I recently sat together for lunch with James Kim, founder an interesting company that just started - Opinmind. Opinmind has developed a cool new natural language processing technology that is able to screen huge amounts of text and can come up with an opinions voiced in that screened document. A great showcase for this is their blog opinions crawler freely accessible at Opinmind.

James was so nice to answer some questions for me:

Q: For the uninitiated - what is Opinmind doing?

Opinmind is a blog search engine that displays the uncensored opinions - favorable and unfavorable - of bloggers on anything and everything. It's easy enough to find expert opinions on popular topics, products or services. Just pick up your daily newspaper or visit one of your favorite sites online. It is not, however, as easy to discover the opinions of everyday people. A visit to Opinmind allows you to gauge the level and tone of conversations taking place in the Blogosphere. We display the relative percentages of positive and negative opinions that we find with our Sentimeter™ on the search results page for each topic.

Q: Where did the idea and technology for the company come from?

Charles and I met in early 2005 through mutual friends of ours at Stanford. I recognized that Charles' expertise in Natural Language Processing and his work in Artificial Intelligence was very special and we immediately began working on Opinmind. Blogging provides people with a simple way to express their delights and/or frustrations with things they run across in their daily lives. We created Opinmind to celebrate the candid opinions of bloggers. Whether you're looking to connect with people with similar hobbies, trying to figure out whether a new movie is worth seeing or you're looking to see what people think of George Bush, you can find it on Opinmind.

Q: How does Opinmind differ from other sentiment tracking tools?

A handful of other companies have developed captive sentiment tracking tools that they use to generate market research reports or provide marketing consulting services. These services are great for larger corporations that can afford them. Opinmind is the only consumer-facing opinion search engine that is free to use by anyone at anytime. We think that all companies, big and small, should have to opportunity to listen to consumer feedback about their products and services. In the end, we believe that this will enable the rapid creation of new generations of products and services that will delight consumers.

Q: What role does the public portal play right now and what will you be doing in future?

Opinmind provides a quick snapshot of public sentiment while highlighting the individual bloggers whose opinions we've discovered. We've also introduced our StikIts and Quotables (currently only available to TypePad users) so people can have fun with the Opinmind opinions in their own blogs.

We work constantly to implement analysis enhancements and to extend the reach of our search results. In the near future, you'll find new tools to aggregate opinions on popular topics, products, and markets.

Q: How is the company financed right now?

Opinmind is currently angel-funded by a group of investors led by Nick Swinmurn, founder of Zappos.com. Nick's off starting a new venture of his own called Stagr. They're still in stealth mode, but that one will also be fun to watch.

Q: How does the company make money and how should this evolve in future?

Opinmind provides sentiment trending services and other sentiment mining tools for blogs and other types of digital media. We feel that the current sentiment analysis services are out of reach for small and medium businesses and agencies. Our goal is to enable marketing, advertising, and PR professionals - both in-house and within agencies - in their work by providing them with data to make smarter strategic product, marketing, and advertising decisions. We offer trend data from our search results as well as license our sentiment analysis technology to run through electronic documents of their choice. Our service has been most popular with marketing services and PR agencies though we're seeing increased interest from firms in the financial services sector.

We've got some more exciting products in development. We'll have more on this later!

Q: What is your most important lesson as an entrepreneur?

Always remember that you're a trailblazer, not a tour guide. Introducing a new concept to the world isn't easy and there are plenty of people out there that will tell you why an idea won't work. As an entrepreneur, it's critical to take criticism constructively, to adapt and to keep moving forward. Concentrate on enabling your customer, think smart and focus on learning by doing. If you feel that you've got an entrepreneurial itch you can't scratch, I recommend starting sooner than later. It's the most challenging, yet most rewarding experience you can hope for.

Thanks James!