Albert Lai and Jeff Tseng recently launched Kontagent at F8. While their virality analytics offerings are still in private beta (I haven't personally had a chance to test drive) I did recieve a demo about six months ago. They have made a ton of progress in a very short period of time. (Congrats guys!)

Kontagent is a type of web analytics that provides creators of social apps insight into how the app is being used, spread, and by what type of people.  The company isn't currently positioned as an advertiser analytics offering but I'd bet that's a logical next step.  Analytics for social apps certainly isn't new and the competitive landscape reminds me of the ETL lanscape back in the mid 90s.  So what sets Kontagent apart from the field?  It's the insight into who is using and spreading the apps not just how the apps are being used. IMHO the cohort and corrolation analysis create a type of influence analytics which app creators will find handy in justifing their ad rate cards. 

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

3 Competitive Keyword Analytics Sites

Here are a couple of my favorite sites or figuring out SEO and SEM strategies.

Compete.com

SpyFu.com

keycompete.com

While we at Circos haven't yet automated our keyword processes, keyword information services like these are used (embedded?) in our manual process.

SpyFu is my current favorite.

UPDATE - This site is also very useful for determining how your sitemap is being viewed by major search engine. It also has a handy tool for checking whether or not your site is in the Google sandbox.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Circos.com Launched at DEMO08

Last week we launched www.circos.com at DEMO08. You can catch our 6 minute live demo here.  Stop by the site and let us know what you think. We are currently in 'preview' mode and will be adding additional content categories shortly.  Likewise if your site has a lot of user generated content or you'd like to have a more colorful search experience drop us a line.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our team has been invited to launch at DEMO 08 in Palm Desert, California January 28th.

As you may imagine we are grateful for the opportunity to launch Circos at what many consider the premier technology launch event.  We are told more than 700 companies applied for a chance to launch at this conference; we are one of 70 companies selected to present.

Stay tuned for more on information about Circos and our participation at DEMO08!

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Interesting Marketing Copy

e-Storm recently came onto my radar. While surfing their website this passage struck me as interesting:

"The Meaning of Click-Throughs

Analytics can be a similar to philosophy. For instance, go ahead and hunker down with some Socrates and Lao-Tzu. Sure, they're interesting, but what can you actually do with their teachings? We may not be able to explain how to attain peace of mind. Fortunately, we can point out how analytics will improve your bottom line. ...."

Ahhh, all roads lead to prescriptive analytics.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

QlikTech & Endeca

Check this out. It seams some of the more progressive BI vendors are finding applications on e-commerce sites. Endeca has teamed with Powereviews to create Buzzillions.com.  The user experience on this site is Endeca! Endeca is an interesting company although I have to say their market positioning is a bit unclear to me ("social navigation"). I thought of them as information retrieval company (think FAST, Google appliance, etc) but the more I dive in it seams they have aspirations or history in the traditional BI space. I haven't dove in enough to figure out if they are transitioning from to towards BI but my hunch is 'towards'. Google is a real threat to any company in the in the enterprise info retrieval space- including SAP. Either way, Endeca is worth a look if you have an e-commerce site.

QlikTech is on fire. They seem to be filling the white space between difficult to learn analytics tools and brain-dead dashboards. Hat tip to the founders and leaders of this company. The fact that their technology is finding applications on consumer focused websites is truly a testament to the ease of use. That said, While I have lifted the hood to check out the engine and I haven't figured out how often it needs an oil change or tune-up.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 04:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Next Hot Thing For Analytics

Yes, an other buzzword, TLA, skill to add the resume: Semantic Web Analytics. It occurs to me as I reread this that you may not be certain if I mean "Semantic Web" Analytics or Semantic "Web Analytics. While the former will eventually be hot IMHO the later is hot now.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) + Predictive Analytics = Marketer's Dream Come True

Analyze the footprints people leave on the web (blogs, comments, reviews), discover their preferences for the attributes of products/services they consume, and give the consumers what they want.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Next Hot Thing For Analytics

Yes, an other buzzword, TLA, skill to add the resume: Semantic Web Analytics. It occurs to me as I reread this that you may not be certain if I mean "Semantic Web" Analytics or Semantic "Web Analytics. While the former will eventually be hot IMHO the later is hot now.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) + Predictive Analytics = Marketer's Dream Come True

Analyze the footprints people leave on the web (blogs, comments, reviews), discover their preferences for the attributes of products/services they consume, and give the consumers what they want.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not your father's web analytics

It's interesting to see the Web Analytics and the Marketing Analytics markets converging. It reminds me of the now old discussions regarding ERP BI tools vs the 'open' data warehouse tools. Now that the web is synonymous with marketing it isn't a big surprise to see web analytics and marketing analytics converging. Good things are bound to come of this convergence. While web analytics (IMHO) started out as interesting yet raw data that was essentially unusable. It is safe to say that today (or at least the past 5 years) it would seam most of the really interesting analytics developments have grown out of the web analytics market.  Some of the best examples of embedded data mining/predictive analytics, text mining etc etc are put to use in web applications. 

A nice book and blog to read if you find yourself getting asked more and more about web analytics is Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics An Hour A Day. While I am a bit cautious to support the notion that 'insight' is a web analytics '2.0' deliverable the book and video (found here )of his presentation at Google earlier this month are worth the time.  That said, I'd suggest using the FF button for the first 13 mins.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What's missing from 'SAP Analytics'? - the 'Web'

Let's leave the commentary on the question in the subtitle for a separate post and focus this one on a few interesting free web analytics tools.

1- a web analytics vendor discovery tool. Enter the URL of a site and this online tool will tell you which web analytics package the site is using. Beware of false negatives - not every web analytics tool is searched for (pardon the ending of a sentence with a preposition). 

2- "WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, an extension (for Firefox) aimed at web analytics implementation specialists, web analysts and savvy web surfers who want to understand how their behavior is being analyzed." 

3-  RobotReplay and their so-called cinelytics (cinema + analytics). This session cam and playback tool is really handy but I'd check your TOS and Privacy statement before adding this java script to a commercial site. This tool sounds a lot like TeaLeaf Technologies, an SAP Labs spin out of Robert Wenig's back in 1999, but it is completely hosted and currently free. UPDATE - did I mention the servers occasionally crash? Still a promising offering.

4- Oh yeah, of course, there is Google Analytics. Arguably Google's smartest acquisition (2005).  I recently had a conversation with Paul Muret one of the founders of Urchin (now Google Analytics).  He made an interesting comment to my observation that GA was cleaning up at the bottom-end of the market and appeared to be moving up the stack into higher value areas (site map overlays, A/B, multivariate testing etc). He nodded and said (not a direct quote but you'll get the idea), yeah it's nice to be  promoting a free product when the competition is asking you to investing 100k$+ (presumably on Omniture/VisualSciences/WebTrends) and even if companies decide to use a web analytics tool from another provider, Google still benefits as those companies are more likely to invest in search engine marketing. 

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

German and Chinese Thinking in Pictures 

(originaly posted here) 

Here are some differences between the way Germans think vs. the way Chinese think.  The design is from a Chinese national who lived in Beijing until 13 and then went off to Germany to study -  Yang Liu is her name.  She has since worked as a graphic designer in NY, Berlin, and London.  She’s won numerous awards and now has her own graphic design business.

I found this to be spot on.  Having the privilege of having had a business partner from each culture, these images resonate for me.  Check that - Morris is Taiwanese technically speaking or is it Chinese technically speaking. Hmmm?

Queuing

Head of Group

Punctuality

CLICK HERE FOR MORE IMAGES 

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is there nothing to fear but fear itself

(originaly posted on Happenings of The Re-Employed) 

The team at Circos has been busy benchmarking Hotel Reviews and those who review them. Our research will be published during the next few weeks as a report but our initial findings are interesting enough to start sharing ahead of the report.

Background - We have developed a few software engines (among other things) that take website visitor 'footprints' and determining visitors interests as well as their influence within a community for a given area of interest. Our semantic and analytic scoring engines are currently out for a drive and have by fueled up with user generated content found on large travel review sites. We scoped the initial scoring to Hotel Reviewers and have decided to ('while we're out there') score the Hotels too.

We scoped the scoring to hotels in 5 cities and knocked out hotels that didn't meet a minimum number of reviews.  Qualifying hotels (hundreds) and reviewers (thousands) were scored across a variety of dimension to determine things like favorability, frequency, velocity, key word association, preference drivers, etc etc.  An interesting finding (other than seeing the Net Promoter Scores for the hotels and knowing who the brand advocates and detractors are) is that for hotels in San Francisco (we are still crunching number on the other cities) the greater the number of online reviews about a hotel, be that positive or negative, the higher the Net Promoter Score. Furthermore, the more reviews about a hotel the tighter the standard deviation becomes. In other words, more reviews = higher scores with less deviation between scores.

This is rather validating as we have also developed software for brands that wish to arm their advocates so these promoters may carry the brand's message throughout their electronic communications. While it is too soon to draw conclusions it may very well prove out that the risks of user generated content on a brand are out weighed by the benefits.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Qliktech nails it with wine demo

Check out this demo site.  Finally a demo site that is useful- that is real data, analyzed in real-time, to solve real problems. Who says pairing wine with food is hard?

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 06:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Assuming all software is free, why should I use your software?"

Its no secret that open source, virtualization and the natural maturation in some categories is commoditizing software to a layer as burnt in as system services; it is happening fast. Very fast. It wont be long now before we see higher brain functions like analytics showing up as a standard option offered by Amazon on EC2 or in one of their partner's machine image.  Layer in Amazon S3 for storage and you have a very cheap, theoretically infinitely scalable BI solution minus the integration services and data management processes. Both of these last two items make me think there is room for a data integration/clearing hub style online service to be offered by industry - kind of like the clearing systems used by banks/credit card companies and some of the services offered by D&B and Acxiom - a service that disrupts the traditional analytics value change where each company now doesn't need to do their own ETL, if you will... but I digress....

The question raised in the subtitle of this post was relayed to me by a colleague of mine. He was pitching software to an enterprise in Asia and was faced with this preemptive price negotiation tactic.  The take away lessons were that technology, while not worthless, is not differentiator (at least not for long) and that software companies need to continue to innovate and prove they are driving value with their business partners not just acting as a utility fueling it.  If a business is a car don't be in the fueling station business be in the on-board navigation systems that provide real-time detours based on traffic conditions- business.

It's interesting to see software companies like Opsware, QlikTech, and FAST out growing the broader market in three very different categories. It seams to me these companies have something in common and it isn't necessarily a focus on higher brain functions - They execute on their plans, focus on a niche market, and attempt (in very different ways) to collapse a value chain.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cool and Useful Utility Found on Forbes.com

(Originaly posted in this blog) 

Check this out. Org chart wiki. This caught my eye while surfing forbes.com.  This concept is what I have been waiting for LinkedIn to implement. Sales people across the country will contribute to such an org chart wiki assuming the find value in the utility.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out and see when a company org chart hits the tipping point of usefulness- and see the metrics on how large a company has to be before it gets reasonably complete org. chart information.

I believe the same utility is likely to be realized by IT professionals should a utility for ITIL/CMDB information be shared. The challenge here however is that it is mid and small sized enterprises that may find the wiki CMDB most useful (e.g. who else has applied this service patch to their router/PC/SAP app for xyz configuration and did it work? do I really need to test this combination?) I say this primarily due to their limited IT resources relative to large corporations. 

If there is anybody from OPSW, Tivoli, BMC, Dell, Microsoft etc etc. that wants to seed such a public db let me know and I'll arrange to have the community software and db hosted. Contact me if you understand this opportunity as I'd like to bounce this off a few people in close to this industry.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 07:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Say hello to Circos

The second website should be accessible tomorrow as the bulk loading jobs are moving everything into production tonight.   The site is called do re meme (http://www.dorememe.com). WHAT IS A MEME?  A meme is an idea, story, or piece of information that is easily passed along from person to person. Jokes, television jingles, catch phrases, blog surveys, and other pop culture morsels are all memes.  This site utilizes a very small subset of our technology and is designed to provide a visual digest of information- information you care about and may want to pass along to others. On this site you'll find sample memes related to NCAA Basketball, TV shows like American Idol, Politics and several others created by the site's visitors.  Feel free to take one or all and pass them along.  We'll be unveiling additional functionality over the coming weeks based on user feedback.

Please visit the sites and let us know what you think.

UPDATE: Tomorrow = Friday

First posted on http://renditionx.com/blog-mt

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A good laugh...

Found this on long time SAPr Jeff Nolan's blog as he jokingly announced SAP was Web 2.0:

SAP needs nothing more than a Web 2.0 style logo and the trusty beta emblem to freeze a market. 

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

BI Accelerator from a different perspective

While I can't agree with all points in Rita's posting on BI-A, she does make a few good points regarding licensing costs and openness; I would have liked to hear about the options SAP BW installations (prior to 3.5) have when it comes to creating predicable, fast query response times. 

There are alternative aggregation engines that support heterogeneous environments. HyperRoll's relational solution comes first to mind when thinking of BI-A and using aggregation to optimize performance.

Another possibility would be to investigate a tool like Celequest's Lava for SAP which uses its ability to capture real-time data streams and aggregate them on the fly. The total wall-time performance is pretty impressive. Another thing I didn't hear Rita mention is the time it takes to extract from R/3 and then load BW create aggregates apply business alerting rules etc etc. I've seen 16 hour loads that have had the European subsidiaries pulling their hair out during month end processing. While real-time analytics (I suppose the word de jour is Operational BI) is not needed for every business event Celequest may be onto something with their approach to capturing real-time business events.

Don't get me wrong BI-A does boast some impressive query response times and solving for that will help to enable broader deployments, but 16 hour processing windows need to be addressed.

Posted by Kevin McDonald at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)