#Trending: Nate Silver Meets Anna Wintour in New Trend Spotting Technology

PULA, Italy and TURIN, Italy, June 11, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- As the $36 billion trend spotting movement continues to gain momentum, iCoolhunt is launching its Nextatlas technology in the U.S. to deliver data-driven inspiration and help brands transform trend detection into commerce. The online service gives businesses a unique way to identify emerging consumer trends by marrying social data from Tumblr with the expertise of 30,000 active trend spotters worldwide and will soon include Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Leading global brands including luxury car manufacturer Maserati, financial service group Allianz and others in the fashion, retail, design, creative consulting, media and food industries are already using Nextatlas to stay on-trend.

Created by brothers Luca and Alessio Morena and designed by top information designer Giorgia Lupi with her team at Accurat, Nextatlas is the business version of the duo's pioneering consumer trend spotting app iCoolhunt. After launching as a proof of concept in 2010, iCoolhunt's success gained the attention of investors and was brought to market as an application in 2013. It was downloaded by 50,000 tastemakers worldwide in just six months. To date, iCoolhunt has raised $1.4 million led by Atlante Ventures Mezzogiorno, the VC arm of Intesa San Paolo, the largest bank in Italy.

"Social media and big data analytics have added an important layer of science to the art of trend spotting," said Luca Morena, co-founder and co-CEO of iCoolhunt. "Imagine if brands like Levi's could have predicted that baggy jeans would become a billion dollar opportunity, rather than missing the trend and taking a billion dollar loss. Now, they can."

How Nextatlas Works
Nextatlas helps brands easily visualize emerging trends by meshing together data from different social media streams into actionable insights that inform and inspire the creative process. Key features of the new technology include:

• Real-Time Trend Spotting Dashboard – Tracks the evolution of a trend and scores its relevance using finely tuned algorithms and its proprietary measurement system Karma. The Nextatlas editorial team then adds a layer of curation, validation and contextualization to the data, offering brands the empirical evidence they need to make sound business decisions. Users can customize their dashboard to track trends specific to their industry.
• Trend Tracing – Allows brands to drill down and pinpoint the sources of trends and their real-world applications across industries, such as cyber-inspired apparel or architecture. They can also map relationships between trends to better understand their significance and inspire the creative process.
• Trend Localization – Trends can be tracked by geographic origin and migration to help brands identify whether they present macro or niche opportunities. By pinpointing how, where and why a trend came into existence, users can predict where it is heading and inform localized campaigns.
• Customizable Trend Reports – Nextatlas users can create instantaneous mood boards, storyboards and visual presentations to facilitate the creative process.

"Too often, there is a chasm between the qualitative and quantitative components of creativity," said Alessio Morena, co-founder and co-CEO of iCoolhunt. "They should co-exist. We use trend spotting data to enable, not interfere, with the creative process."

"Keeping our finger on the pulse of what's next allows Maserati to deliver luxury beyond our cars," said Salvatore Iuzzolini, Brand Development and Partners Manager at Maserati. "We use emerging trends to inspire and inform our brand, our products and the luxury lifestyle we represent. Nextatlas will be an important stimulus for those decisions."

Brands interested in tapping into the power of the Nextatlas trend platform can sign up for a free trial at http://www.nextatlas.com/.

About Nextatlas
Nextatlas is a business application for data-driven inspiration. Using finely tuned algorithms, it offers brands a new way to tap into social data to identify emerging consumer trends and fuels creativity with visually stunning trend forecasts. Nextatlas is the business application of iCoolhunt's self-named consumer trend spotting app, originally launched as a proof-of-concept in 2010.

iCoolhunt was catapulted into the VC spotlight when its iOS app experienced 20,000 downloads in a single week. iCoolhunt has raised $1.4 million to date and was incorporated in 2012 by philosopher, Luca Morena, and designer, Alessio Morena; advisors include Ciro Cattuto (head of the Data Science Lab at the ISI Foundation) and Rebecca Walker (award-winning author at the Huffington Post and author of "Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness"). iCoolhunt is based out of the Sardegna Ricerche incubator in Pula, Cagliari, Italy, with operations in Turin. For more information about iCoolhunt, please visit: www.nextatlas.com and www.icoolhunt.com.

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SOURCE Nextatlas