Technology vs. Infoxication -- The Challenges of Obtaining Intelligence from the Buzz

After four years pioneering the domain of Competitive Intelligence applied to Online Reputation in Spain, "la Caixa", the country\´s 3rd financial entity, is now in the perfect position to evaluate and, when necessary, integrate the newest technologies into its Corporate Intelligence System. The emergence of two activities - Online Reputation Management/Monitoring and Competitive Intelligence - and the progress of two essential and interrelated industries - language engineering and information retrieval - will surely guide the immediate evolution of both our unit and the market as a whole. In this paper I will briefly comment on the key technologies and methodological approaches that, according to our own experience and vision, will define the future of an activity and profession aimed at being central for the everyday decision-making of large corporations. The challenges are as variable and demanding as variable and demanding is the information revolution that will ultimately define our age. Social media and the Buzz, multilingual and multimodal information retrieval, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, the Semantic Web will be among the key words of this presentation, conceived both as an open reflex ion from the perspective of an experienced end-user and as a ground for debate within the privileged audience of EISIC.