AllThingsD » analytics

Big Data Analytics: Trends to Watch For in 2012

Harlan Smith — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:56:42 +0000

Over the last several years, there has been a massive surge of interest in Big Data Analytics and the groundbreaking opportunities it provides for enterprise information management and decision making. Big Data Analytics is no longer a specialized solution for cutting-edge technology companies — it is evolving into a viable, cost-effective way to store and analyze large volumes of data across many industries. But how will this translate to adoption of these new technologies? How will companies incorporate Big Data into their existing business intelligence and data warehouse (BI/DW) infrastructure? How can end users take advantage of the power Big Data has to offer?

What is Big Data?
Big Data technologies like Apache Hadoop provide a framework for large-scale, distributed data storage and processing across clusters of hundreds or even thousands of networked computers. The overall goal is to provide a scalable solution for vast quantities of data (terabytes/petabytes/exabytes) while maintaining reasonable processing times. These systems are incredibly effective for storing and analyzing large volumes of structured as well as unstructured or semi-structured data such as text, web or application logs, email, web pages, documents, and images.

Big Data in the Enterprise
Companies are capturing and digitizing more information than ever before. According to IDC, the world produced one zettabyte (1,000,000,000,000 gigabytes) of data in 2010. Fueling this data explosion are over five billion mobile phones, 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook per month, 20 billion Internet searches per month, and millions of networked sensors connected to mobile phones, energy meters, automobiles, shipping containers, retail packaging and more. Big Data is a platform for transforming all of this data into actionable items for business decision making.

The barriers to entry for Big Data analytics are rapidly shrinking. Big Data cloud services like Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Microsoft’s Hadoop distribution for Windows Azure allow companies to spin up Big Data projects without upfront infrastructure costs and allow them to respond quickly to scale-out requirements. Commercial vendor support from companies like Cloudera can speed development and deliver more value from Big Data projects. Bundled server options such as Oracle’s Big Data Appliance offer fast setup and scale-out solutions. Finally, modular data center designs are emerging as a way to efficiently manage hardware and scale-out rapidly and cost-effectively.

Companies likely to get the most out of Big Data analytics include:

Supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing — With RFID sensors, handheld scanners, and on-board GPS vehicle and shipment tracking, logistics and manufacturing operations produce vast quantities of information offering significant insight into route optimization, cost savings and operational efficiency
Online services and web analytics — Internet companies invented Big Data specifically to handle processing information at Internet scale. Implementation of these analytical platforms is now viable for smaller online services companies to provide an edge over competitors for advertising, customer intelligence, capacity planning and more. Companies who don’t offer online services but do have an ecommerce or other online presence will benefit greatly from understanding customer behavior and buying patterns via clickstream, cohort analysis and other advanced analytics.
Financial services — Financial markets generate immense quantities of stock market and banking transaction data that can help companies maximize trading opportunities or identify potentially fraudulent charges, among various other uses. New regulations also require detailed financial records to be maintained for longer periods.
Energy and utilities — Smart instrumentation such as “smart grids” and electronic sensors attached to machinery, oil pipelines and equipment generate streams of incoming data that must be stored and analyzed quickly to uncover and fix potential problems before they result in costly or even disastrous failures.
Media and telecommunications — Streaming media, smartphones, tablets, browsing behavior and text messages are captured at ever-increasing rates all over the world, representing a potential treasure trove of knowledge about user behavior and tastes.
Health care and life sciences — Electronic medical records systems are some of the most data-intensive systems in the world and making sense of all this data to provide patient treatment options and analyze data for clinical studies can have a dramatic effect for both individual patients and public health management and policy.
Retail and consumer products — Retailers can analyze vast quantities of sales transaction data to unearth patterns in user behavior and monitor brand awareness and sentiment with social networking data.

Data Warehouse Integration
To apply this new technology effectively, it is important to understand its role and when and how to integrate Big Data with the other components of the data warehouse environment. In a vast majority of cases, Big Data does not replace the data warehouse. Hadoop is built for speed and flexibility across huge sets of often unstructured data, but is best used for fairly simple workloads, such as sorting, aggregating, converting, and filtering. Hadoop is also not intended to manage schema structure, referential integrity or security. Database management systems are therefore still a vital part of the overall solution architecture. So how will Big Data Analytics be incorporated with existing BI/DW investments?

Hadoop provides an adaptable and robust solution for storing large data volumes and aggregating and applying business rules for on-the-fly analysis that crosses boundaries of traditional ETL and ad-hoc analysis. It is also common for the results of Big Data processing jobs to be automated and loaded into the data warehouse for further transformation, integration and analysis. This allows Big Data to be integrated with data from other sources and exposed to users via BI tools, dashboards and reports. Several options are available for extracting data from Hadoop into the data warehouse. IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have released or announced tools to interface between Hadoop and relational database management systems.

User-Friendly Tools for Big Data
Tools like Apache Pig and Apache Hive provide SQL-like frameworks for advanced data analysts to run queries directly against data stored in Hadoop. This is an effective way to do targeted, one-time analysis, perform exploratory data mining, or develop queries that may later be automated and loaded into a data warehouse. However, these tools require technical expertise and do not cater to end users.

Luckily, there are some exciting end-user tools coming in 2012. Tableau has support for drag and drop Hadoop reporting currently in beta and Microsoft recently announced the Hive ODBC driver and the Hive add-in for Excel which will allow end-user access to data stored in Hadoop through Excel, PowerPivot and Analysis Services. Tools that enable end users to slice, dice and visualize data in Hadoop will become increasingly important components of a company’s Big Data analytics arsenal over the coming years.

Big Data adoption will continue to be driven by large and/or rapidly growing data being captured by automated and digitized business processes. Successful adoption of this technology requires turning this raw information into usable knowledge throughout the enterprise. To accomplish this, companies will need to intelligently incorporate Big Data into their existing information management systems and take advantage of the developing ecosystem of integration and analysis tools. As we move into the age of Big Data, companies that are able to put this technology to work for them are likely to find significant revenue generating and cost savings opportunities that will differentiate them from their competitors and drive success well into the next decade.

Harlan Smith is a Manager in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management practice at Hitachi Consulting, specializing in business intelligence engineering, architecture and project/program management. Harlan is a graduate of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, and currently lives in Seattle where he has been a consultant since 2005. Follow him @smithharlan on Twitter.

Clearspring Buys Data Science Start-Up XGraph

Kara Swisher — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:00:14 +0000

Clearspring, the social-sharing company — in an effort to increase its business as a marketing analytics player — has acquired XGraph, a data science company.

Clearspring declined to provide the price it paid for XGraph, but said the deal was in cash and stock. The start-up raised $3.75 million just over a year ago.

The combined company has 85 employees — 70 at Clearspring and 15 at XGraph.

Execs at the the McLean, Va.-based company said the purchase will increase value to advertisers and publishers via audience targeting and data science. Clearspring is best known by consumers for its AddThis social-sharing tool, which provides a lot of detailed user data.

Clearspring raised $20 million in funding in May. At the time, the company said it planned to spend its new cash on acquisitions that leveraged data and built audiences more efficiently.

The New York-based XGraph focuses on modeling and monetizing the Web’s social graph.

“We get a lot of data points every day and making sense of them is something we have already been doing, but XGraph fits the bill to go even further in the multi-graph use of data,” said Clearspring CEO Ramsey McGrory. “It puts us in a position to be the market leader for the application of data.”

Key Compton, CEO and co-founder of the three-year-old XGraph, noted that the industry has become data-driven in new ways.

“People are connected to each other via social connections in a multi-graph platform,” said Compton. “I think there are some really interesting opportunities to access the data.”

Here’s the official press release for the deal:

Clearspring Acquires XGraph to Create Largest Multi-Graph on the Open Web

Company accelerates growth by deepening data team and technology

McLean, VA and New York. NY. — November 1, 2011 – Clearspring, provider of the largest social sharing and analytics platform, AddThis, announced today it has acquired XGraph, Inc., a leading data science company focused on modeling and monetizing the web-wide social graph. Clearspring’s massive reach and proprietary real-time data processing capability, coupled with XGraph’s audience technology, create the largest multi-graph platform on the web — mapping 1.2 billion user’s connections by brand affiliation, intent and social behavior.

The investment in XGraph’s data science capabilities marks another step on Clearspring’s rapid growth trajectory. XGraph’s team has deep data science expertise with applied backgrounds in advertising, sociology, mathematics and computer science. Their unique technology dynamically organizes users by shared connections and interests. XGraph’s team and platform will drive Clearspring’s existing efforts with publishers, advertisers and agencies forward while also setting the stage for new innovation.

“Clearspring is at the epicenter of two major shifts online — the web becoming social and personal, and advertising becoming data-driven and accountable. The common thread in both changes is data. To compete in this new world, companies will not only need the ability to access and process big data, but also have the ability to activate that data to create value for consumers, publishers and advertisers,” said Ramsey McGrory, Clearspring’s new Chief Executive. “The combined company has the people, technology and data to enable our clients to stay at the forefront of these changes. 2012 will be a breakout year for Clearspring.”

For advertisers, agencies and trading desks, Clearspring will immediately be able to provide the largest multi-graph audience targeting capabilities available on the open web. By using this technology to identify a brand’s core audiences and finding millions of other connected and like-minded people online, the company can now drive more efficient spending and increased campaign performance. Clearspring also plans to leverage this new capability to deliver publishers unique audience insights, monetization capabilities and actionable data products in the coming year.

“Most companies only capture one dimension of how we’re all connected, whether it be our friends or people we share with — a single graph approach. XGraph not only models these social connections, but also multiple other types of connections such as brand affiliations, intent and more — a multi-graph approach,” said Key Compton, XGraph’s CEO. “We’re truly excited to leverage our technology to unlock the value of Clearspring’s massive data set and help publishers and advertisers truly harness the power of the web-wide interest graph.”

XGraph is headquartered in New York with an office in Silicon Valley. All XGraph employees based in New York will join Clearspring’s office there. Clearspring plans to keep the office in Silicon Valley. The combined company will have 85 employees nationwide.

IBM Seeks Bigger Stake in Big-Data Analytics

Shara Tibken — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:22:34 +0000

International Business Machines Corp. has made a big bet on providing analysis of what are known as “big data,” and this week the company seeks to build on its position.

At a conference it is hosting in Las Vegas for more than 10,000 clients and partners, the Armonk, N.Y., company says it plans to unveil, among other items, a new analytics application for the Apple Inc. iPad and software that enables companies to analyze large amounts of data in the cloud.

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Tidemark Comes Out of Stealth With Funding from Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:09:41 +0000

It has been a little more than a year since word went around that Andreessen Horowitz had invested $6.3 million in a mysterious stealth start-up called Proferi. Today that company is coming out of stealth with a new name: Tidemark.

It also got a new round of funding, including an investment from Greylock Partners, that brings its total capital raised so far to $11 million. Also joining Tidemark’s board are Peter Currie, president of Currie Capital; and Phil Wilmington, former co-president of PeopleSoft and the CEO of OutlookSoft. Both have joined Tidemark’s board of directors. Also on the board are Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO at Workday and a Greylock Partner; and Ben Horowitz, partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Tidemark is building what it calls an Enterprise Performance Management application — all in the cloud — but it is also built from the ground up with mobile applications in mind. I had lunch with CEO Christian Gheorghe last week, and I have to say that what he described to me sounded, at first, a lot like what I’ve heard from lots of other companies wanting to give business leaders useful, up-to-the-minute business information they can act on.

Too often in business intelligence and analytics, projects fail to deliver, Gheorghe says, because they’re good at showing data but lousy in leading to action. “They give you a lot of information, but the next step is what to do about it,” he says. “What are the courses of action I can take, how do I react to what’s happening?”

And maybe this sounds familiar: Data from one application that you’d like to use is tricky to move over into another. “We call it the alt-tab syndrome,” Gheorghe says. “You have to alt-tab between applications, some of which were built before the Internet, back in the client-server era.”

Lots of the existing business intelligence tools are old, not designed to be mobile or to handle volatility in the markets, and they don’t deal well with unstructured data, which everyone seems to want to get a handle on these days.

Gheorghe spent five years and change at SAP, including a stint as its CTO, by way of its acquisition of OutlookSoft. He then spent about nine months as Greylock’s Entrepreneur in Residence. During that time, he realized a perfect storm was happening: If you had to build the business of analytics from scratch, it would solve the problem of making you both cloud-ready and mobile, but also ready to handle mountains of big data. “We found a lot of pain in the core analytic processes that companies had spent a lot of money trying to solve,” he says. Pain like that creates an opportunity for the one who can make it go away.

Tidemark aims to deliver real-time metrics information that has been adjusted for risk and which takes into account all the various strategic, financial and operational forecasting a business does. “There are so many things that the consumer-side companies have done with big data like Facebook and Zynga, but nothing like that has happened in the enterprise,” he says. “Basically they’re still using things that are drilling down and across in grids that no one uses, and dashboards that are two weeks behind.”

Tidemark is launching three applications: Metrics Management and Management Reporting, which aims to answer not the “what’s happening?” question about a business but “why is it happening?”; Enterprise Planning, the classic budgeting, forecasting and analysis functions; and Profitability Monitoring by product, customer and channel — essentially where you’re making and losing money.

The company has also teamed up with three partners: SnapLogic has hooked up with Tidemark to integrate data in the cloud. And since you can’t seem to do anything in big data these days without using some version of Hadoop, the open source big data platform, Tidemark says it has signed up with Cloudera, which sells its own tricked-out version of Hadoop; and VMware, whose vCloud will run Tidemark’s cloud.

Gheorghe’s backstory is interesting. He escaped communist Romania in the late 1980s, but what moved him to leave wasn’t entirely political. He was involved in the trade of bootleg cassette tapes and heard Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” As a product of the evil West, it was forbidden under the regime of Nicolai Ceaușescu. Gheorghe decided there was no way that a country that produced such music could be all that bad. So off he went.

It was of course more complicated than that, but the anecdote serves as a pretty good metaphor for what Gheorge is trying to do with Tidemark, Horowitz says. Yes, there are an awful lot of companies that seek to use the cloud to provide business intelligence. “There’s a lot of new things out there, including Salesforce.com, Successfactors, any of them, they’re new but they bring a lot of the old software paradigms with them,” he says. “None of them have been a complete re-think. But Christian has really done it. It’s ironic that he was the one who could get his mind out of the old paradigm, having been in it for the last 15 years.”

"Unleashed": Zynga Unveils 10 New Products, Including Project Z Platform

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:57:00 +0000

Zynga is unveiling “brand-spankin’ new play” at a press event today at its brand new headquarters in San Francisco.

Yesterday, it hinted that it will share its plans for leveraging Facebook’s new HTML5 mobile platform, but that there are other surprises to come. The event is titled “Unleashed,” so expect a lot of talk about where the company is headed with mobile in general.

Stay tuned at 10 am PT to hear the latest from the mega-successful social games company, which is currently seeking to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering.

9:57 am: Just showed up, expect the show to kick off any minute.

The press conference is taking place in Zynga’s new headquarters. In the atrium, there’s a big stage set up, and the press gallery is sitting in a bunch of retro chairs. Feels a little bit like an MTV talk show.

Zynga invited my dog, Fletch, to come play at the event, but he doesn’t have a travel budget, so he had to stay home in Seattle.

Pretty fitting that Zynga’s office, a.k.a. “the dog house,” has a hot dog stand. As you may know, the company was named after the dog, Zinga, owned by founder Mark Pincus.

10:10 am: The event may be starting. We are watching an infomercial on how Zynga was able to contribute to Haiti relief after the earthquake.

10:25 am: Ok, while we waited to get things started I was able to go get a Blue Bottle cup of coffee that takes five minutes to drip into the cup. What a perk!

Someone is getting excited. Just heard my first barking dog.

10:35 am: Here we go. There’s a montage of games from Poker to CityVille and Adventure World, Words With Friends and FarmVille. You’ve probably played one of them.

10:37 am: Founder and CEO Mark Pincus has taken the stage.

This is the first media event of any kind we have done in our new building, he says.

He jokes that they are about games, and we should feel comfortable being loud today.

He said they are launching 10 new products today, all of which have been in development for a year. Today we will meet the people and faces behind the innovation.

Pincus: There are 1,700 Zynga employees in this building alone, and at some point they will come out and say hi to us.

Pincus: He wants to know how he can get “you guys” to play games. We are all busy, and how can he get us all to play.

For us, it’s a platform. We aren’t the company that will make the next hit game, we are trying to do something broader than that. We want this experience to make up a platform for play.

10:44 am: Pincus says they spend a lot of time on the “FTUE,” or the “first time user experience.”

We want to give you a five to 15 minute experience that feels like a meal, we don’t try to ask you to change your day. Just like a good show, and I’ve been addicted to “Breaking Bad,” if you do like our games, we hope to give you enough depth for you to invest three, six months or a year.

We are going to show off Zynga Direct, whether on the Web or mobile, we are going to build a whole sandbox around the games and not just in the games. Facebook is here today and we are excited to be their launch partner for their platform announced yesterday. We’ll be showing off three HTML5 games that will be part of that.

When we unveil the pieces of Zynga Direct, we hope that you see that it is the deepest Facebook Connect experience on the Web today.

10:48 am: We are showing you CastleVille today, which is the next Ville game in our franchise. That game has been in development for more than a year, and it has beautiful art. It has new ways to collaborate and get ahead by partnering with other players in the game.

We are going to show you a new casual games category today in the hidden objects genre.

David Ko, Zynga’s chief mobile officer, will be showing a number of mobile titles launching in the next few weeks.

10:51 am: Pincus is now handing over the stage to Cadir Lee, CTO, who is in charge of building out so much of the technology in the back-end.

10:52 am: Lee: The first thing I want to talk about is our gaming engine, which has been built from scratch on Adobe’s Flash 11.

We have our own private cloud called “Z Cloud,” which is focused on being able to play our games all of the time no matter if it’s Christmas Eve. We’ve been known to deploy a 1,000 servers in one week in order to support a new game.

This isn’t the sexy stuff, but Zynga’s cloud and gaming engine technology is key. Often, the company is considered an analytics-driven company, rather than a gaming company. Lee is touching on some of this now.

Lee: We’ve long been known as an analytics company, which shows how our players engage. How do we match people up, so that you can have a social experience with a person across the street or around the world. How do we connect you with the right person at the right time.

Roy Sehgal, VP and GM, is now on stage to unveil a new genre, called “hidden objects.” It’s one that Disney’s Playdom has developed through a game called Gardens of Time.

Zynga says its first game is called Hidden Chronicles.

The concept behind hidden objects is finding clues hidden in a room, sort of like looking for Waldo. They are right in front of you, but difficult to find.

Up until Playdom’s release, critics didn’t believe that the popular PC download category could be made into a social game.

Sehgal: It’s going to be social. It’s going to be extremely easy to learn, but hard to master.

10:58 am: You can play with your friends to see who can find the most hidden objects, or provide hints to your friends.

This game is extremely interactive. No matter how many times you play an individual scene, it will be fresh. I believe it will be one of the most beautiful games you will play.

On the screen, Sehgal is showing various scenes that take place on a train, underwater or in the outdoors. The art is rich and historic-looking.

11:00 am: Now there’s a demo of the new Mafia Wars 2, which just launched yesterday, and is promising to be a much richer experience than the original version that came out three-plus years ago.

Since it’s already out, feel free to check it out on Facebook. No need to read a description here.

11:06 am: Mafia Wars 2 is also now live on Google+, which is the company’s second game on the platform after Poker. Remember, Google has a substantial stake in Zynga.

11:07 am: There’s an update to Zynga’s Poker game next. It was launched in July 2007, and after four years, we are still the largest and most social Poker game.

Zynga is unveiling Zynga Casino, including Zynga Bingo.

Casino games has been identified as one of the leading categories on Facebook with others experiencing lots of success, including DoubleDown Casino.

Zynga Bingo will be launching soon.

11:10 am: Bill Jackson, Creative Director, is now on stage. He’s from the company’s Dallas studios, and he says they developed the latest in the Ville franchise, called CastleVille.

The other Villes in the franchise are FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille and now CastleVille.

Jackson: It’s a new level of social, and offers the best of all the Ville games have to offer.

The game has a whole new cast of characters, who look like they are from Shrek, complete with rugged heros and refined ladies who fall in love.

Jackson: CastleVille takes storytelling to a whole new level, and in a personal way. Your journey through the game is different based on who you are.

Zynga is bringing massively mutliplayer role-playing games to the mass market.

CastleVille will have music from an entire orchestra that was recorded in Seattle. Jackson says this is the first time this has been done in a social game, although it is common in console games.

11:18 am: The peanut gallery has been asked to turn around to see all of the Zynga employees — or at least half of them — that have gathered around the balconies of the atrium.

Pincus: We just wanted you to see a few more faces.

Pincus is now introducing John Schappert, who recently joined Zynga as COO from Electronic Arts. He has taken over running all of our games, leaving Pincus to be more entrepreneurial.

11:22 am: Schappert: We are building every kind of play for everyone, everywhere.

We are building on iOS, Facebook, Android, Google+ and Tencent in China.

Helping us deliver on play anytime, anywhere, is David Ko, chief mobile officer.

Ko has an update on Zynga’s mobile plans, which have not been as aggressive as others have been in the space so far.

Ko: We’ve always felt that we need to be the best content creators out there, regardless of what platform.

It’s my pleasure to not talk to you about one or two new games, but five new games launching shortly. It is around Facebook’s HTML5 platform announced yesterday.

The first two are Words With Friends and Poker, and the third is FarmVille. All three games will be available tomorrow.

Another new game is Mafia ShakeDown. You’ll be able to request missions and have the opportunity to be the next “Don.” This game will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

The last game is called DreamZoo, which is Zynga’s first game in the zoo genre.

In a short video, Zynga shows off DreamZoo. You can collect animal varieties and feed and clean your animals.

11:29 am: Schappert is back on stage. He says they have over 60 million daily active users, and they play games over two million minutes everyday.

He is unveiling something called Project Z, which is a Facebook Connect enabled platform. It allows you to play in an environment that’s tailored just for games.

In a sneak peak, a video says players are able to chat, share and form instant communities worldwide.

Schappert: It’s a social gaming playground. You can start a game on Project Z and then continue on Facebook and vice versa. It’s not launching today, but people can start creating a gamer tag starting worldwide today.

11:32 am: Pincus is back on stage to wrap up the presentation:

We really want to build a platform for play. We haven’t changed our vision since starting. We want to be the biggest macro bet on social gaming. We believe in social gaming. We believe that everyone around the world will embrace play, so everything we are doing is an attempt to bring that to life.

We know it’s early and it’s primitive, we know so much of game play and social-ness is early, and over the next few years it’s going to be so much more. It’s going to be mobile. There’s going to be a World of Warcraft feeling, but something you can understand in five minutes.

11:35 am: OK, that’s it folks. Formal presentation is over.

In summary, before today, there were a few niches that Zynga had not yet entered. That left opportunities for competitors to do well on Facebook. With Zynga’s 10 announcements today, including a number of new mobile and social games, the gaps have narrowed significantly.

Zynga has expanded into new genres, like hidden objects and more broadly into casino, and has five new games on mobile. It is also launching its all-new standalone online game network separate from Facebook that goes direct to consumers.

If Zynga was looking for a big bang before its IPO, this might have been it.

Thanks for reading — more coverage and analysis coming shortly.

Federated Media Buys Lijit Networks

Kara Swisher — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:00:16 +0000

San Francisco-based Federated Media Publishing said it has bought Lijit Networks, a smaller online advertising analytics and tools firm.

The price for the Boulder, Colo., start-up — which was founded in 2006 — was undisclosed, but it has received just under $29 million in venture funding from firms such as Foundry Group. Federated said Lijit would continue to operate independently, “but in conjunction.”

In an interview yesterday, Federated CEO Deanna Brown said the buy was to round out offerings for its clients and to better compete in a world where most of the online ads go to the top five players.

“I am excited we can give both publishers and advertisers more tools for engagement and monetization,” she said.

Federated, which lost big social-media news site Mashable earlier this year, also benefits from increased scale and inventory of sites.

Lijit CEO Todd Vernon, who will become EVP of technology at Federated, said that it was ever more important for ad-focused firms on the Web to “deliver the entire stack.”

“Lijit has a core competency in the media business, and combined with FM’s best-in-class sales force, we can offer everything needed to do effective online campaigns,” he said.

Here’s the official press release:

Federated Media Publishing To Acquire Lijit Networks

Combined Entity Will Power More than 77,000 Independent Publishers Across the Web Via Comprehensive Advertising, Analytics and Reader Engagement Tools

SAN FRANCISCO, October 4, 2011 – Federated Media Publishing, which powers the best of the Independent Web, today announced the acquisition of Lijit Networks, Inc. Lijit is a leading provider of advertising services, audience analytics and reader engagement tools for online publishers of all sizes. The combined entity will reach nearly 300 million global unique visitors according to Quantcast.

Lijit, headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, will continue to operate independently but in conjunction with the rest of Federated Media Publishing. Lijit CEO Todd Vernon and COO Walter Knapp will take on corresponding EVP of Technology and SVP of Platform Revenue responsibilities at Federated Media Publishing and will report directly to Federated Media Publishing’s CEO, Deanna Brown. Additionally, Lijit board member Seth Levine from Foundry Group will join the Federated Media Publishing board of directors, effective immediately.

With the addition of Lijit Networks’ existing publisher relationships, Federated Media Publishing will now reach more than 77,000 online publishers and nearly 15,000 expert communities, making it one of the largest companies to power publishing on the Independent Web. The acquisition vastly expands the combined company’s inventory of sites, offering premium advertisers improved scale and reach.

Publishers Will Profit and Flourish

Lijit helps publishers more thoughtfully interact with and better understand their audience by providing analytics and engagement tools that build deeper relationships, lengthen time on site and increase page views. These robust and actionable audience analytics and reader engagement tools leverage intent, behavior and demographics to help publishers of all sizes increase revenue and better engage their readers.

Additionally, the combined advertising services provided by FM and Lijit will give publishers of all sizes a revenue stream that complements existing sales efforts and helps grow and monetize their website businesses, no matter what the size.

Advertisers Can More Easily Analyze and Engage

The combination of Federated Media Publishing’s premium online advertising and conversational marketing programs and Lijit’s proprietary data collection tools will empower advertisers to better understand user intent, contextual relevance and demographic information. And by leveraging the combined entity’s extensive publisher relationships, advertisers will have unprecedented scale on the Independent Web.

Introducing Programmatic Buying to the Independent Web

Programmatic buying is one of the fastest growing trends in digital media and the introduction of Lijit’s robust RTB exchange will equip media buyers with one of the largest platforms available. Over the next few months, Federated Media Publishing and Lijit will develop a series of private exchanges that will highlight leading independent publishers. These exchanges will allow brands to engage active, passionate consumers found in highly conversational online communities and publications, while delivering premium CPM rates via FM’s conversational marketing programs.

Quote

“The Lijit Networks team is just as passionate and committed to powering publishers as we are at Federated Media Publishing and that was a crucial element to this decision,” said Deanna Brown, chief executive officer, Federated Media Publishing. “Our combined relationships, proprietary tools and conversational marketing services will be invaluable to publishers and advertisers alike.”

“Federated Media invented how to leverage authentic voices and engaged conversations that exist in the Independent Web,” said Todd Vernon, founder and CEO of Lijit Networks. “The combination of the two companies is a game changer in the industry that unlocks new opportunities for both companies and our combined publisher network.”

"Big Data" Firm Opera Solutions Raises $84 Million

Dennis K. Berman — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:06:28 +0000

Data-analytics company Opera Solutions LLC is set to announce its first-ever investment round, an $84 million cash injection expected to value the New York company at around $500 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

Lead investor Silver Lake Sumeru, along with Accel-KKR, Invus Financial Advisors, JGE Capital Management and Tola Capital, are putting money into Opera, which hopes to capitalize on the interest in “big data” projects that companies, governments and other large institutions use to analyze real-time information.

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Twitter Finally Unveils Analytics (But Only in Private Beta)

Liz Gannes — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:17:10 +0000

Twitter previewed its long-awaited Web analytics product today, based on data provided about tweets and clicks facilitated by its t.co link shortening service and “Tweet Button” tool for publishers.

Twitter Business Development Director April Underwood showed off the analytics product at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today, though she said it is available only in private beta for now. Update: A Twitter developer blog post says analytics will be available to all Web site owners “within the next few weeks.”

Underwood said Twitter drives 100 million clicks per day to external Web sites. Plus, the Tweet Button is already used by three million sites.

The analytics tool tracks statistics on tweets “up to a couple minutes ago,” Underwood said. It will not be as comprehensive as many analytics tools offered by third-party vendors. However, Twitter will be releasing click data through an API for other companies to use.

The analytics product comes in part from BackType, which Twitter acquired earlier this summer, and is based on the recent rollout of t.co, which enables tracking of shared links even after they travel off of Twitter.

Big Data Start-Up Platfora Lands $5.7 Million From Andreessen Horowitz

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:42:13 +0000

We hear a lot these days about big data, which is kind of a code for the notion that nestled within all the seemingly useless information that a business generates in the course of its normal operations, there are useful, discernable patterns that can help a business over time learn do things better.

It’s a sound idea, and lots of companies large and small have made various interesting plays around it. The biggest is probably IBM, which loves to tell and re-tell its many data analytics success stories. There’s also been a lot of start-up activity around it with companies like GoodData and Domo getting lots of funding.

Many companies are turning to Hadoop, the open source version of Google’s MapReduce technology, which takes large sets of data and makes them manageable. Facebook, Groupon and AOL are three high-profile examples. And there’s such an opportunity seen around Hadoop that the number of companies offering their own distribution of it are multiplying.

Data’s great to have, but its hard to do anything with it if you can’t understand what it’s telling you. That’s where Platfora, a start-up launched by Ben Werther, a former Greenplum exec, aims to come into the picture.

Until today, Platfora has been operating in stealth mode, but it announced that it had landed a $5.7 million A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, is also joining the round. Scott Weiss, AH’s general partner, is joining Platfora’s board. Weiss blogged about the deal on Ben Horowitz’s blog today.

The point of Platfora is to take the big batches of data that live in Hadoop and turn them into beautiful graphical representations that are easy to interpret and understand. I talked with Werther yesterday. “The last generation of business intelligence products served a good purpose, but as the amount of data has grown, the traditional systems have been struggling to keep up,” he told me. That’s why they’ve been turning to Hadoop. But Hadoop is only half of the solution. “Hadoop really only gives you the plumbing,” he says.

Platfora is intended to work with existing clusters of machines running Hadoop, including Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon EMR. Questions and queries posed to the data get transformed into visually clear dashboards and insights.

Weiss, writing on Horowitz’s blog, said that Hadoop needs a business intelligence platform that will make it user-friendly to people other than software developers, and that the established players aren’t up to the task. “The legacy BI vendors don’t have the product architecture for Hadoop or Big Data and we believe this opens the door for a new franchise to be built,” he wrote.

The company doesn’t have a product yet. That will come early next year, Werther says.

Crowdbooster Tells You When Is Best to Tweet, and More

Liz Gannes — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:45:14 +0000

Crowdbooster, a Twitter analytics dashboard that shows users things like when their tweets are most effective, becomes available to the public today. Used by the social media teams of Lil Wayne and JetBlue, the angel-funded service informed me yesterday that my Twitter follower with the highest Klout score is Ellen DeGeneres. Ellen follows me (and 48,000 other people … shh)? Cool!

Twitter Starts to Claim Credit for Sending Other People Traffic

Liz Gannes — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 23:30:42 +0000

In the last week, Twitter has dramatically ramped up its efforts to receive credit for helping send traffic to other people’s Web pages.

As part of the rollout of its t.co shortener for all links included in tweets that are at least 20 characters long, Twitter is now redirecting 40 percent of links tweeted by its users so that t.co will show up as the referring address in Web analytics tools.

That’s according to Awe.sm, which helps publishers analyze the effectiveness of social media.

Awe.sm found through a global analysis of its customers’ data that, as of today, 38 percent of links shared through Twitter are using the new t.co redirect, up from 10 percent on August 13, and less than one percent as recently as July.

This was expected; Twitter had said that it would turn up link-wrapping in mid-August, and that it eventually plans to use t.co for all links. Some publishers say they are already noticing a significant uptake in their Twitter referrals.

As I wrote in July, Awe.sm and its investor Mark Suster have pointed out that Twitter was particularly affected by the problem of “last mile social media attribution.” That is, links shared on Twitter are often passed along through various desktop and mobile clients or widgets on other Web sites, which results in distorted traffic stats.

Because Twitter didn’t previously get involved in shortening and/or redirecting many links, it may have been driving four times as much traffic as Web sites could track, according to Awe.sm.

Twitter was well aware of this problem, because it masked one of the company’s biggest strengths: That people use Twitter to find interesting stuff to look at and read. If publishers know better that Twitter is responsible for their visitors, they’ll be more grateful.

Twitter also says it plans to use data from t.co to help “surface quality, interesting tweets.” And last but not least, t.co serves as an intermediary that allows Twitter to intercede and block access to spammy or otherwise bad links.

What Are Mobile Gamers Spending Money On? A Lot of Nothing.

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:34:58 +0000

Over the past year, mobile games have shifted aggressively to the free-to-play model.

Developers have seen value in giving away their games to gain a larger audience and then charging players for items in the game. Now we are gaining some insight as to what users are willing to spend money on — turns out, it’s a whole lot of nothing.

Players are buying things that don’t even exist, including virtual armor, crops, fertilizer, energy beans, food or weapons. While it’s a small percentage of users who ever buy anything, the ones who do are paying, on average, $14 per transaction.

The results were published this morning in a blog post by Flurry, which sifted through a year’s worth of purchases on iOS and Android games, which are played by an average of more than two million people a day. Flurry is able to report on these aggregate numbers because thousands of developers use its tools to collect data within their individual applications.

Everything that users will pay for in the game are considered virtual items, but even more telling is that they are willing to purchase items that don’t last very long.

These items are called consumables and consist of things that become depleted when used, such as energy, fertilizer, etc. Typically, these items help you advance through the game faster, as opposed to durable items, such as armor that helps you defend yourself in a battle or new buildings that stick around and may help you earn additional revenue.

Flurry said it found that more than two-thirds — or about 68 percent — of purchases are for consumable items, or the disposable items, and that only 30 percent of purchases are on durable items. The least popular category is on personalization items, such as trees, park benches and other items that are purely decorative. Only two percent of purchases fell into that bucket.

In conclusion, Flurry GM of Games Jeferson Valadares writes that the games with the best return on investment are the ones that are designed with consumable items in mind.

Flurry estimates that total iOS and Android game revenue will surpass $1 billion this year.

IBM Opens a Research Lab Devoted to IT Services

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:15:47 +0000

This Saturday will mark an anniversary of sorts for IBM. It will be nine years to the day since Big Blue offered to pay $3.5 billion to buy PwC Consulting. The 2002 deal came only two years after Hewlett-Packard walked away from an $18 billion bid to buy PwC in 2000, saying it was too expensive.

It was part of a long-term strategy at IBM to build out its business in services, and it has really paid off. In 2010, 57 percent of IBM’s $100 billion in revenue was derived from services. And the profit margins aren’t bad, either. One business segment, Global Business Services, reported 2010 profits of nearly 29 percent; the other, Global Technology Services, reported margins just shy of 35 percent. The move has since made IBM the envy of the IT services industry, and as IBM’s most recent quarterly results show, the services business is growing, too.

IT is complicated and costly, and when you’re in the business of building something or shipping stuff around the world or doing pretty much anything that’s not IT itself, there’s a certain amount of economic sense in hiring someone to run your IT for you and take some of the burden off your books.

In that nine years, IBM has learned a thing or two about services. It has 15,000 patents around the delivery of services and software, and has since coined the phrase “services as a science.” You can’t treat something as a science unless you’re dedicated to researching it. And today IBM announced that it is throwing its considerable research muscle behind services: It has opened a new research lab devoted to services only.

Dubbed the Services Innovation Lab, or SIL, it will boast 200 technology experts from around IBM. Their brief will be simple: Push the expansion of cutting-edge computing processes like real-time analytics and software automation more deeply into IBM’s service offerings.

Scott Hopkins, IBM’s general manager for global technology services sales, told me that other companies in the IT services business try to grow by squeezing costs by moving assets or the workforce into less expensive locations. “Some try to do the same thing with a little for a little less cost. Others squeeze and cut the labor base,” he told me. “That’s basically how the industry operates. We’re coming to our clients with our base of experience from research and with our ability to leverage our software, and give them a service that changes their business model. It’s not just taking over their mess for less.”

The lab’s director will be Mahmoud Naghshineh, an IBM vice president who joined the company in 1988. He says that IBMers have been doing this research in the course of IBM’s normal services business for more than 20 years. “What we’re trying to do with this research lab is take it up a notch,” Naghshineh told me. “The idea is to really help our business and our clients by accelerating growth in the services area.”

For example: Cloud computing. Clearly, businesses are looking seriously at ways that cloud computing can reduce operational costs but also efficiently add new computing resources to the available mix. “But when we talk to our enterprise customers, there’s huge complexity involved in moving the computing workloads to the cloud. There’s diverse infrastructure, there are concerns about security, and it all has to be reliable,” Naghshineh told me. One of the major research topics at the new lab will be finding ways to make that transition easier.

Another classic problem in IT outsourcing is planning for service outages, or what I like to call expensive, unwanted surprises. Traditionally, Hopkins says, the primary focus on the problem is on how to get systems recovered and running normally after an outage. “The focus has been on how you react.” IBM put the problem to a team of mathematicians. They captured real-time operational data from numerous data centers in order to come up with a way to predict an outage and head it off before it happens. “I can now go to a client and say that if we don’t do certain maintenance jobs, we’re going to have an outage,” he says.

The lab will operate out of IBM’s worldwide network of research labs, including New York, California, China, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and Brazil. Aside from cloud computing, its initial focus will be on analytics, the automated delivery of services and helping companies adapt to mobile technologies.

Seven Questions About Smarter Commerce for IBM's Craig Hayman

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:30:44 +0000

Recently IBM has been talking about making lots of things “smarter.” There’s the “Smarter Cities” initiative, and its ads talk about creating a “smarter planet.” Broadly speaking, making something smarter means making it more efficient, and less costly, time-consuming or less wasteful as a result.

Earlier this month, Big Blue made an announcement on the subject of “smarter commerce.” The idea is to throw some cloud computing resources at classic problems that businesses face in selling their products and services, especially around marketing. The cloud provides the computing horsepower needed to do deep analytics to find out if marketing campaigns are meeting their objectives, by gathering lots of data about customer preferences, especially online: Nearly two-thirds of all consumers make a first purchase because of a digital experience.

The effort has grown out of two IBM acquisitions, Coremetrics and Unica, both acquired last August, and through IBM’s detailed study of the inner workings of more than 2,000 individual businesses. The result is the IBM Coremetrics Web Analytics and Digital Marketing Optimization Suite, which IBM says automates and simplifies the creation of things like online marketing promotions and ad targeting.

I talked with Craig Hayman, Vice President of the WebSphere, Application and Integration Middleware Software Division of the IBM Software Group, about what smarter commerce means.

AllThingsD: We hear IBM pronouncing various things as “smarter” these days. You’re focused on smarter commerce. So what is smarter commerce, who does it affect, and how?

Hayman: If you think about consumers, and you think about the amount of technology that they have at their hands, to reach out to read reviews and talk to friends and families, they’re incredibly empowered. There’s not one purchase decision that they make that is not impacted by some element of social networks. What does that do to the companies that have to deal with that by offering the best products and services, and you see companies are struggling to do that. To make the right offer at the right time with the right price. When they do it well, we all talk about how it went well; and when they do it badly, we talk about how annoying it was. We looked into enterprises and industries and we found some very inefficient processes in how they buy and market those goods and services, how they sell them, and how they service.

How big a problem is this?

We looked at 2,000 different customer deployments to understand the best practices around that, and we were very surprised, because first off, this is a huge segment. It amounts to about $20 billion worth of software spend, and we realized that when you are able to do something compelling, there are some incredible stories about customer value and increasing loyalty and retention. That led us at IBM to invest in our own capabilities, but we also spent about $2.5 billion on new acquisitions in this area in 2010 alone to help us.

What sorts of things did you learn?

How can you help a customer get customer insight and understand what your future customers are doing? One way to do that is through analytics. Find a way to get that data to the marketing professionals as quickly as possible to help them better run a marketing campaign. We called it our Pegasus release: Track the analytics of how future customers are interacting with different channels, sometimes up to 1.5 billion pieces of data per day. We feed that data back to the marketing pros, integrate it in a way that’s connected to their campaigns, and adjust them based on the results. If I ran a Twitter campaign versus an email campaign, I’d be able to compare the results, including geolocation of the respondents, to show if it’s effective.

Have you tried this with any customers yet?

Seton Hall University was running a social media campaign to bring in more students. And we were able to show them that most respondents were coming back through those links through two zip codes: One was South Orange, New Jersey, where the college was located, and one was a commuter town nearby. If you wanted to target the people who already know about the college, you’re doing a great job. But if you wanted to target students from overseas or from other states, you’re doing a lousy job. We were able to give them those metrics and they were able to shift their campaign and attract more students from a wider range of places. The main problem is to know how well your campaign is working, and having the data to prove it one way or the other, and help you tune it.

Companies are always struggling with things like inventory and distribution and logistics, how much stuff to have on hand to meet anticipated demand and so on. Can this sort of thing help on the back end too? If you market too well, you might find you don’t have enough of the item you’re promoting, for instance.

One element of people’s frustration is when you get an offer and you go to buy it and it’s not there. The customer walks away unhappy, and the company has wasted money marketing to you. You may end up going to a competitor. It’s a triple-whammy. So now we say, let’s find some visibility into the supply chain. We don’t manage the supply chain, but we can see what’s in it, so you know what’s in stock, where it’s in stock, down to what truck it’s on and where it’s going, so you can be sure you have the inventory when people go to buy it. We did this with Crocs, the rubber shoes. They sell through small mom-and-pop shops, but also through major retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s, and also online and through their own stores. People were ordering through all these different means, and they were having stock-outs. People would order and it wouldn’t be available. We acquired a company called Sterling Commerce that gives complete visibility into the inventory no matter where it is in the supply chain, and render that through each of those channels. We helped them to virtually eliminate stock-outs for Crocs.

But in this case you don’t help manage the supply chain specifically?

No. But we integrate with all the supply-chain systems out there. We have a view that you shouldn’t have to rip and replace everything you already have to get this benefit. You shouldn’t have go through a five-year ERP or supply-chain rollout to benefit from smarter commerce. You should be able to work with what you already have.

What other areas of commerce do you touch?

Companies often sell through a series and partners, and generally you want to get those partners up and running and selling your product as quickly as possible. If you’ve got a hot item, you’re looking for new partners to fulfill the sales need. That’s another thing that Sterling helps with. We worked with a big transportation company, CSX Transportation — they used this to reduce the time it takes to on-board a partner from two days to 10 minutes. You can easily see the benefit of that.

Image via IBM’s Flickr feed.

Badgeville Awarded $12 Million in Fresh Capital

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:30:45 +0000

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Badgeville, which is building loyalty programs for everything from media companies to e-commerce and enterprises, has raised $12 million in additional capital to ramp up its business.

As the name indicates, the company is playing around in the gamification space, helping companies increase loyalty and drive engagement through the use of social rewards and analytics.

The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners and El Dorado Ventures with participation from existing investors Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network. In total, the company has raised $15 million.

Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan would not disclose the company’s valuation, but said that the funding comes after two seven-figure sales quarters in a row and growth of 40 percent quarter over quarter. He expects the company’s revenues to hit $5 million to $10 million this year.

The capital will be used to grow Badgeville’s team from 30 to 50 employees by the end of this year. It is looking to hire people in sales and marketing, customer service, and product and engineering.

Duggan said that while there are other companies in the space, they aspire to offer a platform that can easily be plugged into any business. “Some companies require lots of customization, and other players offer low-end, do-it-yourself tools. We are right in the middle and don’t require a lot of customization,” he said. “We want to be the Salesforce.com of gamification.”

Some of Badgeville’s customers include Discovery Communications, NBC, Bluefly, Interscope Records, Major League Gaming, Livemocha, Active Network and Deloitte Digital.

Bluefly, for example, is using Badgeville to add game mechanics to its e-commerce site, rewarding shoppers who watch videos, create wish lists, write reviews or read blog posts.

Tim Chang, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, said gamification is like the modern-day United Airlines mileage program. What he likes about Badgeville is that it is taking a software-as-service approach, which will build a scalable business with recurring revenues.

Other players in the space include BigDoor; Bunchball, which recently raised $6.5 million; Novel, a stealthy Redmond, Wash.-based start-up; and likely more.

AOL Moves the Furniture Around Some More, With Brod to Patch

Kara Swisher — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:05:36 +0000

Here’s an internal memo, titled “Platform for Growth,” just sent out by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, in which he buries the lede by noting the business partner of content czar Arianna Huffington, Jon Brod, will move to work on its local Patch effort and MapQuest mapping unit full time.

General managers previously reporting to Brod will now report directly to Armstrong. Brod came to AOL from its acquisition of Patch, which Brod ran.

Second, AOL also elevated an exec as Chief Analytics Officer and head of something called Project Management Organization.

And, the company has further simplified its branding structure by moving some of its brands under the Huffington Post Media label, which it had already talked about doing. It’s essentially a streamlining of a previous streamlining.

Here is the email:

From: Tim Armstrong
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:29:19 -0400
To: Tim Armstrong
Subject: Platform for Growth

AOLers –

We spent the last week in France at the Cannes Lions Festival, which is a global meeting of the advertising community (the technology industry has CES and Cannes is becoming the “CES” of global advertising). After finishing Investor Day and the global company meeting two weeks ago, the trip to Cannes further underlined the opportunity we are starting to take advantage of — that content and brands are the next wave of the Internet.

Content, Brand Advertising, Video, and Local are going to be at the center of the web and mobile for the next decade and we have made bold moves to position AOL at the forefront of those areas. We have a powerful portfolio of assets as a company and by matching our people, brands, and marketplace-defining products, we will simply get stronger, better and faster.

We are going to further strengthen our content brand portfolio to put maximum leverage into key areas of growth. We are also investing in the leadership structure of the brands and the overall analytical framework we have as a company.

The brand portfolio simplification and investments we are announcing today come from our core strategy, the metrics of growth we see in the business today, and the expanding opportunities we see in the marketplace. Every brand metric was thoroughly reviewed and thoughtfully discussed to get to the list we are sharing with you today. There are a set of brands we will continue to run as stand-alone brands because they have built strong organic traffic, significant customer bases, and unique market positions. There is another set of brands that will gain usage, a larger customer base, and deeper content by becoming part of the Huffington Post platform.

We want to make this transition as simple and intuitive as possible for employees, consumers, and advertisers, so we’ve set up a link to the brand site to review the complete list of brands and USPs.

The AOL Huffington Post Media Group technology platform is the end result of a company wide effort combining the very best content, video, ad, and data technologies from the Blogsmith platform with the best technologies from Huffington Post platform — and we’ve been hard at work adding many new capabilities as well. This combined platform simply has no equal in the digital content space and features an innovative approach to coverage, with edit and tech teams working closely together, and a “hyper-efficient editor” model that enables editors and reporters to rapidly deploy all the tools available to create and disseminate stories. We have integrated in 5min video, AOL demand analytics, and AOL’s data platform deeply into the system, and we will soon be running all of the advertising through AOL’s ad platform. Editors are not silo-ed but empowered to quickly bring their stories to life — and to millions of readers. This leads to engagement on a massive scale, creating an editorial ecosystem with high-quality content, leading edge blogging, commenting, and social sharing capabilities that are easily scale-able and enable real-time speed and a more holistic approach to covering news and engaging audiences.

Here are some quick statistics on the benefits we are seeing in combining sets of brands and platforms:

· When we migrated AOL News to the HuffPost platform we saw significant increases in organic traffic with search entries per UV increasing 195% and social entries per UV up 142%.
· By combining Politics Daily with HuffPost Politics content, social interactions, which include HuffPost comments, FB comments, shares and re-shares, FB Likes, tweets, re-tweets, and email shares reached 3.3MM.

· Adopting Huffington Post style blogging in the Patch platform allowed us to sign up 5,000 bloggers in 2 weeks.

The goals of the brand and platform investments are the following:

1. Grow traffic and grow revenue with high quality experiences for consumers and advertisers
2. Be the leader in content CMS and CMS for Ads (Devil + Social)
3. Simplify the business process and increase profitability in each vertical area
4. Scale video and International
5. Create a culture of speed and transparency on all fronts

In support of the brand investments, we are also making people investments. The current GM structure around the content brands will report to me and I have met with all the GM’s to discuss each vertical opportunity. Local will be broken out as a vertical and is a space where AOL is in a leadership position. Jon Brod will focus full-time on AOL’s local efforts, including Patch and Mapquest. Jon is the co-founder of Patch and has spent the past few months successfully integrating the Huffington Post and AOL media. AOL local has a lot of exciting products coming out this summer and we will be connecting many of those products to our larger business.

We are also announcing a new position that will have a positive impact across AOL — the formation of a Chief Analytics Officer and Project Management Organization (PMO). Tim Lemmon, currently working in Ned Brody’s Advertising.com Group, is being promoted to CAO, reporting directly to me, and will oversee and drive analytics and project management on a company-wide basis. Data and analytics are key to our success and we will continue to look for Tim to provide fact-based guidance and executional focus for all of AOL. Tim’s current AOL Analytics team including Pricing and Yield Management will continue to report to him.

I’ll be holding a working meeting today at 11am EDT with the Sales team to discuss the new brand structure, the HuffPost platform, and the supporting org structure. The meeting information is available on AOL Today and anyone is invited to dial in if you are interested in learning more. Go AOL! -TA

Video: An IBM Film About Chocolate and Babies and Ducks

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 22:39:38 +0000

As part of its 100th anniversary observance, IBM has produced a handful of videos meant to bring to life the usually complicated message that results from explaining the work it does. The first was this fascinating clip it released in February, encapsulating its century of corporate history in 13 minutes.

The film below lasts about 15 minutes and tells some of the stories that IBM Fellow Bernie Meyerson discussed in my conversation with him from earlier today. For one, you’ll meet Dr. Carolyn McGregor, who led IBM’s efforts to bring to bear the field data analytics to help treat premature infants in Toronto. This is, of course, a story that IBM has been telling for the better part of three years, but it’s one that for me never gets old. Who doesn’t like heart-warming stories about babies saved from preventable infections?

And who doesn’t like chocolate? Did you know that IBM saved the world’s chocolate supply? Well, I exaggerate there, but only a little. And while it’s another story that IBM has been telling for a few years, it only gets more interesting with time, especially after you meet Howard-Yana Shapiro, the global director of plant science for chocolate giant Mars, who a few years back committed that company to buying cocoa beans from suppliers who grow their crop sustainably. But first there was the problem of fighting off a virus that was destroying the world’s cocoa supplies, which first required sequencing the genome of the cacao tree from which cocoa comes. That’s where IBM came in.

Also there’s some stuff on Sunil Mitall, the Indian billionaire whose Bharti Group sells mobile phones in India, the growth of Dubai and a wild duck who got too fat to fly. That last item is linked to a saying of founding President Thomas J. Watson that goes like this: “You can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make a tame duck wild again.” What does that have to do with computing? Watch and find out.

Big Blue at 100: IBM Fellow Bernie Meyerson on Perseverance and Big Bets

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:05:53 +0000

There aren’t many technology companies around who can claim to be 100 years old. You’ll probably hear that a lot today as various media outlets report that today is the anniversary of the day in 1911 that three companies came together to form the Computing Tabulating and Recording Corporation in Endicott, New York. It retained that name until 1924, when it became International Business Machines, or IBM.

The sheer number of things we take for granted in modern life that hail in one way or another from IBM is astonishing. The credit card you probably used to buy coffee this morning bears a magnetic strip that was developed by IBM. So was the bar code that’s stamped on practically every tangible product you buy. The memory and hard drive in your computer evolved from technology developed at IBM, as did digital computing itself. For a quick rundown that will blow your mind, watch the video that Kara Swisher posted here in February.

Obviously, an anniversary like this presents an opportunity for many things. One is the basic PR impulse of a corporation like IBM to assert its importance and impact and get people talking about it. So be it. But it’s also a chance to reflect honestly on the impact that technology has played in pushing human society ahead, and to understand how, in an industry that’s traditionally thought of as being populated by young companies run by young people, IBM has so effectively stood the test of time.

I talked recently with Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and vice president of innovation, whose research years ago into a material called Silicon Germanium has a lot to do with why you can find a Wi-Fi network nearly everywhere today. We talked at length about the trajectory that IBM’s research has followed and about the unique mix of research and business acumen that has helped make Big Blue what it is today.

AllThingsD: Bernie, there certainly aren’t many IT companies that can say they’re 100 years old. The company has had its hands in so many things that just permeate modern life. How do you explain it all?

Meyerson: Most people don’t even know that many of the things they take for granted evolved out of work that IBM had done. We’re notoriously bad at explaining the level of progress that has been achieved in human terms. But to understand the distance you’ve traveled is mind-numbing. Here’s a good example. If you’ve ever seen one of those big cruise ships, think about this for a minute. We invented the first disk drives around 1955 or 1956. And the disk drive basically at that time was this monstrous thing using paint from a shipyard to make the memory part of the disk drive. It’s kind of a strange story, but it worked. In any case, if all we did was invent something and then walked away from it, then the amount of storage you have in a laptop today would weigh 250,000 tons. What’s typical data storage today would be the equivalent of two of those big cruise ships. When you put it in terms of gigabytes it loses all meaning. When you think of cruise ships it makes sense.

Well, thanks for not walking away from that one. Storage is one measure of technical progress but so is processing, which is essentially our ability to get things done and how fast. Do you have an equally colorful metaphor to illustrate progress there?

We moved to digital computing in the mid 1950s. It’s hard to compare what we were shipping then to the best machine we’re shipping today, which does about a petaflop, about 10 to the fifteenth power floating point operations. I’m about six feet tall. How tall would I be if I simply grew in height at the same rate that computers have grown in capability? If I had, I would today be looking down and seeing the moon whack me in the ankles, roughly. If you put numbers on it, it gets lost. It’s very easy to forget how far we’ve come, and very dangerous, too.

Why dangerous?

If you forget how far you’ve come, you don’t realize the importance of the tremendous investments required to go further. To continue the metaphor, if I’ve already grown so tall that the moon is whacking my ankles, don’t underestimate how hard it’s going to be to grow even further because I’ve already grown an unimaginable amount. The trouble is there are a lot of other folks at a lot of other companies who walk away. They don’t comprehend somehow the investment required to stay at it, or worse, they don’t value it. And it’s disconcerting to me as a scientist and technologist when there isn’t a focus on the drive necessary to keep things going. To some extent there’s a part of our culture at IBM that says you just keep driving, you keep innovating. And furthermore, you understand intuitively that the further you go, the harder it gets. The first step? Piece of cake. Further is not trivial. By the 47th step you’re walking straight up a cliff and it gets very difficult. If you don’t keep in mind the lessons of the past you’re doomed to repeat the same errors.

So how does IBM deal with that? Other companies have shorter horizons in their research. IBM does a lot more basic research that may or may not lead down a productive path. How does IBM manage that consciousness of what has come before versus the need for a shorter-term payoff?

It’s an excellent question and it basically comes down to culture. You don’t just create an organization that comprehends this overnight. This is basically the result of 67 years of learning. So when you look at IBM and particularly our research division, which does astounding things, we have a culture of making what we call big bets. These are things that are incredibly aggressive in terms of the targeted outcome. But they’re bets. Key word: Bet. You win or you lose. The bet aspect pertains precisely to your question, which is how do you focus on getting it done, and getting to closure, even if it’s a longer-term effort. The danger tends to be that if you do things that are really disconnected, and which don’t have a logical outcome, they can linger for a decade or two without any real progress. If you take a long view — a view that is nonetheless grounded in reality — the question comes down to how do we do it? It comes from this long, long-standing culture. Some things come to fruition quickly, others take forever. The question is having the right mix. That’s the element we’ve mastered. You have to have a diversity of projects under way. You can’t make all your bets on something five or 10 years out, but similarly you can’t place them all on something this quarter. Over the years, we’ve basically developed structures that ensure we have that diversity, and it has served us very well.

What’s a recent big bet that’s paid off?

Data and analytics. We felt that the use of IT to deal with big data — vast data sets that no human has a chance of dealing with — that sort of needle-in-a-haystack item is really something you can address with IT because of the computing horsepower that’s now available. In 10 years we’ve invested $60 billion in R&D and $14 billion acquiring 25 companies tied to analytics. And we’ve done some astonishing things in terms of accessing big data. One good example was Watson. That capability of dealing with big data has had some profound impacts near-term and it will have tremendous societal impacts over the long term.

We hear a lot about big data and analytics these days and I think it’s one of those abstract buzzwords that makes people roll their eyes. Can you give me a concrete example of analytics in action?

We worked with a hospital in Toronto treating premature infants. They have underdeveloped immune systems so when they become ill, they don’t really respond. They don’t have all the usual warning signs the way healthy infants do, so it’s hard to tell. By the time you know they’re sick, they’re so infected they usually die. The problem is this: How does a nurse working in the intensive care unit spot these infections early enough to treat the child so they don’t die? We asked: What if you took all the data coming off a child in the ICU — their heart rate, their blood gas measurements, brain activity, breathing activity and so on. This data flows out at a rate of tens of thousands of readings a second. If you compound all these into a database and then watch that child, every once in a while one of these children will get one of these infections and die. What you do then is you work back through all the cases like that to see if there is an early warning sign that you’re missing. All the other parameters for that child are normal right up until the moment they’re terribly sick. It turned out there was a warning sign, and it turned out to be that very early, a certain normal fluctuation in the heartbeat went away. Their heartbeats were more stable, but even so it was within the sweet spot so it wasn’t generating any alarms. That turned out to be one of the warning signs. Now they’re able to see 24 hours out or more when one of these children is getting ill before the best trained ICU nurse could ever spot it. It makes the difference between these children living and dying.

That’s a winning bet. What about the losing ones? What happens when the big bet turns out to be wrong? How do you manage that?

One of the things we do at IBM is that when we make a big bet, we practice the art of parallelism. You have two or three things that work in parallel and you measure against an absolute standard. The reason you do this is that you have to at some point choose a frontup and a backup plan. You never get it right every time so you have to have a Plan B. Which we’ve done with a lot of success. We had a case where we were developing a new material to use as an insulator on chips. The preliminary data showed that one we were using, lets call it Material A, was promising. But we also continued to work on another one we’ll call Material B. After nine months, A just wasn’t cutting it and B turned out to be the winner. And of course we had lost some of the investment, and we punted on A. This friend of mine with one of the trade journals came in to see me. He’s a good guy, but he came in and wanted to have a little fun at my expense about this. He asked how we were going to explain that we worked on A for nine months and it didn’t work. I thought about it for a moment and I looked at him and said, “Show me someone who has never failed and I will show you someone who will never lead.” You have to be willing to hang by your fingertips with the understanding that every once in a while you’re going to lose your grip. But you similarly have to make sure that somewhere you have a net so that the fall doesn’t wipe you out. It’s a very tough balance. It’s not that we avoid failure. Quite the opposite. We do hard stuff. I could list many many programs we’ve had to shut down because they weren’t cutting it. Most companies that have cataclysmic failures simply don’t know when to punt.

Seven Questions About Big Data and Analytics for IBM's Steven Mills

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 26 May 2011 14:00:48 +0000

The one thing you probably know about IBM is that it’s big. It does big projects with other big companies, and with governments. One concept it has been talking about lately is “big data,” or analytics. The idea is that you can find money-saving value in the intelligent analysis of patterns that might minimize or eliminate wasted effort, or detect common problems early, or anticipate a need before it becomes acute.

Last Friday I rode a bus up to IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York–site of the IBM Jeopardy Challenge from earlier this year–to sit in on a series of presentations on the benefits of analytics. But I also got a chance to sit down with Steve Mills, who’s been IBM’s Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software and Systems. He has some 100,000 employees reporting to him and oversees the operations that contribute about $40 billion worth of IBM’s revenue. If you were to look for someone who’s on the front lines with big IT projects intended to corral and extract value from mountains of data, he’s it.

We talked about opportunities IBM is finding around analytics in fields as varied as marketing, health care and pumping oil in the North Sea.

AllThingsD: So Steve, IBM is talking a lot these days about big data and analytics. Naturally, companies are always on guard to resist the temptation to invest in buzzwords–they have to bring some skepticism to the discussion and wonder if making a big investment is right for them. What kind of benefits are companies getting out of it, and what kind of questions should they be asking?

Steve Mills: Certainly larger enterprises have been buying IT and listening to IT companies for decades. They are not drawn in by the latest buzzwords, they are looking for value. In the 1990s was the last time you saw people making technology investments because they thought they had to, not because they knew exactly where they were going. It was an era where people thought they had to be Amazon or be ‘Amazoned.’ You had to ride the wave and be there. It was a period of overbuying. And it was a period of great promise, but not one of great value. It’s not to say there was no value. The Web improved data connectivity standards, data structures became more finite, HTML and XML, there was some lasting value that emerged from the feeding frenzy of the late 1990s. The aftermath of that was much more caution. Companies are much more careful now. With this whole notion of big data and data analytics, companies are asking themselves what their big analytic problems are, and wondering where they could get more value from having more data. They get that the cost of bringing that data in has come down. They can store and organize it and analyze it and hunt for patterns within it. These are things that were always of interest but the costs have come down to a point where they can do them. The economics have improved, but they still want to go through the exercise of determining what kind of value they get from it. What might look like a great use of technology might not deliver much return.

Well, that’s the most important question, isn’t it? The value looks great on paper, but then there are practical limitations. I’m thinking of someone who said to me the other day that Salesforce.com is a great product and can deliver a lot of value, but then the salespeople that it’s aimed at are often a little lazy and don’t put all the information they can into it which limits the value somewhat. There are human elements that can limit the value. Do you run into that much?

There’s no such thing as a big data program without a pilot. The more pilots you run the more real deployments you do. Will every pilot result in an immediate deployment. No. Does that mean you don’t see any value? Not really, but its just that as you run it and begin to see the complexity, you might back away, other priorities might come in, projects get shelved. I think the discussion of big data is better when its around an applied operational definition rather than a theorertical one. You look at areas where business are exploring this and looking for value. We see a lot of consumer packaging companies looking at what’s known as sentiment analysis. They want to collect things out of the blogosphere and Tweets and whatever information there is about what people are saying about the products they produce. Historically they might have run focus groups, and they probably still will, but you see them reaching out for large amounts of unstructured data, and a lot of it is garbage. They’re hunting for the jewels, and it comes back to the issue that the technology is there, it’s affordable. If you talk to any consumer package goods company, they’re definitely looking at this and beginning to make some attempts to determine if they can get any incremental value from analytics.

So where does IBM fit into all of this?

As you saw last year we acquired Unica and Coremetrics. Those technologies are geared toward the ability to bring together large amounts of information around marketing, on-the-Web activity, effectiveness of marketing campaigns in the case of Unica, and effectiveness of Web presence in the case of Coremetrics. And use these technologies as ways to sift through that and look for trends that steer you toward what’s working. There’s a lot of scenarios in big data around health care and the use of the Watson technologies. The idea is to deal with a big corpus of information and bring it together in a way that delivers value against a particular purpose. The whole medical effort is to create a physician’s assistant, not to replace doctors but to give them more at-the-fingertips insight based on the symptons the doctor is observing. If you have access to all the outcome data that’s available it’s possible to hone in on the problem much more quickly.

I feel like we’ve heard this discussion around bringing IT to health care for years, and yet there’s still so much resistance and inertia. What’s going to change that now?

That resistance will be broken by providers with control over their physicians. So if Kaiser Permanente starts to dictate to its physicians what prescribed approaches they have to take, then they’ll be required to participate. The Mayo Clinic does this today. It’s a very tightly controlled environment. They have an enormous amount of data and they use it quite effectively. Its part of what’s required to be a physician at the Mayo. And the Mayo doesn’t share its data, it thinks it has a strategic advantage in the way it uses data. Other institutions may be more open to that. But in the end, if a doctor wants to get paid, they’ll used the tools that are prescribed. I think there’s enough impetus for change. WIll every independent practitioner use these tools? No, not near term. Will major institutions adopt? There’s no question that they will.

Obviously, this takes place against the backdrop of the larger debates around health care reform and the President’s plans, and some Congressional opposition to it. Where does this all fit in relation to that?

Our view is that the change will be driven at the state and local level. Local private health care entities will play a role. The major health care payer companies, the Wellpoints, the Blue Cross Blue Shield network, Cigna, Aetna, they all have a vested interest in bringing more efficiency to health care. It will move from the bottom up rather than from the federal level down.

What kind of results are you seeing? Is there a standard yardstick you use to think about return on investment? Or do you have enough data on that yet?

You have to break it down by area. The New York State Department of revenue is seeing some pretty impresive results in using analytics to collect delinquent taxes. I don’t know how many thousands of a percent return that amounts to from the initial investment. The level of investment is modest versus the recovery of money. The project paid for itself overnight. Similar projects at Medicaid meant to detect fraud and abuse pay for themselves typically within a matter of months. There are areas that have that immediate kind of payback. Often its where you know you’re paying for something or losing money, you’re able to stop the bleeding. We’ve done some very sophisticated projects related to energy and energy transmission that pay for themselves in six months. It’s a little gear driving the big gear situation. The capital and operational investments at power companies are so high, that when a little IT is applied geared toward optimizing preventative maintenance, the investment is paid for in weeks. The problem is usually so obvious, and it’s usually just a matter of correlating and analyzing the data you have available to realize a better approach. The small gear of IT investment spins very fast relative to the big gear that comes from high opex and capex investment. In those cases the payback is really fast. Other areas are less clear, which is why you do pilot projects that start small.

What do you generally recommend when companies do these pilot projects? Is there a classic approach that applies widely?

You have to have some intuitive sense of where you want to go. When we started with the New York State Tax initiative, they had already been doing their own investigative work on fraudulent tax returns, so they knew what was going on, people weren’t paying correctly for whatever reason. They had some sense that analytics was going to help them, but it didn’t mean simply throwing money at the problem was going to work. We had to come up with a selected set of uses cases and figure out how to best use the technology for maximum result. You don’t want to hunt for nickels and dimes. You want to go where the money is. You also don’t want to investigate a lot of false positives.

This kind of work would, I think apply so widely to so many areas of human endeavor, I wonder if there’s one project you’ve done that sticks out as having been unusual?

We did a big project with Statoil out of Norway, trying to get more pumping days out of the year from their North Sea oil platforms given the extreme conditions and the equipment they have to maintain. They had a problem with excessive downtime. We worked with them on their instrumentation, then collecting and formatting the data, applying time index data to it because that’s critical. That was a two-year project, and we had people out there working on the platforms. There were 62 use cases, none of which existed before we started the project. There was a lot of effort from IBM people working with Statoil, but the payback was enormous: Given the relative value of a barrel of oil you don’t need that large a percentage in improvement for the investment to pay off. It was a two-year pilot that showed you could do these things, and that it was cost effective to do it.

(Image courtesy IBM’s Flickr feed.)

Sewichi Raises a Seed Round to Track Mobile Analytics

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:35:55 +0000

Seattle-based Sewichi has closed a round of seed funding that will be used to discover a new way to measure analytics in the mobile space. Investors in the undisclosed round include Madrona Venture Group and the company’s founder, David Shim. Shim is still being secretive about his three-month-old company, but hinted that mobile has more interesting data points than a PC to track, including location, time of day and information from sensors, such as Wi-Fi and NFC. Shim worked previously at Quantcast and Farecast.

Onetime Mobile Search Player Medio Aims for Rebirth as Analytics Company

Ina Fried — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:00:42 +0000

At one time, Medio was a start-up that hoped to be the Google of mobile search. It raised a bunch of money and built its engine.

But, after Google decided that it wanted to be the Google of mobile search, Medio found itself too small to compete on either the algorithmic or ad side.

So the Seattle company hunkered down and plotted a second act. The once-loquacious startup went silent, scaled back from more than 100 employees to around 60 and slowly started building back its business around the recommendation engine that had formed a key part of its search engine.

These days the company is looking to sell access to that engine to phone makers and operators who want to use it to help figure out which services and products to pitch to their customers. The need is particularly acute when it comes to trying to sell mobile apps, of which there are tens of thousands.

“The problem is people don’t know they are there,” Medio co-founder and CTO Brian Lent told Mobilized. “There’s a discovery problem.”

It is a widely recognized problem in the industry, with many companies aiming to attack it from different angles–some by pitching their own app stores, others by pitching advertising options and still others, like Medio, by trying to help understand user interest.

Medio is announcing later on Thursday that its services have been widely adopted by T-Mobile, a longtime customer of Medio’s. Lent said the carrier has actually been using the analytics services for more than a year, but that the company wanted to wait until it could demonstrate results before going public.

Since taking over powering T-Mobile’s Web2Go service in June 2010, Lent said that the company has been able to help T-Mobile triple its number of sessions per user, while offering significantly faster response time as well as reducing the amount of data sent between handset and network by 40 percent.

Medio’s engine can help suggest which apps a user might be interested in based on their past purchases, location and other information. It can also suggest what other items to pitch, such as wallpapers or ringtones, or even a different rate plan. The Medio technology is also designed to make it easy for a phone buyer to have a device customized with their favorite apps, sites and news feeds.

While many are attacking the app discovery issue, Lent comes armed with some serious technical chops, having worked alongside Larry Page and Sergey Brin as well as early Yahoo employees at Stanford’s computing labs in the 1990s. He had the chance to join both companies very early on, but passed.

Adobe's Omniture May Build, Acquire or Partner Its Way Into Mobile Even More

Tricia Duryee — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 02:20:22 +0000

It is the goal of Adobe’s Omniture to track consumer behavior no matter where it occurs–the Internet, social networks or mobile.

While the company focused this week on addressing the shift to social networks at its annual customer conference in Salt Lake City, an area it finds even more exciting is mobile.

“We have to think mobile first,” said Brad Rencher, the VP and general manager of Adobe’s Omniture business. “It can’t be a channel. It can’t be something we do part time. If we do, then we are going to miss a huge wave of innovation.”

“We’ve moved mobile to the top of the list,” he added.

Already, Rencher is willing to make the bold claim that his company is the largest mobile analytics software provider in the world–even though he’s not willing to give us the figures to back it up.

What he is willing to say is that today Omniture manages five trillion clicks through its customers’ experiences on the Web and mobile and that “a significant percentage” of those come from mobile.

While computer clicks are increasing too, he said, mobile is growing faster as consumers buy more smartphones and start to adopt tablets.

Rencher said Omniture’s platform is able to measure a wide variety of mobile traffic, including which browser a person is using on what phone and operating system.

But it is interested in doing a lot more.

Omniture is currently discussing whether to buy, build or partner with other analytic providers to have a comprehensive service. “We have our own internal initiative, but there might be something we absolutely have to have that we need for the platform,” Rencher said.

While mobile is the fastest growing part of its analytics business, he said, video is also a significant growth driver.

Of course, Omniture is very familiar with acqusitions. It was acquired by Adobe 18 months ago for $1.8 billion, and Rencher’s background at the company stretches back to 2005 when he was working at Morgan Stanley.

He first worked on taking the company public and later represented it in M&A deals. He then joined the company full time and moved to Utah.

Rencher said that Omniture continues to be based just outside of Salt Lake City and that Adobe has committed to building a long-term facility on land it has purchased.

Social Media, Genomics Driving Data Tsunami

Russell Garland — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:32:08 +0000

The social media wave is being followed by a big data tsunami.

Ok, the imagery is getting a little outlandish, but the flood of information that must be stored and analyzed is generating excitement, especially in Boston, where many in the tech world worry that they were at the beach while Silicon Valley and New York enjoyed the fruits of the Web 2.0 revolution.

Social networking companies such as Facebook and Twitter are generating terabytes of content, IDC analyst David Reinsel said during a keynote Thursday at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Big Data Summit in Burlington, Mass. For example, three billion photos each month are uploaded to Facebook for a total of 3,600 terabytes per year. (A terabyte equals one trillion bytes.)

More important than content creation, he said, is content consumption, which involves vaster amounts of data: “Consumption is what’s driving big IT…Consumption is what drives traffic to your website, and that’s what gets you ad revenue…It demands analytics.

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Hewlett-Packard to Acquire Data Analytics Firm Vertica

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:07:03 +0000

Hewlett-Packard said today it had reached an agreement to acquire Vertica, a privately held, real-time analytics platform company based in Billerica, Mass. HP said Vertica will enhance its capabilities in real-time business analytics for large and complex sets of data. HP expects the acquisition to close in the second quarter of its fiscal year 2011. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Motricity Will Pay Up to $150 Million for Mobile Marketing Expertise

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:12:46 +0000

Bellevue, Wash.-based Motricity has agreed to acquire Toronto-based Adenyo, a mobile marketing provider in the U.S., Canada and France. It will pay $100 million in a combination of cash and stock with an additional earn-out of up to $50 million. Motricity–which builds storefronts for wireless operators, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, that sell and distribute smartphone applications–said it was attracted to the company for its mobile advertising and analytics capabilities. The deal is expected to close by the end of March.