When it comes to sieving through unstructured data, there’s a great deal of interest from several industries, from advertising to search.  Viralheat’s unleashing its intelligence tool to those companies in need, with the release of a free sentiment analysis API.  Currently in beta, the new Viralheat API lets you incorporate its sentiment analysis tool into your apps, assessing a variety of data sets from the Web.

Viralheat’s been working on its sentiment analysis technology for a couple of years now, creating a tool that several companies have found quite useful so far.  In an era when automating data curation has a growing significance for brands, Viralheat’s technique leverages natural language technology to determine the underlying meaning in what people are saying on the web.  With an established product now on the market, Viralheat’s looking to further differentiate itself amongst industry rivals.  The API, offered for free, is the next step in Viralheat’s progression.

“Social media analytics needs to evolve to be much more sophisticated,” said Raj Kadam, Co-founder and CEO of Viralheat. “By releasing our sentiment analysis API for free, we are breaking down the barriers to entry, and helping the market for sentiment analysis to mature much faster. As more developers use the API, this will become one of the largest, most accurate and easy to use sentiment engines available.”

Viralheat’s always been about freeing data analytics tools to a wider population, and extending its API to the developer community will also grow Viralheat’s reach and points of integration.  Viralheat expects to learn a great deal from its developer community, positioning itself as an important development for the entire industry.  And with a focus on scalability, Viralheat is actually looking to push the market forward, through accessibility and two-way communication between its platform and its outlets.

“We’re training our system for a couple scenarios,” says Raj Kadam, CEO and co-founder of Viralheat.  “Sentiment is something we can’t get 100% right, but we can improve based on feedback.  Pass it through to make sure it’s being applied correctly.  We also want to expand to other languages.  It’s focused on English but now clients want precise analysis in other languages, and no one else really has that.”

Being all about the data, Viralheat stands to learn a great deal from its API community, and work towards a next product release that works around even more of its long term goals.  Anticipating what will come of an API release is always a guessing game, but Viralheat already has an extensive client and partner base that’s ready and willing to make good use of this new release.  Some launch partners include Seesmic, which has built Viralheat’s sentiment analysis into their desktop offering, and Klout, which will be leveraging the API to contextualize content created by influencers.  The free API is available today, and supports up to 5,000 calls per day.