SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 16, 2015) - Sysomos, the social intelligence company powered by data science, has acquired gazeMetrix, an industry-leading image recognition and visual listening platform, to help brands and agencies capitalize on the opportunity presented by the increasingly visual social web.

"Most brands are missing crucial visual data about their customers on Twitter and Instagram, and few recognize that analyzing captions, comments and hashtags isn't enough," said Lindsay Sparks, chief executive officer at Sysomos. "gazeMetrix already helps many leading global companies monitor visual brand or product mentions and, most importantly, understand the customer in context. We're excited to bring this essential technology for the modern marketer to our 1,500 customers."

Launched in 2012 through renowned startup accelerator, 500 Startups, gazeMetrix has been at the forefront of visual analytics in social media using state-of-the-art algorithms and a proprietary virality detection method. The platform provides brands a window into how their logos are representing them and how customers are representing their brand.

"gazeMetrix has developed a broad set of machine vision techniques leveraging one of the biggest advances in data science, Deep Learning -- the most popular approach to developing Artificial Intelligence," said Stu Ogawa, chief technology officer at Sysomos. "In a matter of days, gazeMetrix can be trained to 'see' brand logos, people, scenes and objects while also giving marketers an early look into social content cycles that are gaining momentum and drawing positive or negative attention a brand."

Harnessing the Power of User-Generated Content

As Forrester Research revealed in a June 2014 report, Establish Product Credibility On Your Website (subscription required for access), only 19 percent of U.S. online consumers trust a brand's content on social networking sites, while 67 percent of consumers trust brand and product recommendations from friends, peers, experts and a brand's own customers on third-party sites.

In addition to its photo monitoring offering, gazeMetrix also seamlessly enables digital rights management, allowing brands to easily contact users who have posted photos. Brands can ask for permission to republish user-generated images on their own channels, turning that content into assets that work for the brand.

"User-generated visual social content offers rich data that can be translated into actionable insights with the right tools," said Saurab Paruthi, chief executive officer at gazeMetrix. "With Sysomos being the largest independent social intelligence platform, now made even more powerful through Expion's enterprise-class social engagement platform, the integration of gazeMetrix visual listening technology will make Sysomos the actionability engine marketers really need."

From Insight to Action

The news of Sysomos' gazeMetrix acquisition follows its July acquisition of social marketing platform, Expion, and positions the combined company to offer an integrated set of tools including social and now visual listening, community engagement, content curation and publishing -- all driven by the industry's most advanced data science technology at the core of Sysomos. Both gazeMetrix and Expion bring to Sysomos a deep focus on insight and action, plus unique technical capabilities that, when used together, will provide marketers the most comprehensive, integrated social analytics and marketing platform available.

"Integrating the elements so that marketers can take precise actions recommended by the technology is critical for the next stage of social analytics," said Peter Heffring, president of Sysomos' platform division. "Being able to not only tell a company about what's happening around their product and brand, but to provide the means to take action on the insight is core to what we are doing."

Sysomos continues its 2015 momentum, acquiring both gazeMetrix and Expion in a period of months and having almost doubled headcount since the beginning of 2015, including making several major executive appointments. The company has also been investing heavily in platform enhancements to strengthen its data science capabilities, infrastructure and ability to scale.

For more information on this announcement and to view a video highlighting how gazeMetrix will come to life with Sysomos, click here.

About gazeMetrix
gazeMetrix is a consumer behavior analysis company that uses advanced image recognition and artificial intelligence technologies to analyze user generated photos in social channels, helping brands understand how their products are consumed and visualized by users in their daily lives. Used by global brands in more than 40 markets gazeMetrix, empowers marketers stay in control of brand's image and identity. gazeMetrix is based in Bangladesh, India. Learn more at www.gazemetrix.com.

About Sysomos
Sysomos is the social intelligence company powered by data science that gives businesses immediate context to the hundreds of millions of conversations happening online every day. The Sysomos social intelligence platform continuously decodes these conversations and news stories to give marketers real-time answers about what their customers think and feel. More than 1500 brands and agencies, including 80 percent of the most valuable global brands, as ranked by Interbrand, trust Sysomos for their social intelligence. Sysomos has offices in seven cities worldwide, including London, New York, San Francisco and Toronto. Learn more at www.sysomos.com.