Archive for April, 2008

April 28th Mobile Monday NY: Mobile Analytics & Social Search Event

Friday, April 25th, 2008

If you are involved in the mobile industry, and have not joined your local Mobile Monday group, RUN to their web site now and join. There are many chapters throughout the world, and you can get more info at the main Mobile Monday Global site.

This month the NY group is doing an event on Mobile Analytics & Social Search.

This month’s event, “Optimizing the Mobile Experience and Increasing Visibility with Social Search and Mobile Analytics” is sponsored by taptu.

Bryson Meunier, Resolution Media: To demonstrate how rapidly the mobile web and mobile search is developing these days, ten months ago David Harper said at the Mobile Monday NY dedicated to Mobile SEO:

“There is a real lack of analytics, as far as traffic or benchmarks. Many analytics tools don’t understand mobile traffic.”

Today, however, there are many analytics packages in place to optimize mobile campaigns, including Amethon, Bango, Mobilytics and Quattro Wireless. The fast-paced world of mobile search has also brought Taptu to the forefront in the last six months with their mobile social search engine, which many have called a serious competitor to Google in mobile search.

Fortunately, Mobile Monday NY is hosting a free event on April 28th to discuss the new opportunities available in mobile search and discovery since that Mobile SEO panel just ten months ago. How can marketers best leverage social search and mobile analytics to bring visibility to their brand today? Representatives from several companies active in mobile analytics and social search, including Amethon, Bango, ESPN, Quattro Wireless, Mobilytics, Resolution Media, TigTags, and taptu, will be on hand to discuss. | RSVP here

This should be a wonderful discussion for the industry considering that 99% of the mobile analytics vendors are on the panel. If you are in the NYC area, please join us.

When:
Monday, April 28 2008 at 7:00 PM (until 9:00 PM)

Where:
Samsung Experience
Time Warner Center – Shops at Columbus Circle
10 Columbus Circle, 3rd floor
New York City, New York 10022
(map)

At the intersection of Broadway, Eighth Avenue, Central Park South and
Central Park West.

Subways to Shops at Columbus Circle: A/C, 1/9, B/D
to 59th Street/Columbus Circle

Ready for Next Round of Mobilytics Beta Testers

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
While it’s been quiet on the blogging front lately, it has been anything but quiet back here at the office. The developers have been banging out features and bug fixes, while business development is racking up an impressive list of potential and committed clients. We’ve had great interest from companies that range from the little guy with a wap site, to a few of the top 10 Internet giants. (Still waiting for Google to call…)

Beginning Monday, April 7th, we will open the next round of beta testing. Over the next few weeks we are looking to add at least an additional 1 million page views per day. We will be sending out invites to specific requesters based on when they signed up, as well as the technology used and size of the site. But don’t worry, we are looking for both large and small sites. We will probably add about 30 beta testers in this round over the next 2 weeks.

One of the other things we will be looking for is sites that are interested in using our service for free (and earn revenue) in exchange for showing a small text ad. We need to start testing the ad servers and targeting platform in the real world. Please let us know if you are interested in participating. There is more information about our mobile ad network here on our web site.

Over the last few months, we have been working hard on making our infrastructure and applications as scalable as possible. Without getting to technical in this post, we have built out an entire network of virtual computers, disk storage and monitoring applications using the Amazon Web Services platform. I figure if it’s good enough for them to run Amazon.com on, then it’s good enough for us.

When things settle down, I plan to put together a number of posts and a technical document outlining exactly what we have done. There are many out there in the tech community that can learn from this experience. I have been in technology for over 20 years, but never before have I integrated such a wide range of products and operating systems with such power, and with such ease.

For those of you non-techies, all you need to know is that with a single click of a mouse, we can add additional capacity. As the page views grow, so does the processing and data collection power. We recently heard a story about a competitor of ours who was having major issues with processing time and overloaded traffic. While moving over to the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud set us back a few months, we won’t need to rebuild our apps and infrastructure when we become the #1 mobile web analytics solution available.

Our goal for the last phone of testing is for this scalability to be completely automated. We are almost there. The system can see how much data is coming in and waiting to be processed, and it can turn on and off “virtual” computers as needed. That’s cool! We don’t need to pay for computers that are not being utilized, and it will all be done automagically.

Keep an eye out for your beta invite, and please respond quickly if possible. If you can’t take advantage of your invite, then we’d like to send some out to others who are waiting. We have received hundreds of requests, but can’t flip them all on at once (although we probably can), until we load test further.