Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1.1, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Faculty of Computer Science), language: English, abstract: Emotions are not only the foundation of human life, but also influence all decisions in modern markets. Grasping the reasoning behind our choices is a key element in econom-ic sciences. Sentiment analysis, a tool to extract emotions from text, is used in this thesis to analyze customers' opinions in various markets. The calculations are done on a server architecture that is designed to be scalable for massive input directly from social net-works. It computes the sentiment score in a flexible multi-stage process and provides several methods of accessing the results. Subsequently, it is demonstrated how to use the system's capabilities by implementing various commercial use cases. This includes geographical and demographic analysis. Additionally, the system is able to provide near-real-time results. Lastly, the thesis concludes by performing several correlation analyses on the collected data. This illustrates how the intensity of emotions vary by the maturity and form of the economic market and affects the participating companies in these markets.