Bluefin Labs has raised $12 million from investors in a recent funding round. Time Warner (News - Alert) Investments led the Series B round. Also taking part were SoftBank Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Lerer Ventures.

Bluefin Labs will use the money to increase sales and client services, according to econtentmag.com. The money will also be used to improve innovations in company technology and research and development, the report adds.

Bluefin’s solutions help marketing companies and TV networks track viewer responses to programs by monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Bluefin signals analyze responses to 11,000 television programs which are shown 346,000 times. The comments that are monitored are found in 5 billion postings in social media sites, econtentmag.com adds.

"Our technology empowers marketers and television networks to make more informed advertising and programming decisions by allowing them to track how audiences are responding to television," Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO, Bluefin Labs, said in a statement carried by TMCnet.

The company traces its birth to the MIT (News - Alert) Media Lab, where Roy was director of the Cognitive Machines Group. Roy and colleagues came up with a Human Speechome Project. It showed a “complete digital record of the first years of a child's home life … and analyzed that record computationally,” according to a history posted on the Bluefin site. The researchers discovered algorithms that showed connections between language and context, the history adds. Michael Fleischman, Bluefin's president & CTO, later applied the lessons learned to broadcast video. It has since led to many commercial applications. For example, Rentrak (News - Alert) Corporation, working with Bluefin Labs, will offer analysis of TV programs. Rentrak will provide reports offering both Rentrak's TV Essentials system and Bluefin Labs' data, according to TMCnet. "The combined analytics provide unparalleled insight into television engagement," Roy said.

In other company news, Evan Shore, founder of the Noah’s Ark Foundation, who has also worked for McKinsey & Company (News - Alert) and The Carlyle Group, has been hired by Bluefin Labs’ product management team, according to the company’s blog.

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