That was July. Wednesday, Domo will announce that it has raised another batch of money, and is bringing in a new investor. The company has closed a $20 million round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

IVP, which had invested in Omniture and so has a history with James, is joining an all-star cast of investors including Benchmark Capital; Andreessen Horowitz; Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel; and Hummer Winblad, plus a bunch of personal investments. The round — which is being described as an A-1 round, brings Domo’s total capital raised to date to $63 million.

IVP general partner Todd Chaffee said Domo is an example of a dynamic management team going after a high-growth market. “We know Josh has the experience to build Domo into a disruptive and dominant player in a growing $10 billion market,” he said in a statement. Aside from Omniture, IVP has backed HomeAway, MySQL, Twitter and Zynga.

James wouldn’t tell me the implied valuation, but he did concede that it’s upward of “a couple hundred million.” And if that’s not surprising enough, what’s equally surprising is one possible use for the money: Acquisitions. Well, maybe.

“Let’s just suppose, and this is 100 percent supposition,” he told me over the phone Tuesday, “that we want to buy someone. We’ve thought about it. We’ve had potential targets cross the email threads. It’s not the right time to do that stuff just yet. But it’s nice to know we have the flexibility when the time comes.”

So where’s Domo, the business intelligence software-as-service play he was building? It’s running as a demonstration with a few early customers, he says. And he’ll have more to say about it publicly in about three to four months.

“We have a few thousand people who say they want to see a demo, and we’re working through that list,” James says. “The feedback has been more positive and at a higher rate than I would have thought possible. I think we’re going to have to figure out how to do a lot of installations all at once.”

That’s what we call a good problem to have.

That brings the price tag for Adobe’s two-year ad business shopping spree to $2.4 billion. The bulk of that comes from Adobe’s 2009 acquisition of Omniture for $1.8 billion; it has also recently picked up Auditude and Demdex.

Adobe’s appetite for ad technology has been good news for a handful of investors who have been betting on the sector. In the case of Efficient Frontier, the deal is a big win for Mitsui & Co., Redpoint Ventures and Cambrian Ventures, who put less than $15 million into the start-up.

But while lots of VC cash has gone into ad tech in the past few years, there haven’t been a ton of big exits.

Beyond Adobe, the only other active buyer has been Google. And industry executives say that some ad tech firms looking for more funding are having trouble getting the dollars they want.

Adobe isn’t beating the drum about its intentions, but it’s also quite clear about them: The company figures that it already has deep relationships with lots of Web publishers, and that the logical way to extend its business is to help them sell ads, too.

Monday night’s announcement that the company had purchased Auditude, a video ad-serving start-up, is the most recent not-very-subtle hint about where Adobe is going. People familiar with the transaction say Adobe spent around $120 million on the purchase.

That’s about double the reported price tag for Demdex, the “data management platform” Adobe bought in January. Adobe kicked off its advertising M&A plans back in 2009, when it dropped $1.8 billion on Omniture, the traffic tracker that dominates Web publishing.

And it’s a good bet that Adobe’s not done buying.

Last year, the company tried to buy Invite Media, a “demand side platform” that helps advertisers navigate big data exchanges, but lost that deal to Google. On a call this afternoon, Adobe executive Todd Teresi wouldn’t tell me that Adobe was interested in buying another DSP — there are plenty out there — but he did say that his company plans to either build or buy something that will give it the same capabilities.

And if Adobe would like to pick up any other pieces of the ad tech “stack” — the dizzying array of companies that try to insert themselves between advertisers and publishers — it has plenty of other options. And bankers willing to help.

[Image credit: Rafal Olechowski/Shutterstock.]

Leaning on a year of acquisitions, worth millions of dollars, it unveiled X.commerce, a platform aimed at developers, which can use it to help retailers bridge the gap from offline commerce to mobile, social and local commerce.

As part of it, it hosted a number of partners on stage, including Adobe and Facebook. Adobe will contribute Omniture’s analytics tools, and Facebook will be integrating the social network’s “open graph,” enabling consumers to interact with brands in new ways.

Here’s the liveblog from earlier:

eBay kicks off its developer conference today in San Francisco’s Moscone center, where more than 4,000 developers and merchants will be present to hear about X.commerce, the online retailer’s big foray into providing back-end tools for developers.

Yesterday, we got a glimpse of its plans, but will hear even more from eBay’s President and CEO John Donahoe, who will be joined on stage by Bill Ingram of Adobe and Katie Mitic of Facebook, who are both expected to announce partnerships with the major online retailer.

9:08 am: Time to get started. People are still leisurely taking their seats. We are in the same room that Apple’s WWDC conference was, but I can assure you there’s far less urgency here in finding a good seat.

9:11 am: Naveed Anwar, the head of community for X.commerce, has just taken the stage.

We learned a little bit yesterday about X.commerce, but essentially eBay is hoping to turn into a tech company and provide the necessary tools to merchants and retailers to expand from physical to mobile and social channels.

There’s going to be a lot of talk about how retailers need help in getting ahead.

Anwar says there’s already 850,000 developers in the ecosystem today.

We are here today because Donahoe has been a champion of developers since he became CEO three years ago. He’s up next after a short video.

9:17 am: Donahoe is dressed down today in a button-up shirt and jeans to deliver this message:

I see an enormous acceleration in the pace of change and innovation. The more I reflect on it, I think it’s more than just that. I believe we are at an inflection point. … In particular, I’ll make a prediction: I believe we’ll see more change in the way consumers shop and pay in the next three years than we’ve seen in 15.

He continues, offline retail hasn’t changed that much, and then online commerce came around 15 years ago, but it’s a fairly distinct experience from offline retail.

That’s now changing because of the smartphone.

The lines between online and offline are blurring, and they are blurring faster than anyone could have imagined 12 months ago. What that is doing is expanding the opportunity for innovation.

We think e-commerce, which is 4 percent of offline retail, will double or triple. … By 2013, e-commerce will be a $10 trillion opportunity.

9:23 am: This year alone we’ll do $5 billion in retail on the eBay mobile app, and PayPal will do $3 billion in mobile payments this year.

He says, people now have a mall in their pocket, and expect shopping to come to them.

Donahoe says the pain points are being felt by retailers: I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with retail CEOs over the past 12 months that go something like this: We need to be multi-channel. We just figured out Google AdWords, and now we have to figure out things like Groupon and LivingSocial.

9:27 am: Here’s the eBay pitch for X.commerce: Donahoe says retailers are saying, “we need to figure out how to delight our customers, but we aren’t technology companies.”

EBay, the whole entire company’s mission, is to enable commerce. We want to enable merchants of all sizes to compete in this new environment and we will not compete with them.

Over the past year, we’ve been hard at work, and today, I’m excited to announce X.commerce. It is the world’s first open commerce ecosystem.

It’s intended to put together the full suite of services, so developers can drive innovation for merchants.

I feel this more than ever before, you will play an important role. I know that no one single company can provide all the solutions. Retail is a complex market, and they need different services by vertical and geography, and we need you to help with that.

Donahoe said this is the intention for X.commerce:

– We will build a full commerce stack, many of which will be acquired.

– We want it to be open. We’ll open up GSI, but Magento has been open since the beginning. The companies, including Milo, Red Laser and Where, they are open today. We are buying them and opening them up.

– We want you to be able to come to one place to get the platform and services that you need.

9:35 am: That was the high-level overview from Donahoe. Next up is Matthew Mengerink, the VP and General Manager of X.commerce.

If you haven’t picked up on it already, this is not a consumer-focused story. This is about eBay creating the unsexy stuff that runs in the background that will help consumers buy things on the Web or at the cash register.

9:37 am: Mengerink has a story to tell. He’s a father a five, and his daughter needs a fleece jacket. He’s in the store, and sending pictures to his daughter at home. Once he gets home, his daughter hates it. Classic, right?

Well, as a coder, he says he starts to envision how there could be better technologies to prevent that.

Now, he’s starting to talk about ecosystems and distribution. He says that what they are building is for both mom and pop, large retailers and small.

To prove it, here’s some demos, where they took real-life businesses over and conducted “extreme makeovers!”

9:43 am: In a video, we are introduced to Soccer Pro, a small family-owned retailer. They handed over the business to eBay to see if they can save their business.

This should be interesting.

The out-of-the-box X.commerce looks like this:

Carlos, the owner of Soccer Pro, comes out on stage with a thumbdrive, which stores all of his inventory.

The inventory is uploaded to Magento to create an online storefront, and now Soccer Pro has payments, tracking inventory and analytics.

Presto-chango, Soccer Pro has a live storefront!

That was fast.

9:47 am: The next step is to send inventory to eBay, so Soccer Pro has access to 100 million customers worldwide. The inventory is also automatically added to Milo, which will drive foot traffic to his physical store.

9:49 am: Next on stage is eBay’s first partner, Adobe. Bill Ingram, VP of product management, is on stage to explain that merchants need the power of analytics. It will be integrating Omniture into the Magento platform to inform merchants who are its customers and where are they coming from.

In a demonstration, Adobe shows how its tools will allow a retailer to see that email is outperforming affiliate channels, and that more of the marketing budget should be headed to email.

Once set up, these tools look easy enough for a regular person to understand, but they will need developers to set it up, and then tweak it as their businesses change in the future.

These are not tools for merchants, but for developers who are the ones working for the merchants and retailers.

9:56 am: That’s it for Adobe.

Now Sivan Metzger from Kenshoo is on stage to give us a peek into how more partners will be part of the platform. Retailers use Kenshoo to manage online advertising campaigns across Google, Facebook and other sites.

More partner demonstrations. eBay is partnering with Mazentop to help with international sales.

10:05 am: Central to the X.commerce platform is Magento, which eBay purchased four months ago. Magento’s co-founder Roy Rubin is now on stage to give a rundown.

EBay is now officially announcing PayPal Access, which we covered yesterday. PayPal provides an identity across all retailers on the Web, so that consumers don’t have to create a discrete log-in for each and every retailer they visit on the Web.

A big problem for online retailers, unless you are someone like Amazon, is that customers don’t have an account. Shopping cart abandonment is a big problem.

10:16 am: The first retailer makes it on the stage. Betsy Poirer, director of Digital Channels and Partnerships at Toys R Us, which is uploading its inventory onto eBay’s site in order to drive traffic to its stores.

Poirer said it has 800 plus stores in the U.S. and only one Web site, and that they are constantly looking for ways to reduce friction, so that it is easier for customers to come back.

In this case, she said it was really easy to use eBay, Milo, Red Laser, GSI because it is under one retailer.

10:23 am: Katie Mitic of Facebook finally makes it on stage to show what social commerce looks like. Mitic has just joined eBay’s board of directors.

Mitic is talking about the trials and tribulations of finding the perfect gift for her husband, but that her best gifts have been ones that have been recommended to her by a friend.

She said in the first wave of Internet adoption, people knew what they were looking for, like movie times, but that it was largely an unsatisfying experience.

“It’s not a surprise that the second phase of the Internet is different. Over 800 million people on Facebook are their real selves … You come to Facebook to learn about your friends.”

10:28 am: She said think about the last time you bought a car. You’ve researched it, and you’ve made the decision, but as soon as you post it on Facebook, someone said, accusingly, “You aren’t going to buy that loser car, are you?”

Your friends are driving real results.

Once American Eagle Outfitters added a like button to all of its items, customers who were referred to the store by a friend bought 57 percent more on average than someone who was not referred.

Mitic is now explaining Facebook’s new open graph, which means people don’t just have to like something, they can “read” a book, “listen” to music, “review” a product and recommend.

10:33 am: Mitic said that Magento developers will be able to use the Open Graph into their applications. They will also be coming to GSI developers, as well.

That means, even the small mom-and-pop store will be able to have their products show up on Facebook.

That’s it for Mitic.

The partnership between Facebook and eBay is pretty simple, and there doesn’t seem to be anything deeper with PayPal.

That’s it for eBay. It’s over. The short story is: eBay is also a tech company, not just a retailer.

Now we have another entrant called Birst, which today will announce what it calls a Business Intelligence appliance. No, it’s not hardware — that’s what I thought, too . It’s actually software that you install locally on your own on-premise servers. And yet it’s still a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. How does that work?

Having already become a player in the basic cloud-based BI business, the company realized that most of the data that makes BI valuable in the first place doesn’t live in the cloud but actually is used with applications that run behind the firewall.

I talked with Birst co-CEO Brad Peters, who told me that the software runs like a SaaS product — you access it through a browser, just like you would any other typical SaaS product, and you get the same benefits, including zero worries about upgrading or adding new features. But you also get the benefit of having it run on-premise behind the firewall. “It’s the exact same experience as with the cloud,” he says.

The whole point of BI, Peters says, is to take data created in various business applications — whether it’s SAP, Salesforce.com, Concur, Omniture, Siebel or what have you — into a dashboard, where it is arranged into a graphical presentation or report that you can then use to make business decisions.

The textbook case for BI is comparing data on marketing spend to deals. If you find you’re spending a lot of money on one type of marketing campaign that seems not to be generating leads and deals, and not enough on one that seems to be working better, you can see the pattern and make needed changes, Peters says. “What BI is really about is taking the raw data and synthesizing it so that business people can act on it,” rather than relying on spreadsheets.

Big companies like SAP and Oracle are in the BI business, too, but their solutions cost a lot of money and are therefore aimed more often than not at bigger companies. Yet Birst has its share of larger customers: Citrix Systems is a Birst customer, as is Rackspace, the Web and cloud services host.

So far, Birst has raised a combined $20 million in two rounds from Dag Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad. Peters said the company is keeping most of its funding details close to the vest — he wouldn’t say how much Birst’s most recent round was, for example — arguing that there’s been too much attention paid so far to BI start-ups and how much money they’ve raised. “Ultimately, a software company needs to make money, and BI is really hard,” he says. “You can waste a lot of money really easily. There’s been about $300 million raised by companies trying to do BI, so clearly the amount of money raised doesn’t correlate to success.” Those sounds like words to the wise.

The new start-up — still unnamed — will be built upon the foundation of a company he bought called Corda Technologies, but with a much bigger focus than Corda sought. So? Well, he’s been working on rolling out the firm’s new name.

Two weeks ago James announced a contest: Anyone who could guess the new name — based on a complex math problem — could win $10,000. Fun, right? It turned out that at least part of the solution — helpfully posted right in the comments section of this story — was a phone number in the 801 area code, which is in, you guessed it, Utah. Once that clue was posted, James said on his personal Web site that calls with guesses of the new name came in at a rate of hundreds an hour. You see, we here at AllThingsD get results, people.

Anyhow, an announcement of the name is due any day now, we hear reliably, and we’re guessing some lucky math major with the initials J.T. will get a check for 10 grand. But first? The company’s old name has to die. So what does its new CEO do? Kill the name. And film it for all the world to see. Get it? Enjoy the fun the video below.

When we last looked in on his efforts to fund this new venture, James had raised $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz, and had also gotten a commitment from Ron Conway’s SV Angel, both as part of a seed round worth more than $5 million. On top of that, he’s already pretty far along in raising a Series A round, and Benchmark Capital had already committed up to $30 million.

Remember also that though he had acquired Corda Technologies, a company based in Lindon, Utah, near his home, he said that company was to be the basis for the new one, only with a much bigger vision? The thing is, he hadn’t decided on what to name the new venture.

Well now, he’s apparently decided on the name, but he’s just not ready to tell the world yet. Instead he’s going to let you guess. And there are clues. He’s announced on his personal blog a contest to work out the name, and to guess it you have to figure out a mathematical equation. A $10,000 prize goes to the first one with the answer, as explained in the fine print from James’s personal site. Send your answers to info@corda.com.

The $10,000 prize for solving the math equation and puzzle will only be awarded to one person, as determined at our sole discretion. The recipient will be the first person who we determine has found the answer key, signed a non-disclosure agreement, and then finished the equation and puzzle and demonstrated proof of his or her solution after obtaining the key.

Think you’ve got the brains to do it? Well here it is, smarty pants. Get to it. Or maybe, just maybe, there are some clues you can find in James’s recent video interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Probably not, but it’s worth watching all the the same.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110613/omnitures-former-ceo-10000-says-you-cant-guess-my-new-companys-name/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110509/youtube-founders-buy-social-media-analytics-co-tap11/ http://allthingsd.com/20110509/youtube-founders-buy-social-media-analytics-co-tap11/#comments Mon, 09 May 2011 16:03:22 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=6475 YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have made another buy for their new “information discovery service” AVOS, which recently acquired Delicious from Yahoo. For an undisclosed price, they’ve picked up Tap11, a social media analytics company used by brands.

In a press release the purchase was explained as a means to help recommend content to Delicious users.

We plan to leverage our Volume™ algorithm to fully measure the impact of content consumed and shared across the social ecosystem,” said Braxton Woodham, Tap11′s CTO. “In combination with Delicious.com, we will be able to provide consumers and publishers with deep, relevant insights and recommendations.”

Tap11 emerged from Zannel, a mobile social networking start-up founded in 2006 that had focused on video early on. Throughout its various incarnations, the San Francisco-based company had raised $16 million from US Venture Partners, Palomar Ventures and Alloy Ventures.

Tap11 had eight employees as of March. AVOS said it is retaining Tap11 CEO Adam Zbar as head of business operations & strategy and CTO Woodham as head of engineering, but didn’t mention the others.

Here’s a video from a recent GigaOM conference where Woodham describes Tap11 as the “Omniture of the Real-time Web.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110509/youtube-founders-buy-social-media-analytics-co-tap11/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110427/exclusive-whats-former-omniture-ceo-josh-james-doing-since-leaving-adobe-raising-money/ http://allthingsd.com/20110427/exclusive-whats-former-omniture-ceo-josh-james-doing-since-leaving-adobe-raising-money/#comments Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:30:13 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=5486 It’s not unusual for founding CEOs to hang around only for a little while after their companies have been acquired. Even so, Josh James, the founder of the Web analytics powerhouse Omniture, seemed eager to hit the road faster than most. After Adobe Systems acquired Omniture for $1.8 billion in September of 2009, James resigned the following July.

What’s he been doing since then? Gearing up for another venture, I’m told. Some time last year, James, flush with the $80 million and change he made from Adobe as one of Omniture’s biggest shareholders, hit the eject button on his gig as an Adobe exec and acquired/bought out Corda Technologies, a business data dashboard start-up based in Lindon, Utah. Corda forms the basis of James’ new venture, but its vision is substantially bigger, I’m told.

Until recently, James has been bankrolling the venture out of his own pocket. But in recent weeks he’s been raising money for a seed round. And as seed rounds go, it’s unusually large. I don’t know a precise amount, but it’s somewhere north of $5 million and less than $8 million.

I’ve confirmed that Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital fund run by Netscape creator Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz, the former CEO of Opsware–the software company they sold to Hewlett-Packard–have ponied up about $1 million, betting that James can strike gold once again.

Corda specializes in pouring all types of company performance data into a dashboard for executives. It will have a new name, still undecided. In fact, the Corda Web site doesn’t even mention the fact that James has acquired it. Still, James has started assembling a team in Utah.

His acquisition of Corda and his an offer to hire a former Adobe employee caused a legal spat between James and Adobe, as reported by The Salt Lake Tribune. Adobe claimed that James violated non-compete agreements he signed when he left the company in buying Corda and hiring trying to hire away a former Adobe employee. The Utah case is over, ordered stayed by a judge, while a case that James and Corda brought in a Santa Clara County court in California against Adobe alleging unfair competition is still pending.

Update: Since I first published this story we’re learning more about who’s investing in this still-unnamed Josh James-helmed venture. A source familiar with the matter says that aside from the $5 million-plus seed-round, which should be announced officially within the next few weeks, James is already pretty far along in the process of raising a Series A round that will be announced later in the year. A source familiar with the situation says that Benchmark Capital–which has backed companies like Mint, the personal finance site acquired by Intuit last year, and others as varied as eBay, Instagram and Jamba Juice–has committed up to $30 million to the new company.

A Second Update:I’ve just confirmed that Ron Conway’s SV Angel is investing in the seed round.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110427/exclusive-whats-former-omniture-ceo-josh-james-doing-since-leaving-adobe-raising-money/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110311/adobes-omniture-may-build-acquire-or-partner-its-way-into-mobile-even-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20110311/adobes-omniture-may-build-acquire-or-partner-its-way-into-mobile-even-more/#comments Sat, 12 Mar 2011 02:20:22 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=3497 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110311/adobes-omniture-may-build-acquire-or-partner-its-way-into-mobile-even-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110309/adobes-omniture-group-unveils-tools-to-track-opinions-about-social-media/ http://allthingsd.com/20110309/adobes-omniture-group-unveils-tools-to-track-opinions-about-social-media/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:00:25 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=3399 While companies often feel the pressure to have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, mobile and other platforms, it’s hard to quantify why.

To that end, Adobe is unveiling new features today that will enable marketers to monitor, measure and monetize platforms, where consumers are having conversations about their products and brands.

As an example, Aseem Chandra, VP of Marketing for Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit, said the product will be able to alert a company to a spike in traffic on Twitter, and track down the original source.

What they might find out is that Justin Bieber, who has nearly eight million followers, tweeted about his favorite jeans, which was read and spread by thousands of others on Twitter or Facebook.

With that information, the tools could then enable a brand to make decisions on future celebrity partnerships, or more likely, on what keywords to buy on Google.

Chandra said one reason it has gotten so difficult to see where the traffic is originating from is that a ton of activity is also coming from mobile devices, including the proliferation of tablets. “How do you measure that, and where does it originate from? You want to be able to correlate those two and encourage the behavior,” he said.

The new SocialAnalytics features, which are apart of Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite, is expected to be unveiled this morning at Adobe’s Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City. The tools track more than 40 different social networks and gather positive, neutral or negative sentiments. A beta was introduced last year, and since then 75 customers have been using the platform. The product will be available more widely in the third quarter.

Chandra said the past year has shown them how important social media is to media, entertainment and e-commerce companies.

“Everything we do as consumers and professionals is informed by social. That’s going to stay regardless. The conversation we are having with CMOs is that they see that, and are asking us how do I make the important decisions around their business, marketing programs and campaigns? …There’s a lot of activity and it’s well deserved.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110309/adobes-omniture-group-unveils-tools-to-track-opinions-about-social-media/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/ http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:46:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27571 Tony Haile has a vision of the future, and it involves turning people like me into cyborgs.

And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It’s part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics start-up: He says that very soon “content producers” like yours truly are going to be faced with the choice of becoming robots–that is, replaced with algorithms and machines–or sticking around and injecting ourselves with big helpings of technology and data.

Chartbeat is supposed to help people like me with the cyborg route, by providing real-time information about the way the stuff I make performs on the Web: How many people are looking at a given story, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, etc.

Until now, most of Chartbeat’s 3,000 customers have handed that information over to managers and editors. But now Haile is rolling out Newsbeat, a tweaked version of the service that’s supposed to be delivered directly to rank-and-file stuff-makers like me. He’s been working with Web publishers like Gawker Media, Fast Company and Time Warner’s Time Inc. to get the rollout ready.

I’m not entirely opposed to my coming transformation, by the way: Unlike some of my peers–and these tend to be older peers–I like the idea of knowing more about the way people consume the stuff I make.

And it’s inevitable, anyway. On the Web, it’s impossible not to be exposed to performance data. The only question is what kind of data, and how much.

But still. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with all of this data. The version of Chartbeat that All Things D already uses gives me plenty of personalized information about my stories, and it’s narcotizing to sit around and watch my numbers flick up and down all day.

And if I were running a very big Web site, like, say, the Wall Street Journal, which also uses Chartbeat (and, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), I could put some of that data to work. I could figure out which stories I might want to highlight on the homepage, and try to analyze why others aren’t performing as well as they could, etc.

But from my worm’s-eye view, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to make of my Chartbeat report. Chartbeat tells me that my scooplet this morning on Rock Band is doing well, which is gratifying. But I could also get that information, with a longer delay, via services like Adobe’s Omniture or Google Analytics.

And in any case, then what? That information can’t help me make more scoops, or more interesting stories. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I can I do a better job.

Haile disagrees, of course. So let’s let him make his own case in this interview, which we conducted in the semi-busy hallway outside his office yesterday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101007/adobsoft-nonsense-on-the-microsoft-adobe-rumor-in-any-case-itd-more-likely-be-goodobe/ http://allthingsd.com/20101007/adobsoft-nonsense-on-the-microsoft-adobe-rumor-in-any-case-itd-more-likely-be-goodobe/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:01:48 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=35123

Investment bankers and stock markets can calm down–Microsoft and Adobe are not in talks about an acquisition.

Spurred by a story in the New York Times that Microsoft was eyeing the software company for purchase, Adobe (ADBE) stock went wild today, up 11.5 percent to $28.69.

Except, according to numerous sources at both companies with whom I talked today, it’s “nonsense.”

Sure, it might be an interesting idea–kind of like AOL (AOL) and Yahoo (YHOO) merging–but that’s not the case at this point either.

Chalk this one up to blabby bankers and stock speculators–this might be a good rumor for regulators to look into.

Of course, as is typical, the execs at both companies talk a lot–you might have noticed that Adobe has a lot of software that is popular on the Windows operating system.

So, they had a meeting!

But it is kind of hard to do an acquisition when “Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, recently showed up with a small entourage of deputies at Adobe’s offices to hold a secret meeting with Adobe’s chief executive, Shantanu Narayen.”

Memo to the Times: When there is an acquisition afoot–in my experience–it’s all private airplanes and law offices and not a company HQ visit by the very loud and very noticeable Ballmer, the exact polar opposite of a shrinking violet.

In any case, it is not a big surprise at this point if longtime rivals like Adobe and Microsoft (MSFT)–which makes a competing video technology called Silverlight to Adobe’s Flash–talk about trying to stop the explosive growth of Apple, especially in the mobile space.

Microsoft is about to launch its Windows Phone 7, after many cloddish efforts in the arena have failed, and Adobe has been subject to a withering attack from Apple (AAPL) and its CEO Steve Jobs.

Jobs, in no uncertain terms, has dissed Flash relentlessly as a technology.

Others have not, such as Google (GOOG), which recently showed strong support for Adobe’s Flash in its recent launch of Google TV.

In fact, it is Google that is more mentioned in Silicon Valley as the logical acquirer of Adobe, if there were to be a sale.

Along with all its various assets, such as the Photoshop and Acrobat software that dominates online publishing, Adobe’s Omniture unit is one of the more powerful and popular analytics companies on the Web, which is right in Google’s wheelhouse.

Personally, that’s the one I would bet on, although that’s entirely me speaking.

Until that happens, here is a video interview of Jobs smacking around Adobe and Flash at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in June:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101007/adobsoft-nonsense-on-the-microsoft-adobe-rumor-in-any-case-itd-more-likely-be-goodobe/feed/ 13 http://allthingsd.com/20101007/report-microsoft-adobe-hold-secret-summit-on-apple-and-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20101007/report-microsoft-adobe-hold-secret-summit-on-apple-and-mobile/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:05:56 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=50373 So Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped by Adobe recently for a secret meeting with Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen, the New York Times reports. It lasted about an hour and covered a number of topics, among them how to better compete against Apple in the smartphone market and a possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft.

Given the meeting’s length, it’s hard to imagine the buyout talk extended much beyond a casual mention of the idea, though the two companies have held more in-depth discussions on the matter in the past. It’s far more plausible this was largely an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” chat, with Apple (AAPL) in the villain’s role, with some peripheral jawing about getting Flash running on Windows Phone 7.

But who knows, right? By purchasing Adobe (ADBE), Microsoft would gain a lot of IP and recent Adobe acquisition Omniture, whose Web traffic measurement software is that industry’s standard. And with nearly $37 billion in cash and short-term equivalents, Microsoft (MSFT) is certainly capable of writing the $15.5 billion check it would likely take to acquire the company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101007/report-microsoft-adobe-hold-secret-summit-on-apple-and-mobile/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100922/real-time-web-analytics-startup-chartbeat-tallies-up-more-investors/ http://allthingsd.com/20100922/real-time-web-analytics-startup-chartbeat-tallies-up-more-investors/#comments Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:16:11 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23727 Chartbeat, the real-time Web-publishing analytics service, has added a few more investors to its previously announced $3 million funding round. Joining Index Ventures et al are: Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, former Verisign CFO Dana Evan and Code Advisors, best known as Quincy Smith’s newish gig.

All three are interesting names to attach to the company: Mullenweg created one of the Web’s most popular publishing platforms; Evan used to sit on the board of Omniture, Chartbeat’s giant rival (which is now owned by Adobe); and this is only the second investment that Code has made in its brief life–it has also put money into Flipboard, the much-buzzed-about iPad publishing app.

Meanwhile, Chartbeat is gaining rapid acceptance at big Web publishers that also use Omniture and/or Google (GOOG) Analytics. We’ve got an account here at All Things Digital, and I can confess that I’ve sometimes spent way too much time watching people come and go on my site–the interface is intuitive and sort of addictive, and it’s kind of like pachinko, that oddly mesmerizing cousin of pinball.

But I’m also not sure what I’m supposed to do with the information that Chartbeat provides me–it’s great to see how many people are reading this particular story at a given moment, but so what? I’ve already written my story–there’s not much else I can do at this point, right?

And if I can’t do much with that information, what can publishers at much larger, sclerotic shops do with the data?

I posed those questions to Chartbeat General Manager Tony Haile, who was kind enough to sit down with me for a minute before heading off to Africa for his honeymoon:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100922/real-time-web-analytics-startup-chartbeat-tallies-up-more-investors/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time-2/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:26:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21228 Remember when Chatroulette was this crazy, sort-of-hard to explain phenomenon with explosive growth?

Right. That was months ago! And it may well have peaked since then.

But! It’s still drawing plenty of visitors. And if you want to watch people watching each other on the voyeur site, in real time, now you can. See this display from Chartbeat, the start-up Web analytics company that competes with the likes of Adobe’s (ADBE) Omniture and Google (GOOG) Analytics and that lets you track visits to a site as they’re happening.

Plenty of great nuggets here for anyone who wants to poke around (Hehheh. Hehheh. I said “poke.” Hehheh.). Like right now, for instance, there seems to be a large number of people from Texas who like the site. You can also peruse the dashboard to divine longer-term trends, like the fact that Chatroulette traffic seems to peak around 8 pm Eastern time.

Oh, and in case you were wondering–it’s safe for work.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Tech-Talch – Chatroulette
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:26:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21228 Remember when Chatroulette was this crazy, sort-of-hard to explain phenomenon with explosive growth?

Right. That was months ago! And it may well have peaked since then.

But! It’s still drawing plenty of visitors. And if you want to watch people watching each other on the voyeur site, in real time, now you can. See this display from Chartbeat, the start-up Web analytics company that competes with the likes of Adobe’s (ADBE) Omniture and Google (GOOG) Analytics and that lets you track visits to a site as they’re happening.

Plenty of great nuggets here for anyone who wants to poke around (Hehheh. Hehheh. I said “poke.” Hehheh.). Like right now, for instance, there seems to be a large number of people from Texas who like the site. You can also peruse the dashboard to divine longer-term trends, like the fact that Chatroulette traffic seems to peak around 8 pm Eastern time.

Oh, and in case you were wondering–it’s safe for work.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Tech-Talch – Chatroulette
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time/feed/ 0