Data in (or out of) the US

The Analytics world will certainly be affected by all of the news around the NSA and other US government moves.  Bloomberg reports:

"Some companies are apparently so concerned about the NSA snooping on their data that they're requiring - in writing - that their technology suppliers store their data outside the U.S."

And for data that does travel through or stay in the US, we also need to be mindful of how it moves in/out of our datacenters.  Consider Microsoft, who according to the Washington Post, are considering taking actions, noting that:

"executives are meeting this week to decide what encryption initiatives to deploy and how quickly"

All of these changes are a big deal for companies like Webtrends and others who take data security and privacy very seriously.  Worldwide data collection, and powerful streaming architecture will become even more paramount to solve the ever-changing high-performance Analytics demands from a diverse and concerned customer base.

Smart Data-Driven Redesign at the NYTimes

Like so many others, I'm constantly impressed with the NYTimes.  They have such an incredibly rich history of award-winning content, and have been pioneers in so many areas of digital media.  Plus they are loaded with super smart, data-driven, talented people.

We're incredibly lucky to have them as a customer of ours at Webtrends.

Mashable has a great article on the redesign of the article layouts the NYTimes is rolling out.  So many of these changes are driven by smart analysis of data.  Note these quotes:

• Longer articles are no longer paginated because the Times found that readers read further and stay longer when they don't have those obstacles, Ian Adelman, the Times' director of digital design, says.
• Approximately 46% of the Times's web traffic comes through the home page, and Adelman says desktop visitors frequently click on an article from the home page and click back to the home page to choose another article over and over again.
• Subscribers who log in to the Times site when the redesigned pages roll out will notice that the navigation menu has been pre-populated with shortcuts to the sections they visit most.
• Overall, there are less ads, but the Times expects impression numbers will remain steady because the new site will encourage people to read for longer periods of time.
• There's also an expectation that, with less elements to compete with on a page, advertisers' messages will stand out more — a hypothesis that will be tested in time by click-throughs rates and other engagement metrics.
• Larson says they are still testing to determine optimal placements for many of these features, particularly the most-emailed stories widget, which is especially popular with readers.
• To keep you reading, a row of additional stories from the section appear at the end of articles, followed by a second row of stories recommended for you based on your previous reading history.

Micro-Campaigns with Real Cookies

Over at AdRants, Steve Hall notes "The most important issue the real-time marketing trendlet has brought to the forefront -- much the same way Twitter and other social media did -- is that the campaign is dead."

He's referring to the big campaigns that brands and agencies have run for a long time, and probably will still run moving forward, but I agree with him that there will be fewer of them, and that the trend is toward more of a real time marketing approach.

He cites the Oreo Super Bowl ad/tweet (such a clever, quick idea pulled off during the power outage while the game was paused) as an example of why it's critical for brands to be executing ideas much more rapidly.

We see the same trends at Webtrends, and have started to think in terms of micro-campaigns when we're thinking of analytics and optimization solutions.  Micro-campaigns are measured in terms of hours, not days or weeks.  They are frequent, and are generally supported by social media efforts, along with search, ads, and other drivers/sources.  There are all kinds of conversion metrics, and the goals can vary, but the nature of them is consistent: move fast, double-down where things work, and reset where they don't.

Our recent developments around Webtrends Streams and Optimize are focused on helping folks who are constantly testing, constantly learning and constantly running micro-campaigns.  You can't succeed at the art of micro-campaigning if you aren't measuring them as-they-happen.  And no other solution allows you to do this like Streams.  Check it out.

Webtrends Streams Visualizations - Inspired

As I noted previously, with Webtrends Streams you can "see" things you haven't been able to see before.  The fantastic challenge for us as we were starting to put it together was, now how do we show it?  How do you provide a new lens into this new type of data?  We had put together an incredibly powerful API, but that API data isn't really made for traditional data visualizations as the data is much more "alive".  It is constantly moving, and flows as your visitors, and your customers, and your mobile app users interact with your sites and apps.

Let me take a step back, and explain a little more about the data.  Webtrends Streams is an enriched stream of event-level data.  It's not traditional pre-aggregated data that you find in real-time solutions.  You subscribe to a stream of data, filtered and segmented to only see the data you're interested in, and as each event occurs, it's delivered to you.  If you want to see more technical details, to the right is a small snippet of an event (in this case, a visitor arriving on a web page) that I just captured to show what I mean.  Note that this is a very small snippet of all of the data that comes back.  Every possible element that is collected, plus the additional enrichment we're adding in, can be consumed by you through subscribing to streams that are of interest to you.

Our first look at the data was even more rough than what you see above.  It was our "bare bones" UI, and it was developer friendly, but didn't make much sense beyond the engineering floor at Webtrends.  We started to think about how we could present it that might make sense to us, and came up with a few interesting views of the data, but realized that we needed to open it up to a wider team of creative folks.  So we did what any respectful development team would do - and we brought in a bunch of food, and being in the great northwest, there might have been some beer there as well, and had one of our best Developer Day events ever.

The results from that day inspired us.  We realized that these visualizations gave us the lens we were looking for to "show" Streams.  You can see a couple of examples in this video we created (no need to watch me...just skip to 16 seconds in and 40 seconds in).  And the good news is that all of the visualizations were all built in html, css and javascript, so the development time is quick, and deployment is easy.  There are so many powerful javascript libraries now for animating data (see the absolutely amazing work from Mike Bostock at the NYTimes, and others working on d3 as examples), that there's no excuse for building static reports anymore.  Your data is alive.  Your visualizations should reflect that.

At this point we knew we were on to something big.  Not only was the data extremely compelling, but now we had a way to show it.  A new way to express as-it-happens data.  Instead of just explaining to customers that they can use the data to understand what's going on right now, we could show them.  Are you launching a new site, or app, or campaign?  Wouldn't it make sense to:

1. Be able to validate that everything is setup as expected prior to launch, and troubleshoot any last minute measurement issues
2. "See" each visitor as they are arriving, knowing how they got there, and what looks to be of interest
3. Immediately validate whether your ad and search spend is working
4. Note if your visitors are experiencing any errors, or trouble converting as expected, and fix those issues - while those same visitors are still on the site

These new visualizations gave us visibility into all of this level of understanding - and more.  And the visualizations immediately resonated with our early adopter Streams customers.  So much so that they asked for more, and started building out their own as well.  Tell me, how awesome would it be to collaborate with your customers to create previously unheard of visualizations, and help them show off their data inside their company?  Our customers are already doing this with us.  And their work is truly inspiring.

Although we set out to provide Streams as a new API, we pivoted quickly and instead have created some fantastic visualizations to accompany the rich API data.  Rather than show a bunch of screenshots of those visualizations (which do not do them justice at all), I'm going to create some videos to show it off.  Look for those soon, and feel free to drop me a line (elbpdx @ gmail) if you'd like to chat more about all of this cool work.

Webtrends Streams: Behind the Scenes

Webtrends Streams is amazing.  It's different.  A fresh, revolutionary idea (or, set of ideas really), that will fundamentally change how we think of digital analytics.  You will want to see it, very soon, and it will blow you away.

I'm proud to be part of the team putting this innovation together.  What we originally set out to do was to reinvent real-time analytics.  It was a great time for us to rethink our approach to real-time data for several cool reasons:

1. Campaigns, and verticals like media, retail and travel, are requiring analysis sooner:  In the summer of 2011 we had just created a powerful new tool to collect and analyze Facebook campaigns.  In doing so we analyzed tens of thousands of Facebook posts and determined that any given post at that time had a shelf-life of 11 hours.  That was a real eye-opener.  Marketers only have a few short hours to determine whether a post (a micro-campaign if you will) is succeeding or not, and whether to double-down on the post (sponsored post, other potential sources), or whether to get the next post ready to rollout.
2. Real-time innovation through Reinvigorate: We were lucky enough to acquire Reinvigorate, still the best real-time solution available on the market today.  Behind the excellent product is some very smart IP that we immediately poured into a new Heatmaps solution, creating our first real (very) big data infrastructure.  Also behind that was a new approach to real-time data (well done Sean!).  With Reinvigorate, you know, immediately, who is on your site (or using your app).  You can tell how many active visitors are currently viewing any page.  It's very powerful, and got us thinking.
3. Killer technology shared by other creative companies: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, were starting to release and share more mature open source projects that begin to offer incredibly reliable, stable, rapid data movement to support the difficult task of true real-time requirements.

So, we started prototyping new real-time analysis tools...and it didn't quite feel right.  It felt incomplete, and "only" evolutionary.  It was incredibly robust, enriched with additional data, and faster than anything else available, but that didn't feel like enough of a win to make a major investment to complete.  There are definitely places where real-time data is important, and it can fundamentally move the needle for organizations that need it.  But we thought we could do more.

We started experimenting with the idea of expressing the data we collect differently.  What might it look like to enrich the data we're collecting, and then send it out an API as soon as it is collected?  What if we could also offer our customers the ability to subscribe to receive all events, or just a subset of events they are interested in?  And if they only need certain variables (parameters), let's reduce the stream of data to only include those variables on each event.

We ended up building new data viz's as well...

I still remember the time Andrew showed me the data flowing through the Streams API.  I work with a bunch of very smart people, and we were all blown away at what we were seeing.  Now it started getting fun.  We knew were were on to something special.

For the first time, we could "see" all views, events, clicks, plays, pauses, opens, closes, Likes, comments, add-to-carts, purchases, scenario steps, searches - EVERYTHING - as it happens.  Yep, as it happens.

Oh, and are you interested in focusing the data to specifically see product views, add-to-cart, or other scenario events?  Just filter the stream to only send those events.  What about watching referring sources, campaign IDs, and resulting landing page?  No problem.  How about all video starts, or % complete, or errors even?  Easy.  Curious how many people are using your mobile app right now, and which content is being viewed broken down by city and mobile device type?  You got it.

We're really proud of how flexible and powerful Streams is.  And we are just getting started...wait till you see what we have in store next.  Let me know if you want to see it...it's very cool.  I'll post more later, but for now...start here: http://trnd.me/PMdrl5

Congratulations to Chartbeat

Many congrats to the Chartbeat team, closing a new round raising $9.5M.  They've done a great job of pushing the real time story deeply into the analytics world, and are pushing through three major ideas at the moment:

1. Engagement.  Real-time engagement is a very smart idea, and will be very useful for sites who are looking to really understand what's of interest by their visitors.
2. Data in context.  Very smart.  It's one thing to see a number, or even a trend, but is it good?  Or bad?  Context matters.
3. More data.  Mobile devices and social activities are critical to understanding the big picture.

They've updated their look as well, with a data-viz look to their site, and new dashboard views within the product.  All good things.  Well done.

My SAO Ignite Presentation

A couple of weeks ago I gave an Ignite presentation for the SAO Ignite v2 event.  I've been to Ignite events before, but this was my first time up on stage.  I had a great time putting together the presentation, and the event itself was fantastic.  It's quite a challenge to condense a topic into 5 minutes with slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds!

The Story

I wanted to create a presentation that was more of a story than a typical slide show.  I've created many technical presentations in the past, but I really wanted to just tell a story for this.  My topic was around the fun ongoing project I've been working on with Schoolhouse Supplies, a local non-profit dedicated to providing school supplies to kids in need.

The message I wanted to get across was:

1. Background on this fun project I created (Schoolhouse Supplies Online) to leverage the talents of the non-profit to sell supplies to parents who can afford it, thus providing a revenue stream for the organization, and offering an opportunity to reach out to more potential volunteers and donors.
2. How it has made a difference to the organization, and to our community.
3. And hopefully inspire others to get involved.  There are many great opportunities out there for folks to use their tech ninja skills and ideas, and make a difference in our world.

The Slides

I did something I've never done before when preparing the slides.  I wrote my story first.  Just the story.  Text.  No pictures.  No keynote or powerpoint.  Just the story.  I edited it, read it aloud, edited it, etc.  Trying to get everything I wanted to say into 5 minutes.

I then went back through and started timing individual 15 second segments, breaking up the story into a couple of sentences at a time.  When it comes down to it, you really only get a couple of sentences per slide.  It's not a lot!

I then started looking for pictures.  I didn't want bullets.  Just pictures to support the story.  Finding photos to use that are licensed for public use can be a bit of a challenge, but Flickr pulled through nicely.

The Presentation

I've been working on this project for six years now, so I know it well.  The story was easy to tell as I've told it many times over the years.  The challenge was that I've told the story so many different ways over the years that I couldn't stay on track when practicing with the slides that I had submitted.  Every time I went through it, I was using different examples and anecdotes, and I was starting to get worried I wouldn't make it through!

After practicing it through, probably 20 times on the day of the event, I finally got it down.  I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out.

Many thanks to the SAO staff for putting together a great event.

Heatmaps and Big Data

At Webtrends, we've been having a blast getting our latest big data environment configured, tested and rolled out over the last several months.  This newest installment, supporting our killer new Heatmaps functionality, is based on Hadoop (and HBase and Hive).

We've been leveraging massive SQL and NoSQL big data infrastructures for years, but it's particularly fun to add the distributed mapreduce functionality of Hadoop into the mix to give us new slices of the data.  This new platform is similar to how our Reinvigorate environment is configured, but built for many times the volume of traffic.

And I'm really happy with our approach rolling it out.  We've created an infrastructure to support our incredible volume of data, and we've chosen to start with a controlled use case, and incrementally add data and functionality, so as to prove the scale.  As the industry is learning, it's relatively easy to build an analytics solution based on Hadoop, but it's extremely difficult to do it at scale, securely, with solid operational processes behind it.

One of the ways we're helping to ensure the success of this rollout is by thoughtfully thinking of the incoming data.  The data required to support Heatmaps is well defined and contained to click events captured through our new v10.2 async javascript tag.  This provides us with a use case that is contained, relatively straight-forward to test, and yet provides really high value for Marketing folks and web developers to make quality decisions when optimizing their websites (or Facebook Apps, etc.).

Our amazing UX team had some fun with the Heatmaps data, and even added in a couple of surprises that were very smart, and relatively easy to implement.  My favorite is the date compare transition, where the Heatmap overlay smoothly transitions from one time range to another.  So cleverly done!

The best part of all of this?  This is only the beginning of what we believe to be a huge opportunity to create very compelling solutions around the volumes of data we collect and analyze for our customers.  I think they are going to like what they see in the coming months/years from Webtrends.

So long Konfabulator

Almost missed this.  Yahoo is discontinuing development and support of the "yahoo widgets" (Konfabulator) platform.  From their EOL statement:

• Yahoo will be discontinuing development and support of Desktop Widgets as a product

• After April 10, 2012, the Desktop Widget Gallery website for downloading new and updated desktop widgets located at widgets.yahoo.com will not be operational.

• The existing Desktop Widget Engine, Yahoo! and 3rd party desktop widgets in distribution on desktop PCs and Macs, may continue to operate under arevised terms of use.

I give the Konfabulator team a lot of credit for creating the first real cross-platform App platform.  It was easy to develop fairly powerful apps (widgets), and make them easy to use.  Well done.

Of course, they missed a few opportunities along the way, including the now obvious iOS and Android revolution.  Bummer for Yahoo.

What's strange in all of this is that there's definitely still an appetite for desktop widgets.  It's not like the demand has gone away.  The Chrome approach doesn't seem quite right, and even Apple hasn't totally nailed this particular need.  Is something else out there?

Facebook Insights Delays and Changes

All analytics solutions eventually suffer through "delays". We had some pain back in the early days of Webtrends Live when we might fall behind by a few hours (the solution was originally designed to provide data in less than one hour). Facebook has consistently had an terribly long delay of a "couple of days" for their Insights data since they launched their service. They are today telling Page admins:

Insights Delays

During the past few weeks you may have noticed delays to your insights data. We're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused and want you to know that we're working to resolve these issues and make sure they don't happen in the future.

Their delays have been close to a week in recent weeks. Bummer. It's hard to run an effective Marketing campaign if your data is a week old.

They've also recently made some changes to their data...telling Page admins:

Improvements to Page Insights Data

You might notice an update to the data you see on the "Likes" and "Reach" tab of your Page Insights. We've made some changes to improve the accuracy of the information you have about the location of your audience.

Making changes to how data is calculated is always tricky.  It's hard to convey to your customers what you are doing, and it raises doubts about the accuracy of the prior data - and what else might change along the way.

My advice for the Facebook Insights team: communicate early and often.  It's always better to let folks know what's up early, and fall on your sword if need be.

Realtime Relevance

We are working on some killer technology right now to enable clever analysis of data via new streaming services (the stuff behind the realtime efforts of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn). We're building on top of what we've done to leverage realtime data in Webtrends A10, Optimize and Reinvigorate, and it's starting to really get fun.

Our Marketing team is also out in front of the conversation...here's the latest from them:

It's a good time to be at Webtrends...

I joined Webtrends in '99. The company had just gone public and we were growing like crazy. Our flagship Webtrends software products (LogAnalyzer, Professional Suite, and Enterprise Suite) were minting money, and we were just starting to get some traction with our new "online" tool called Webtrends Live (later renamed Webtrends OnDemand).

In Q4 of that year we had an internal goal to hire 100 people across the organization. We did just that...while the business was still accelerating. It was a fun time.

Flash forward to 2012. Our SaaS solutions revenue grew over 20% last quarter from the previous year, with earnings up an incredible 418%. And we just announced last week that we're going to be hiring 50 new employees - 35 in engineering alone.

The difference this time? It's not a bubble. At least not for Webtrends. We're making money, we're growing, and instead of sitting back and watching it slowly, organically, grow, we are putting our foot on the accelerator.

Want the inside scoop on what we're up to? Take a look at our job openings. A lot of great opportunities all around the company. Make sure you look at some of the engineering jobs to see what we're putting together: streaming/realtime processing, big time big data, deep data mining research, and incredible (award winning) user experience initiatives.

It's a good time to be at Webtrends. If you want to work on the latest technology, serving some of the smartest marketing brands in the world, now's the time.

Chartbeat Realtime

Our Webtrends realtime offering is very slick. Sean has done an amazing job putting together Reinvigorate, and I can't wait to extend his functionality deeper into Webtrends products.

Chartbeat offers a great realtime view as well. And I really like how they offer an open, transparent look into the offering via data from the businessinsider.com site. Check out Chartbeat's realtime viz on that site's data.

I really like how they pick up Twitter feed as a data source to help augment the overall view. And whether or not you agree on the definitions, the idea of showing reading and writing as engagements is smart too. Nicely done folks...

Advertising and Analytics Caught in the Cross-hairs

AT&T's move to metered data plans is going to have an interesting long-lasting effect on the Apple ecosystem. Apps that leverage services like advertisers and analytics companies who rely on transferring data to and from devices now have a new ingredient in the mix: reducing bytes transferred.

Those who have been paying attention to this already know what it's all about, but for different reasons. When we were putting together our analytics mobile SDKs at Webtrends, we were hyper-sensitive to many issues: privacy, flexibility, powerful reporting, efficiency, device battery life. It's those last two issues that forced us to be very efficient with the data we're transferring, and to take measures to only send data when it didn't interfere with the user experience in the app, or when the device battery was low.

But now the challenge is different. Mobile device users may not want to have extra services running in the background, eating up their precious bytes. And how do users keep track of this?

App developers will have new requirements of third party services, as they themselves are now having to factor in how much bandwidth their own apps are consuming. From this NYTimes article:

One of the biggest problems, app developers say, is that people are not sure how much bandwidth they are consuming with an app. AT&T customers will be able to track their data use on the company’s Web site and receive alerts when they near their quotas, but many customers are in the dark about how much data a particular app or video uses.

“They’re going to be reluctant now because they’re going to be thinking in the back of their mind that there’s a clock ticking about how long they can play this game,” said Brad Foxhoven, chief marketing officer and a founder of Ogmento, which makes augmented-reality games for the iPhone.

Developers will likely look to Apple to add new functionality to help them clearly articulate how much data is transferred, and how to be as efficient as possible with that data transfer.

State Farm's Impressive Mobile Apps

State Farm has done a great job of leveraging mobile technology recently. They have put together a couple of great iPhone apps that go beyond traditional marketing, and offer an interesting glimpse into how businesses can leverage mobile devices.

Their first app, the Pocket Agent is full of good useful info. The feature I think is the most useful is the one you don't want to ever have to use. If you're in an accident, you need to capture as much information as possible to assist with (among other things) any claims you might need to make. It's good to gather this info right away, and their iPhone app allows you to do this easily. They've even updated the app a couple of weeks ago to add enhancements to their “Submit a Claim” functionality, including:
o Draw the Scene
o Other claimants and vehicles
o Describe the Scene
o Offline access to documenting an accident

Their second app, Steer Clear, is more targeted toward educating young drivers - and verifying that they are doing the right things. As they say,

The Steer Clear® Mobile app is part of a comprehensive program that helps young drivers reinforce positive driving behavior and stay aware of hazards on the road.

I find this app to be a very smart move for State Farm. First of all, they are targeting young drivers who are more likely to be mobile-savvy, and therefore might appreciate that they can lower their insurance costs by following the app.

Second, they've built in some great verification tools that allow State Farm to validate whether the driver is actually following through with the trip logs, training and education. Of course, it's not a perfect solution - you can probably figure out how to say you're doing something and not actually do so - but it's a great attempt.

Here's a video showing what they're up to.

HTML5 Storage and Analytics

One of the more powerful features in HTML5 is the ability to store data locally via the browser. Of course, browsers have had this functionality for a long time via cookies, but the HTML5 spec extends this concept even further, solving some additional web site use cases, and opening the door for the rapidly emerging mobile world.

Specifications
There are two mechanisms defined in the web storage spec: sessionstorage and localstorage. Sessionstorage allows for session-specific data to be stored, which can be helpful for maintaining state information that you may not want to extend into another visit. This even applies to sessions from the same visitor, within different tabs of the same browser. This is a better solution than cookies for scenarios where you want to keep transactions separate from one another. The spec notes this use case:

"For example, a user could be buying plane tickets in two different windows, using the same site. If the site used cookies to keep track of which ticket the user was buying, then as the user clicked from page to page in both windows, the ticket currently being purchased would "leak" from one window to the other, potentially causing the user to buy two tickets for the same flight without really noticing."

The localstorage mechanism, on the other hand, persists across sessions and visits.

How much storage?
The spec currently suggests a limit of 5MB per origin (domain) for this new storage. This may change as the spec continues to be revised. At 5MB, it's certainly much larger than the limit on cookies today.

Privacy
There's a decent sized section of the spec that speaks to "user tracking". There's clearly a strong concern about how this storage mechanism could be used to build user profiles and potentially track personal information. It looks like the working group developing this spec is taking privacy concerns very seriously, and are building in good safeguards.

Some thoughts
This storage would have been a great mechanism to have many years ago, but I'm not sure we were really ready for it. I think we've learned a lot over the years about privacy, and protecting personally identifiable information, and the time is much better now for such power.

The possibilities with this storage mechanism are fantastic. Google has already been making use of this functionality to help improve its apps. Apple has been a strong supporter of advancing the HTML5 spec in general.

But the rise of mobile computing has really made this mechanism important. Some very smart folks are already figuring out how to leverage localstorage to build apps that behave like a native app (eg, an iPhone or Android app), but are actually running in a browser. Check out Nextstop on your mobile device to see an example of what I mean. By pre-fetching and storing content, the experience becomes extremely rich when moving from view to view. It's quite amazing to experience it.

The Analytics connection
Analytics providers like Webtrends can obviously make use of the localstorage mechanism in creative ways. But the real thought-leadership will come with providing new analysis of usage of the storage functionality so website owners can better optimize their sites. More good opportunities for analytics providers and practitioners!

Jive acquires Filtrbox

Jive Software, who makes fabulous collaboration tools for both internal Enterprise use, and external communities announced today that they are acquiring Filtrbox.

TechCrunch notes:

Jive says that Filtrbox’s social media real-time monitoring technologies will be absorbed into Jive’s platform to help businesses and brands harness the power of the real-time web from within Jive’s collaborative software.
...
Jive is wise to boost its offerings as it is going to be competing with Salesforce’s Chatter and other social offerings. But the company is ready for the fight.

RWW notes:

How companies leverage the cloud will determine how they fare in the market. The ability to crunch large amounts of data is vital for understanding the real-time nature of how conversations flow. Jive seems to understand this and appears to be moving more toward a cloud-based strategy.

Initially, Jive will market Filtrbox through its Jive Market Engagement solution along side Radian6. Jive and Radian6 formed a partnership back in September. Here's what Jeremiah Owyang and his colleague, R "Ray" Wang had to say about the partnership.

Radian6 and Filrtrbox are essentially in the same space. it is unclear how the relationship between Jive and Radian6 will be affected by the Filtrbox purchase.

This definitely muddies the waters with Radian6. It'll be interesting to see what happens there.

Not only is this a social monitoring play, but there are analytics implications here as well. An interesting move, and one we'll watch closely! Congrats to my friends over at Jive!

Flurry Makes Another Move - Mobile App Analytics Revenue with comScore

Flurry has just announced a smart deal with comScore... Gagan Biyani over at MobileCrunch has the scoop:

Flurry wins because comScore’s sales force will sell Flurry’s data analytics software, generating an initial revenue stream for Flurry. According to Director of Community Peter Farago, clients will pay comScore to have Flurry’s SDK installed on their applications, and Flurry will make a revenue-share for each client. ComScore is adding reporting and charting software on top of Flurry’s analytics. Flurry is traditionally free for developers, but comScore is going to charge clients to use Flurry because of the additional reporting and charting they add.

This news is getting a lot of attention. As it should. This is a good deal for Flurry who, as a young company trying to make a living in the already crowded Analytics space, have figured out two revenue models already.

I agree with Om Malik though:

The way I see it, it’s only a matter of time before someone like comScore or The Nielsen Co. buys out Flurry and its rivals. It’s becoming increasingly evident that the mobile web and mobile apps are part of new usage behavior that goes beyond today’s plain-vanilla web.

There are plenty of smart folks in the Analytics and #measure space that know full well what is required to make their holistic, powerful solutions work for brands around the world. This is a wise move by both companies to make a big play in this rapidly expanding space. 2010 will be a great year for Analytics in mobile measurement. Bring it on!

HTML5 rel=noreferrer and Analytics

Phillip Lenssen over at Blogoscoped notes this interesting HTML5 nugget from Mark Pilgrim's DiveIntoHTML5 site that suggests that there will be a new relation attribute (rel="noreferrer") for links that will force browsers to drop the referrer from the header when selecting links.

This is how Mark describes it in the semantics section of his site:

rel="noreferrer" “indicates that no referrer information is to be leaked when following the link.” No shipping browser currently supports this, but support was recently added to WebKit nightlies, so it will eventually be showing up in Safari, Google Chrome, and other WebKit-based browsers. [rel="noreferrer" test case]

This is an interesting use of rel in HTML, changing the behavior of the browser. Especially a default behavior like this that has been around since the stone age (early stone tablets had a referrer of course...).

The impact to the Analytics community could be quite far-reaching. Referrer information is obviously quite important to a lot of base reporting dimensions. We'll all be interested to see if this specification will actually make it into HTML5.

Mobile App Analytics Consolidation: Flurry and Pinch Media Merge

Flurry and Pinch Media are merging to form a strong Mobile App Analytics alliance. The combined company will keep the Flurry name. From their press release:

"As a combined company, Flurry and Pinch Media analytics services will be running on more than 80% of all iPhone, iPod Touch and Android handsets worldwide."

...

"In the near-term, the company's main priorities will be to seamlessly unify its service and significantly increase the analytics feature-set offered. The company will continue to offer its analytics service free of charge."

They claim to have their application tracking installed (via the apps using their services) on 50 million unique devices, measuring over 1 billion sessions per month. That is impressive indeed.

Dean over at Venture Beat notes that the company will have 20 people on staff, with 8 open positions, and hope to combine their services into one by the end of the next quarter. Regarding the business model, he further writes:

Both companies have launched widely used analytics services for the iPhone and Android phones, but they aren’t profitable yet. To monetize the data, Flurry recently launched AppCircle, a recommendation platform. Developers install it in their games and it analyzes a user’s taste in apps. Then it recommends apps for the user. These recommendations are likely to be highly useful because they’re based on the user’s past purchases. Flurry gets paid through a revenue sharing agreement with the developer.

They both have done a great job building out their products, and defining a new niche analytics industry. They will likely continue to innovate quickly, and work hard to find the right revenue stream. My 2 cents is they should look to expand the recommendation platform into a clever search mechanism. With some 400k apps expected through 2010, developers are going to need to be found, and today it's not easy, and Apple can't be the only winner out there.