Sony announced a new handheld gaming system this week that it claims will revolutionize the portable entertainment experience.

The new PlayStation Vita was unveiled as part of Sony’s presentation on the eve of the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

The Vita marks Sony’s biggest advance in the handheld gaming space since it introduced the Sony PSP in 2006. The Vita doesn’t feature 3D gaming, like rival Nintendo’s 3DS, but the dual cameras will be used in another emerging video-game space — augmented reality.

PlayStation Vita vs. Sony PSP chatter

The unreleased PlayStation Vita is already generating more buzz than the established Sony PSP.

PlayStation sentiment

Sentiment around PlayStation is at its most positive point of the month. Conversations around PlayStation are currently 85% positive, after dipping to 35% positive during the hacker PlayStation Network fiasco.

Now that the PlayStation Network is back in action and the Vita is generating positive buzz, has Sony regained the consumer confidence?

Nintendo reported yesterday plans to cut the price of its Wii console to $150 as soon as May 15. Over the past year, Wii sales have slowed considerably. Nintendo revealed earlier this year that it sold about 7 million Wii units in the U.S. in 2010. It had sold more than 10 million units in 2008 and about 9 million units in 2009. The Wii has trailed the Xbox 360 so far this year in overall sales.

Wii chatter

The price drop generated a small increase in chatter. However, we noticed a much higher spike in chatter around Wii conversations on April 25. Further analysis showed us that Nintendo announced plans to release Wii 2 in 2012 that day.

Wii vs. PlayStation vs. Xbox

As we posted yesterday, PlayStation has been facing increased negative buzz due to its hacked PlayStation Network. Regardless, Xbox has generated the highest amount of buzz overall throughout the last month.

As we move into day 11 of the PlayStation Network fiasco, Sony continues to rebuild its beleaguered network while apologizing profusely to users.

Sony believes hackers obtained user account information, including home addresses, email addresses, birth dates, usernames and passwords and potentially even credit card numbers.

PlayStation chatter

Apparently some users don’t appreciate what they have until its gone. Chatter around PlayStation is up 79% as more news about the outage is revealed.

PlayStation sentiment

PlayStation sentiment, which is generally between 80-90% positive, spiked up to 65% negative.

XBox sentiment

Meanwhile, XBox sentiment is currently 81% positive. Can Microsoft XBox capitalize on Sony’s PlayStation Network woes and steal market share?

IBM’s Watson computer beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the most successful players in Jeopardy history, this week.

Jeopardy buzz

Conversations mentioning Jeopardy spiked 1,200% during the two-day show featuring supercomputer Watson. Buzz around Jeopardy is at its highest point since September 2008 when the Jeopardy PlayStation video game was released.

Jeopardy sentiment

Conversations around Jeopardy were 82% positive this week.

Jeopardy topic cloud

Watson was mentioned in more than 62% of Jeopardy posts this week.

Now that we know supercomputers can dominate humans in Jeopardy, will the show still matter?

Facebook continues to become one of the most important platforms for brands to engage. The Next Web published a list of the top 25 most ‘liked’ brands on Facebook. Do more Facebook ‘likes’ mean increased chatter for brands online? We used Social Radar to run analysis on Web chatter around each of these brands in 2010. Compare the lists below.

Interestingly, there seems to be little correlation between which brands have the most Facebook ‘likes’ and which brands are being talked about most online.

The chart below contains the brands ranked in order of most Facebook ‘likes’, with bars representing online chatter.

The September 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during September 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during September 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

Twitter falls a bit, but still takes top spot. LG’s new BL20 Chocolate helped LG jump 11 spots. NFL rises again this month as the NFL season heats up. MTV jumps 13 spots due to buzz around the MTV Video Music awards. AT&T’s announcement of MMS support on the iPhone raised AT&T’s position up 5 spots.

View the full list below, or download the PDF. For additional information about how you can analyze chatter sentiment to gauge positivity/negativity, view key words mentioned about your brand and identify key influencers, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.

E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) has concluded and we have analyzed the most discussed announcements from the show.  Microsoft’s motion-tracking Project Natal unsurprisingly took the top spot followed with the PSP Go.  Metal Gear Solid, the most discussed game, came in third.  Some other notable mentions are Gran Turismo 5 versus Forza 3, for which GT5 generated the most chatter.  Also, Scribblenauts is quite far down the list, but today the game as been generating a strong upsurge in mentions and we expect this one to get a bit more attention over the next few days.

Wednesday we posted a sentiment comparison between Project Natal and the PS3 motion-tracking controller you can see here.

The full top listing is in the chart after the jump, displayed by the percentage of E3 discussions mentioning that announcement.  The Top 10 is in the image below:

Top 10:

Continue reading…

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is wrapping up in Los Angeles. At their respective keynotes, both Microsoft and Sony made major announcements in a similar vain.  Microsoft presented their Project Natal, a camera-based device which can track full body motion without needing a controller. Shortly after, Sony demonstrated a prototype high-precision motion tracking controller for the Playstation 3.  Both exciting and impressive in different ways.

We decided to see the web’s reaction to these announcements, and threw the Wii Motion Plus accessory in for comparison.  MotionPlus is an add-on coming for the Nintendo Wii controllers which improves their motion tracking accuracy and capabilities.

Project Natal had the most positive response. Additionally, in regards to overall conversation volume, it had around three times what Sony’s motion controller generated.  Interestingly, after these announcements, we saw a notable increase in negative chatter around the Wii Motion Plus, with negativity increasing around 8%. This is attributed to users seeing these new developments as superior to Nintendo’s long-time-coming accessory.