as we believe they have developed a unique approach to turn vast quantities of unstructured data into actionable intelligence."

"Many years of joint research enabled Sowa Labs to develop an intelligent system that combines human financial market expertise with self-learning computer algorithms," says Ulli Spankowski, CEO of Sowa Labs. "The collaboration with Interactive Data reinforces the value proposition of our core competence -- developing innovative, intelligent solutions that are state-of-the art and allow investors to gain valuable insights from social media."

Sowa Labs specializes in systematically extracting and analyzing sentiment indicators from social media and social networks. The further collaboration with Interactive Data builds on the successful collaboration of the two on the FIRST project which was co-funded by the European Union. The FIRST project successfully addressed the extreme challenges of dealing, in real time, with ever growing amounts of data in financial markets.