Well the situation has officially spiraled out of control. There isn’t a filter anywhere that can ensure that I receive the messages I want, and not the garbage I get.

Maybe it’s the holiday season, but we now receive over 400 spam emails a day among to our info, sales and support email addresses. Personally, I receive about 300 to mine.

There really is only one solution that works, and that is the one that requires the sender to verify they are a real person the first time they email.

So as of this morning, we have installed Spam Arrest on my personal email, as well as the general company email addressess. We pre-loaded a whitelist of customers and contacts, but that’s only a start.

Let me publicly apologize to anyone who has not received a response from me, or from one of our general email addresses. I have missed too many emails lately because of this, and it ends here….

And to those of you that get annoyed when you have to type in those funny numbers the first time you email someone, understand that it’s the only way to ensure that every email from that point on will get read and responded to.

Whoever comes up with a 100% accurate, automated way to rid the world of spam should have their face carved in a mountain…..

(no I’m not kidding….)

Well according to Dennis at Wap Review, and a Bango newsletter I got today, Verizon has installed the Novarra Transcoder on their network.

The largest US mobile carrier, Verizon Wireless has started funneling traffic between Verizon feature phones and the  web through a transcoder from Novarra.  Verizon calls the service “Optimized View” and has added promotional information and a FAQ to their customer website  There is also a page on the carrier’s developer site which has links to a opt-out form and to a  PDF document detailing the rules that the transcoder uses to determine which sites to transcode.

Essentially what this means for mobile analytics is that you are not getting the correct phone information. Rather than seeing “SonyEricsson K770” in your reports, you might see “Novarra-Vision/7.3”.

While this may be a problem for some mobile analytics vendors (see http://bangoserviceblog.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/verizon-transcodes-mobile-websites/), it is not an issue for us.

We built Mobilytics knowing that transcoders and other exceptions exist. As long as the vendor adheres to some basic guidelines (which almost all do), we are able to still report the correct information. We simply add some info to our exception engine, and all is well.

A similar issue exists for Blackberry Phones, the Google Transcoder, the Opera Mini browser, and other various sites and transcoders. This is why Mobile is different. Regular web analytics can’t account for these exceptions and provide incorrect information.

I want to thank Bango for pointing out this issue so we could update our exceptions engine. Nothing needs to be done by the Mobilytics customer for continued accurate reporting. While you will be seeing a lot of “Mozilla’s” and “Novarra’s” at Bango, expect to see less of them here in the coming days.

You can read up on the controversal issue of transcoding at some of the following links. Since Verizon is giving you the option of getting white listed, you should do that to ensure the user is seeing your site correctly. It’s not needed for Mobilytics.

http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=536

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/

http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=516

One of the things we have found over the last 6 months, is how many people don’t understand why mobile specific analytics products are needed.

Both from an accurate tracking and marketing perspective, mobile analytics can make a huge difference in your everyday business decisions.

I’ve put together an in-depth white paper that is the “everything you need to know about mobile analytics” of white papers, to explain what this is all about.

In it I cover the following topics in detail:

• Brief history of web analytics
• What makes mobile different, and why traditional analytics won’t work
• What mobile web analytics is
• What to look for in a solution provider

Without getting too technical, I explain how vendors do their tracking, and what the pros and cons of each are. I do not compare the specific vendors, only the methods they use for unique id tracking. No vendors are mentioned, and it is not a “sales pitch” oriented paper.

At the end of the day, anyone evaluating a solution should put the tracking code from multiple vendors on their site and review the results. The process of viewing the reports in the vendor’s interface, and the report data will speak for themselves.

Download our Actionable and Accurate Analytics on the Mobile Internet white paper, and let us know what you think. Pass it along to others as well.

Our goal is to educate the public, and to collect information that will make Mobilytics an even better product than it is.

At Mobile Internet World a few weeks ago, I was particularly impressed by one member of a panel I had attended. Bob Walczak of Ringleader Digital appeared to be a “tell it like it is” kind of guy, and I found him extremely refreshing and entertaining.

Well apparently I was wrong. He appears to be more of a “Tell it like you want them to think it is” kind of guy.

Bob has publicly taken credit for a “new” technology they invented called “media stamp”. The weird thing is that it sounds exactly like the process we use to uniqely identify users for our analytics. This technology was discussed at a Mobile Monday panel I sat on back in April that Bob attended.

Since cookies and Javascript are rare on mobile browsers, we developed a way to create a unique fingerprint for users without them. Essentially we take all the information we receive from the carriers, all the information we have about the phone model and it’s capabilities, and other information derived from the actual browsing experience, to create this fingerprint.

We then provide each unique ID with a score from 1–100 which gets attached. The score is based on how sure we are of the uniqueness of the user, and how sure we are that we can identify them when they return.

While any claim that Bob makes that he can 100% identify unique users is false, we can still uniquely identify a very high percentage of unique users. This is why we give them a score.

In a press release yesterday, Ringleader made the following claim:

By “stamping” a mobile device, Ringleader Digital enables agencies and brands to identify unique visitors and track their clicks, impressions, and acquisitions across all browsing sessions, mobile sites, and wireless carriers. Media Stamp is the first technology to standardize these ad serving and analytic capabilities in mobile, which were previously only available for online advertising.

Sorry Bob, you were not the first, and you knew it.

“The potential of mobile advertising has been constrained because agencies and publishers have not had the real-time visibility or analytics required to validate the return on investment for mobile ad campaigns” said Bob Walczak, CEO of Ringleader Digital. “Media Stamp is reinventing mobile advertising by quickly gaining a strong understanding of user preferences and enabling mobile advertisers to provide targeted, relevant advertisements to growing and active mobile audiences.”

“Reinventing” is an appropriate term for what Ringleader has done, since we already invented it. Mobilytics is still the only “impartial” third-party ad tracking tool that can use this fingerprint to track “across” ad networks.

Conversion tracking capabilities from Media Stamp analyze how impressions/click results are connected to actions. Media Stamp can also associate the user’s behavior to each page that included a specific served ad – enabling publishers to identify all pages that contributed to a visitor’s conversion. Ringleader Digital is also expanding Media Stamp capabilities to enable real-time delivery of targeted ads by correlating behavioral and engagement patterns to deliver targeted and actionable advertisements.

While it is great to see them using this technology on the ad-serving side, we have been doing it with ad campaign tracking for over 6 months.

You can see Ringleader’s press release here.

I need to go check on our patent application…

There’s a lot of talk in the industry about Mobile Search Engine Optimization lately. While this deserves a much longer post, I wanted to get a few resources out there to you all.

We are currently testing our new Mobile Search Engine position reports that will show you how you rank in the mobile specific search engines, and hope to have it live late next week. While these reports can show you where you rank, you still need to make the changes to your site that will help improve your position.

I read a great post this morning on Digital Fire on this topic. Give it a read.

Also, I have been in discussions with Bena fro GoMo News who also has a Mobile SEO Blog.

She is also leading a new initiative through her new mobile SEO company, Visibility Mobile that will hopefully become a standard for mobile SEO. It’s called MetaTXT. You can download a whitepaper on this on their site, or by clicking here.

This is an interesting topic that we will definitely be hearing more about.

Bryson Meunier also has a Mobile SEO blog that you should add to your reader. He is also involved with the Mobile SEO Google Group that is definitely worth joining.

We’ll be talking much more about this going forward. In the meantime, I wanted to get some info out there to get everyone thinking.

This is a first!

When I owned a web hosting company many years ago, I used GoDaddy’s private label reseller plan for domain registrations. Thousands of my customer registered their domains through us, which was processed by GoDaddy.

Although I have had minor issues before, I have never had anything like this happen. This morning GoDaddy automatically changed the name servers for Mobilytics.net, and took down the entire infrastructure in an instant! We immediately knew and took care of it, but there was still downtime.

Now getting back to the title of this post, I want to point out how all the redundancy in the world means nothing when there is a single point of failure that can’t be avoided.

We have built redundant systems on everything:

• Our DNS is served from 9 servers all over the world, and is dynamic.
• Every server is behind load balancers on the Amazon EC2 cloud in different data centers.
• We have physical servers in case Amazon goes down.
• Our Database Servers replicate and ship logs to backups
• Even our office is in 2 locations!

But all this is for NOTHING when your domain name is suddenly taken from you and pointed to a “Coming Soon” page!

Think about it. The entire Yahoo network can be taken down by someone at their registrar simply changing the name servers assigned to the domain.

Just Like That!

So how can you avoid it? I don’t think you can.

Yesterday was the renewal date for the domain Mobilytics.net. We have it set on AutoRenewal so it charges automatically. Well apparently GoDaddy attempted to charge it and there was a problem. What’s odd is that I went in this morning when I found out, clicked the button that charges it to the “on-file” payment method, and it went through just fine. I made sure to renew for 7 years so I have no problems like this again.

So what do they do when there is a problem yesterday? They send an email (which is sitting in the “GoDaddy” spam box), and change my name servers to their parking page.

Bye, Bye Mobilytics…. Down you go!

So I guess since I spent $7 with them to register the domain, they can take down our entire business just like that. There is something very wrong with this. How can they have so much power? How does paying them $7 per year give them the right to take down 27 servers like that? Well we’re going to find out!

Note to Yahoo , Google and eBay: Make sure you pay for your domain registration

Things went so well for us at Mobile Internet World, that we decided to take a last minute booth at ad:tech in New York City next week.

They have a special area for mobile companies called the “Go Mobile Zone”, that is set up right outside the keynotes.

If your attending, please stop by for a demo of Mobilytics. If you need a free pass for the Expo, let us know.

Oh, and I hear Bango will be there as well if you want to compare our products in the flesh…

How do you discover new web site on the mobile web?

There are so many great sites out there, but they are lost in that tiny screen you carry around. As the mobile search engines mature, it should get easier, but for now it’s very fragmented and difficult to explore.

There are some great directories of sites like: http://yeswap.com/ and http://dir.mobi/ that I visit often.

Two great blogs I like are WAP Review, and Mobile Mammoth. They both have great reviews and info on sites they find.Mobile Mammoth also has an email list. Each day I get an email with a review, and link to a new site.

In addition to these resoources, we are excited to announce the launch of our Mobile Site of the day SMS list. Each day we will text you a link to a great mobile web site that you can simply click on and visit. We are finding some great sites since we launched Mobilytics, and we want to share some with the world.

If you want to get on the list here in the U.S., you can text SOTD (site of the day) to 95495 from your mobile phone.

You can also follow us on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/mobivity from anywhere in the world.

If you find any great sites, be sure and let us know!

This doesn’t surprise me at all. Fierce Mobile Content is reporting on a Jumptap / Zogby poll that reports that 71% of those surveyed on the mobile web favor Barack Obama.

Given that John McCain is not known for his technology saavy, I would think that mobile web users would relate more to Obama.

The survey–conducted from Oct. 7 to 24 via an ad banner campaign running across the JumpTap premium mobile ad network–reports that among the 3,462 likely voters surveyed, 71 percent support Obama, 25 percent favor McCain and the remaining 4 percent are either undecided or prefer another candidate. Seventy percent of respondents believe Obama is better for the economy, 65 percent feel he is best suited to manage the war in Iraq and 70 percent say he is most likely to improve their quality of life.

I would like to have seen the analytics on this poll. I wonder what the most popular phone is among Obama supporters vs. McCain.

For more on the JumpTap/Zogby poll - read this release

“Hey you guys are like Google Analytics for Mobile!”

One of the things I’d like to track with Mobilytics is how often we hear that.

Yes, Mobilytics is just that. It has been designed to be the simplest, most powerful, most accurate mobile analytics solution available. Our goal was to provide a significant number of metrics and reports, while keeping the interface, simple and fast.

We also strive to be the single place where you can get all of the information you need to evaluate and optimize your site traffic. Everything from campaign management, to search engine position rankings.

There is no better compliment than to be compared to a giant in the industry!

Come visit us next week at Mobile Internet World in Boston if you are there. We will be in booth 409.