Microsoft has acquired Swiss start-up Netbreeze

Microsoft Corp. today opened a sold-out Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2013. During the conference Microsoft announced that it has acquired a company from Zurich called Netbreeze. Netbreeze is a spin-off of ETH Zurich and was founded in 1998 by the physicists Francois Rüf and Ales Prochazka. The company is active in the field of social media monitoring. It is the second time that Microsoft has acquired a Swiss company. In 2005 they bought media-streams.com.
 
Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics explains in his blog, what makes Netbreeze so attractive: “When Microsoft considers an acquisition, we look for leading edge technology companies with innovative IP that aligns with our technology and can scale for the enterprise; this is what we were fortunate enough to find with Netbreeze. Netbreeze technology is unique in the way it combines modern methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP), data mining and semantic text analysis to support 28 different writing systems including German, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Traditional Chinese or Mandarin.  This is a huge benefit over competing solutions that translate to a common language then analyze sentiment from there.  Additionally, they offer their customers the ability to monitor a wide array of social channels including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as 6,000 online news websites, 18 million blogs and 500,000 message boards.”