TechCrunch50 Honors StockMood.com With the Thomson Reuters Award for Best Business-to-Professionals Start-Up

Business Wire, Sept 29, 2008

ATHERTON, Calif. -- The organizers of TechCrunch50 in partnership with Thomson Reuters, recognize TechCrunch50 finalist StockMood.com as the winner of the Thomson Reuters Award for "Best Business-to-Professional Start-Up". The Award celebrates excellence in both product intent and business model promise, specifically in the intelligent information category. StockMood.com is a newly launched start-up venture that uses advanced artificial intelligence to analyze news stories, classify their sentiment, and then measure their potential impact on stock price direction.

The Thomson Reuters Award for "Best Business-to-Professional Start-Up" was presented at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. TechCrunch50 provides a platform for early-stage, and frequently unfunded, companies to launch for the first time to the technology industry's most influential venture capitalists, corporations, angel investors, fellow entrepreneurs and the international media. Companies are selected to participate exclusively on merit.

"The TechCrunch50 team is very pleased to be working with Thomson Reuters to recognize StockMood.com," said Heather Harde, TechCrunch CEO. "The 'Best Business-to-Professional' award provides the TechCrunch50 finalists with an additional platform for recognition. We are honored to be working with a partner as prestigious as Thomson Reuters to highlight early stage, technology start-up excellence in the intelligent information category."

StockMood.com Measures How a Stock's Price Responds to News

StockMood.com employs an artificial intelligence algorithm to measure how a stock's price responds to news. Each news article on StockMood.com is individually ingested, and its sentiment assessed by natural language processing models, created by machine learning algorithms. When a stock is in a "good mood," the stock price responds favorably to good news, and has a tendency to shrug off the bad news. The opposite is true for stocks identified as being in a "bad mood". When both the mood and the sentiment values for a stock reach certain empirically determined thresholds, a Sentiment Alert is issued, indicating a relatively high probability of movement over the next few days. Product users are given the opportunity to contribute their own opinions regarding the sentiment of individual news articles, thus providing the artificial intelligence algorithms with feedback they can use to refine their future judgments, and adding a "crowd source" aspect to the product offering.

"StockMood.com was one of the stand-out start-ups at TechCrunch50, providing intelligent information to a professional audience to help them make better and faster business decisions," said Marcy Simon, Global Marketing Strategist for Thomas Reuters. "We chose to recognize StockMood.com with our 'Best Business-to-Professional' award to highlight the company's innovation and business model acumen. Given the current economic and financial climate, we believe there is a niche which the StockMood.com product has identified, and we wish them the best of luck for their future."

StockMood.com is currently in a BETA testing phase. To become a StockMood.com BETA tester, send email to L.halperin@lagovent.com.

"We are thrilled to accept this award from Thomas Reuters," said Brett Markinson, founder and CEO of StockMood.com. "To be recognized by Thomas Reuters is an honor for StockMood.com and an absolutely terrific, extremely gratifying way for us to conclude our TechCrunch50 experience."

About TechCrunch50

Founded in 2007 by leading technology blog TechCrunch and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, the TechCrunch50 conference provides a platform for early-stage, and frequently unfunded, companies to launch for the first time to the technology industry's most influential venture capitalists, corporations, angel investors, fellow entrepreneurs and the international media. Companies are selected to participate exclusively on merit. TechCrunch50 is supported by corporate sponsors Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Salesforce, MSN Money, Symantec, Thomson Reuters and Yahoo!, as well as venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Mayfield Fund, Clearstone Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, Founders Fund, Perkins Coie and Fenwick & West.

About Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs more than 50,000 people in 93 countries. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: TRI); Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: TRI); London Stock Exchange (LSE: TRIL); and Nasdaq (NASDAQ: TRIN). For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.