Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Analytics’

Which Mobile App Platform Should a Startup Focus on?

As much as startups want to launch their applications across all mobile platforms, it’s often more realistic to focus on just one. But which one? The iPhone has the biggest numbers in terms of both apps and app buyers, whereas Android usage stats are rocketing.

Earlier today we wrote about a new mobile analytics report that showed that Google is no Apple. We explained the difference between these two as relates to phone sales and usage. Now we’d like to highlight the difference for startups that are deciding which one to do business with. It’s tempting to go with Apple because of their current sales figures, but in the long run Google is going to be a far less limiting business partner.

Sponsor

What’s the Best Reason to Go With Apple?

In early March at the Mobilex Conference in Chicago, Charles Yim, of Ad Mob explained his company’s mobile metrics report: “Android and iPhone users download a similar number of apps every month and spend a similar amount of time using the apps. However, iPhone users continue to download more paid applications, with 50% of users purchasing at least one paid application a month compared to 21% of Android users and 24% of webOS users.”

This, as well as the iPad’s pre-order numbers, is one of the strongest arguments for why the iPhone is the best way to go. So yes, the money is in Apple apps, but consider that app developers are starting to make equivalent money with Android.

Difference between Apple and Google as a Business Partner

Last week Google launched its application marketplace, which aims to include you, the third party developer, into their application ecosystem. Not only is the Google application ecosystem further reaching than anything Apple has created, but Apple charges a fee every time you submit your latest app to their store. Google, on the other hand, charges you a flat rate of $100 for all the apps you submit.

That’s important – and not just because it means developers are saving a little money.

Recently ReadWriteWeb guest writer Daniel Cawrey pointed out that Google makes most of their ad revenue by driving traffic to Google-owned websites. So the greater the number of apps Google can get on their websites, the more page views and resultant ad revenue they generate.

Yes, that’s good for Google. But since selling mobile apps increases the amount of page views Google can generate, the company is going to be far less concerned with charging or limiting app developers in the way that Apple does.

Finally, mobile innovator forums are already being dominated by Android. Where do you think you’ll find more app makers to partner with? There are far fewer barriers to app developers collaborating on the Android platform compared to the walled-garden of Apple.

Tech startups often have to plan for long-term economic growth in ways that the current market says is not yet possible and when it come to long-term growth, Google Android is going to limit those possibilities far less than Apple.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

MySpace Employees Speak Their Mind. Lots Of Yelling Going On, Apparently.

We’ve had lots of emails from MySpace employees with their response to our most recent post about the crumbling mid level management structure. “If you’re a MySpace employee and feel differently, please contact us anonymously,” we said. And they did contact us. But they don’t feel differently. There was also a great discussion in the comments section to that post where a few MySpace employees chimed in both pro and against the company.

But the emails were most telling. One wasn’t anonymous and the writer asked to keep it off record, and we’ll respect that. But he wrote at length about high level execs “chewing out” the lower ranks, in public. And lots of exec level nepotism hires.

This is a theme brought up by another employee, writing anonymously. He or she confirmed that too many mid level managers are leaving the company, and talks about more yelling at employees in public (“Maple” refers to 407 North Maple Drive, the address of MySpace HQ, “Jason” refers to Co-president Jason “Hell Yeah” Hirschhorn):

Dear TechCrunch-

I always enjoy your article on the drama at my company – MySpace but I’ve never felt the urge to write until now. I guess I’m writing you because your article was ABSOLUTELY dead on. Because of that, my morale isn’t really high and I really don’t give much of a shit anymore.

Well, the hole goes deeper than that. Many departments are losing much of the middle layer of actual star performers, but people who can’t get anything done due to the crazy BS in Maple. For example, 2 directors in Jason’s product org are gone recently: (Director of Analytics – Joe Schantz who went to Yahoo), Director of Product Mahesh Angadi. Other senior middle managers like Sr Product Manager Charles Pham, who went to CitySearch and Sr. Online Marketing Manager, Laura Coltrin left and is now at EventBrite. What do these particular people have in common? Besides being huge losses for MySpace, they were all re-orged under his royal heighn-ass, Jason. People don’t want to work for that moron – he’s just consolidating power.

Today, Jeff Webber – Director of Engineering in Seattle – gave notice (no idea where he’s going.)

Oh, and Jason really doesn’t get along with Mike. Jason was witnessed ripping one of his VPs a new one when the VP was trying to explain why he was doing something that Mike requested (in front of 6 other people.) It’s a mess – but it should be fun watching one run the other out of town.

A bunch of other people have their foot out the door – spend some time around Maple, SF or Seattle near the front entrance and watch people disappear for hours at a time or for “long lunches”. Its almost comical. You see a lot of people going into empty conference room and talking on their cell phones or people “going to grab coffee” by themselves and chatting on the phone walking down the street. And yeah, I’m one of those people.

Anyway, this isn’t just due to the fact these idiots are running the company into the ground. The reason why people are leaving now is that MySpace gave out these big secret retention bonuses that had a 2 tier payout. Overall, the ENTIRE bonus was for anywhere from 20% to 100+% of a person’s base. The key is that they pay out in two segments – you had to be working in December so that you get 25% of the bonus amount). If you’re employed here until June, you get the remaining 75% of their bonus. As you can imagine, this is a LOT of money – especially at a place that gave tiny annual raises last year (<5% was the average), where we cancelled profit sharing last fiscal year (not sure you knew about that) and with no stock incentive.

It’s a huge sign of how bad things are that they are leaving 75% of the bonus on the table. However, since we all know that the ship is sinking, taking 25% in December was good enough. I don’t blame them. I’m out of here as soon as I get a new gig. I earned that bonus money but I’m sick of this place.

Oh – and the guy who thought of this bonus plan? Mike. These were given out after the review cycle (August.)

So yeah, you want to write about more defections? Wait until June and then everyone will get paid and bounce. I and others are counting the days. Its kinda funny – it was supposed to be a total secret from everyone in the ranks (yes, some people didn’t get bonuses, but those people kinda suck so who cares right?) but now everyone is joking about it privately.

-Disgruntled

And one last employee says it’s ok to paraphrase and quote parts of his/her email. This one still has some fight left in ‘em. Here are some of the better parts:

Until a recent reorg of the engineering group (did you cover it? I don’t recall seeing it.), the whole company was segmented into horizontal layers so there was an operations group, a database group, an api group, a front-end group, a search group, a datawarehouse group, etc. Anything but the most minor feature required an obnoxious amount of cross-group interaction and took huge effort just to get everyone on board and the work scheduled. Some of that layering is being done away with, at least that is the stated goal.

In addition to the extreme layering there was a group of people who sat in the middle of the process, able to accept or reject any project; people who didn’t have the business sense to be in bizdev or be product managers and didn’t have the technical ability to be developers. When they accepted a project for development they would (randomly?) select some developers to build it. There were no clear lines of responsibility, no reason for anyone to really care about what they were working on, no reward for success and no punishment for failure (except for layoffs which seem to happen more or less randomly so they don’t fall on either the reward or punishment side). This structure was called ‘the matrix’ and thankfully was a casualty of the reorg. Plus in the big layoffs last spring (before my time) the hardest hit groups were front-line employees, the developers and testers who do the actual work; you had these big design committees arguing back and forth for weeks or months about how and what to do and no one to do it at the end of the day.

A lot of the people who are leaving and have left recently were in charge of this dysfunctional process and are unable or unwilling or just plain sick of trying. Yes a lot of good (better anyway) technical people are leaving or have left and yes there is a lot of detailed knowledge about keeping the current code running going with them.

…

There are other problems besides all of that, God I’m getting sick of writing about this. The technology platform (.net) and development methodology (scrum) and general caliber of developer (although there are exceptions) is more reminiscent of a poorly run enterprise development shop than an Internet company, certainly far far far from what you would find at a startup or Facebook or even Microsoft.

…

Will Mike & Jason succeed at creating something functional out of this godawful mess? Too soon to tell, I think. The first all-hands meeting a couple of days after they took over felt like an old fashioned tent revival or something, I almost expected Zig Ziggler to show up. But I will say that there has been more communication from them in a few weeks than from Owen in several months and they are reaching out to meet with developers working on interesting or important new projects, in short they seem engaged in a way that Owen never did. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Read the whole story…

Typing ‘cadence’ used to identify authorized database users, lock everyone else out

We’ll admit to having shared a few login credentials amongst friends here and there in our younger days, but it sounds like the party might soon be over: a company called Scout Analytics has developed a way of identifying a user’s “typing cadence,” and matching it to how a username and password are entered. It only takes 5 login attempts of around 12 characters for Scout to nab your cadence, and although 1 in 20,000 people will share the same cadence, combining the data with browser info and IP addresses makes it accurate enough for general usage. No word on what sites are using this technique, but we won’t be surprised if it starts popping up rapidly — and sniffing typing cadences becomes the next great malware scourge.

P.S.- Yes, we just wanted to run the picture of the keyboard pants again. Seriously, can someone please hook us up with those?

Typing ‘cadence’ used to identify authorized database users, lock everyone else out originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Ars Technica  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Firm uses typing cadence to finger unauthorized users

Though most users feel anonymous when browsing the Web, their browsers constantly turn over unique information such as a list of installed plugins, screen resolution, and the user agent string. Taken together, such bits of information can uniquely identify many users even without cookies.

But this is now old tech; behavioral analytics firms have already moved on. Cookies, browser signatures, and IP addresses can all help identify particular machines and particular browsers—but how can you tell which human actually sits behind the terminal at a given moment? One way is by measuring the “cadence” of their typing.

Read the whole story…

TechCrunch State Of The Union, Belated Edition

One thing we love around here at TechCrunch is data. And since we’re busy looking up our own traffic stats for 2009, we thought we might as well share those stats with everyone.

Total unique visitors across all TechCrunch sites in 2009, according to Google Analytics, were 69,482,978, up 55% from 2008’s 45 million unique visitors. Those vistors racked up 228,202,753 page views in 2009, up 90% from 2008’s 120 million page views.

TechCrunch is the largest site in our network, followed by CrunchGear, CrunchBase, MobileCrunch and TechCrunchIT, in that order.

Google search is the single biggest source of traffic, although it decreased from 37.3% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2009. Direct traffic is second, at 24% in 2009 (v. 25.3% in 2008). Then there’s a big drop to Digg (5.1% in 2009, 5.3% in 2008), Google sites (Reader, etc. (3.18% in 2009, 4.2% in 2008) and Twitter (2.9% in 2009, 1.2% in 2008). Feedburner, TechMeme, Facebook and Hacker News rounded out the list of top referrers in 2009.

Traffic so far in 2010 is way, way up on the TechCrunch sites (11.7 million unique visitors so far in 2009). We’ve heard anecdotally from others that traffic has surged in 2010 across most Internet sites. We’ll be digging into that trend shortly, too.

Read the whole story…

Mobile analytics firm Motally adds APIs to handle supersized data sets

Motally, a San Francisco-based firm that does mobile website analytics for clients small and large, has made it easy for large enterprises to import huge sets of server log data to Motally for analysis, and to export large data sets already given to Motally in a portable format, for further internal analysis at Motally’s client companies — some of whom won’t realize Motally is the ultimate source of the data and analysis.

The export functions can spit out up to 10,000 database rows at a time in popular file formats CSV, JSON, or XML. The import functions are designed for companies that provide extra-large “white label” services to multiple websites. (Yes I know, 10,000 rows isn’t very many to a serious database developer, but that’s 10,000 rows per API call. The size of the database is theoretically unlimited.) The APIs can be integrated with existing systems such as Omniture.

“We are seeing a strong demand for this kind of capability,” Motally CTO Duc Haba wrote in a press release that will go out today.

“Motally provides clients flexibility, and control over their data,” Motally marketing director Sharon Lin added in a phone interview. To prove it, she said, the company is working out deals with paying clients on a case-by-case basis, rather than trying to implement a rigid pricing plan for all customers. Most of Motally’s API customers will be bigger companies that operate at the enterprise scale, rather than independent websites.

For example, imagine a company that handles mobile websites for dozens of e-tailers or dozens of mobile content publishers. This company is unknown to consumers, yet it handles billions of Web transactions per day. Motally can accept that amount of data — two billion records? no problem! — to provide details on what’s drawing customers, what’s popular or not, and what are the dreaded “exit pages” that send customers away.

Motally itself is providing the service white-label style. Clients, who’ll be companies that serve large numbers of very busy mobile sites, will appear to be providing the traffic analysis themselves, when it truth it’ll be done by Motally.

Motally was founded in early 2009, and received an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Blue Run Ventures and super-angel Ron Conway.

Read the whole story…

IdeaScale Powers 24 Crowdsourcing Sites For The U.S. Government

Yesterday, California’s Chief Technology Officer, P.K. Agarwal, wrote that the government is using a crowdsourcing tool, IdeaScale, to get a consensus on the ideas to spur IT innovation around the California’s IT systems. IdeaScale, which is a crowdsourcing tool produced by startup Survey Analytics, is gaining serious traction as a crowdsourcing tool for government agencies. Currently, 24 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government are using IdeaScale to power crowdsourcing initiatives.

IdeaScale’s technology allows citizens to submit ideas to a site and then vote on their favorite ideas via a Digg-like voting system. The ideas that have the most favorable votes bubble to the top. Agencies can also participate in the discussion by commenting on ideas and posting updates, effectively creating a community around this ideation.

For example, the U.S. Department of State is using IdeaScale to crowdsource ideas and suggestions on policy. The Obama administration also used IdeaScale to solicit ideas from government agencies on its Open Government initiative last year. Of course, IdeaScale’s tool can be used for non-government initiatives as well. According to its website, the platform has been used by Microsoft, RedHat, Navteq and others.

President Obama’s government has been a fan of crowdsourcing, and has used similar tool Google Moderator to power citizen participation on Change.gov, and Town Hall meetings.

Read the whole story…

Motally Brings Mobile Analytics To The iPad

Once the iPad SDK is released, many developers will be in a mad rush to create apps optimized for Apple’s tablet device. Already, developers are flocking to update their apps with the new iPhone SDK optimized for the iPad. But it’s not only the developers of games and apps who are participating in this gold rush. Motally, a startup that provides analytics on mobile devices, is launching the extension of their user-action tracking services for mobile web and apps to include content developed on Apple’s iPad. Their analytics will automatically work for iPhone apps accessed on the device with further support to be released specifically for the iPad SDK once it is available from Apple.

Motally’s offering allows developers to receive daily reports, web-based dynamic reports and user statistics such as unique users, page views, engagement time search keyworks, average pages/visit, etc. Currently using the iPhone SDK, Motally will support the iPad SDK once it rolls out.

Motally offers more advanced features that allows developers to troubleshoot and debug their products from anywhere in the world, without having to re-deploy apps and games to the Apple iPhone store. For a young startup, Motally has seen significant traction as a mobile analytics provider. Backed by renown investor Ron Conway, Motally’s clients include Twitter, Yelp, Fandango and Verizon.

Read the whole story…