J.D. Power and Associates today announced the acquisition of Umbria Inc., a marketing intelligence company that specializes in social media and consumer-generated media research. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Umbria Inc., located in Boulder, Colo., is a pioneer in deriving market intelligence from the rapidly growing world of online communities made up of blogs, message boards and social networks. Using leading-edge technology and algorithms, Umbria transforms the unstructured data of the online community into actionable insights by identifying important themes and topics of interest by demographic profile. Its highly regarded research is used by organizations to launch new products and identify new market opportunities in a wide variety of industries, including automotive, financial services, consumer electronics, retail, media and entertainment.

INFO SOURCES

J.D. Power and Associates

FIRMS

Headquartered in Westlake Village, Calif., J.D. Power and Associates is a global marketing information services firm operating in key business sectors including market research, forecasting, performance improvement, training and customer satisfaction. The firm's quality and satisfaction measurements are based on responses from millions of consumers annually. J.D. Power and Associates is a business unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies.

Umbria is unique in its ability to assess both what is being said, and who is doing the speaking in the online world. Umbria's patent-pending technology enables the company to classify posts and estimate gender and age of the speaker, as well as rapidly identify and eliminate bogus spam posts. Umbria analyzes voices of the online community by using proprietary Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to dissect the who, what and why of online opinion, offering in-depth insights for some of the world's leading brands.

LINKED TO

J.D. Power and Associates is a business unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies

Umbria Inc. is Linked to: Sequel Venture Partners, VistaVC and Arrowpath Venture Partners

PEOPLE

Janet Eden-Harris, chief executive officer of Umbria

Steve Goodall, president of J.D. Power and Associates

Note:

According to findings presented at the recent BlogWorld conference, more than 147 million Americans say they use the Internet. More than 12 million American adults report maintaining a blog, while more than 57 million say they read blogs. Approximately 120,000 new blogs, as well as 1.4 million new blog posts, are created each day. In addition, blog search engine Technorati.com indicates that as of the end of 2007, more than 112 million blogs were in existence worldwide.