Data analy­sis: it’s all about count­ing num­bers, isn’t it? Not accord­ing to tech ana­lyt­ics firm Synap­si­fy, which has just announced a thump­ing $600,000 in seed fund­ing cour­tesy of ICG Ven­tures, Mid­dle­land Cap­i­tal and For­ti­fy Ventures.

Can­ny chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers, chief rev­enue offi­cers and busi­ness devel­op­ment asso­ciates won’t have failed to notice that the val­ue of data analy­sis has been ris­ing steeply over the last few months; last year, as pay­ment fees declined, the val­ue of pay­ment data start­ed to soar, dri­ving new, sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­els not reliant on fees. And this is exact­ly where Synapsify’s unique approach to data analy­sis comes to the fore.

Beyond num­ber crunching

Its web­site out­lines its capa­bil­i­ties rather deft­ly. Here’s a quote:

“Synapsify’s tech­nol­o­gy can (i) read any type of writ­ten con­tent based on sev­er­al dimen­sions, (ii) reveal the qual­i­ty, bal­ance, cred­i­bil­i­ty and quotabli­ty of such con­tent and its most impor­tant top­ics and phras­es (iii) index and match against any oth­er writ­ten con­tent or cus­tomized index­es, and (iv) raise the abil­i­ty to dis­cov­er, under­stand and seg­ment action­able insights.”

As CEO and co-founder Stephen Caldel­mo puts it, “The world has become over­whelmed with writ­ten con­tent that can no longer be curat­ed and under­stood sole­ly by cost­ly human moderators.”

Synapsify’s tech­nol­o­gy goes well beyond one dimen­sion­al clas­si­fi­ca­tions (neg­a­tive, pos­i­tive, neu­tral) and sim­ple key­word men­tions. It mea­sures the over­all val­ue of con­tent from any web­site, and even mea­sures it against the qual­i­ty of com­pet­ing con­tent. Then it quan­ti­fies how much traf­fic a post on, say, MediaJobs.com might attract in com­par­i­son with a competitor.

An expan­sive technology

The poten­tial appli­ca­tions are immense: its patent­ed search and text ana­lyt­ics tech­nol­o­gy endows its clients with enor­mous abil­i­ties to eval­u­ate con­tent. Synap­si­fy doesn’t just ana­lyze how much peo­ple are spend­ing, what they are watch­ing and how much time they’re putting in to their online inter­ests; it pro­vides a care­ful­ly honed pre­dic­tive analy­sis of what peo­ple, write, say, like and think.

Now, that’s bor­der­ing on the unnerv­ing; Gov­ern­ments could use this tech­nol­o­gy to fig­ure out what their cit­i­zens are up to on social net­work­ing sites. But it also per­mits much bet­ter mod­er­a­tion on web­site forums, and pub­lish­ers could har­ness it to pro­duce appre­cia­bly bet­ter-sell­ing books.

The sec­ond quar­ter of 2013 will see Synapsify’s first col­lec­tion of enter­prise clien­tele as well as its API.