Motally to deliver reliable mobile analytics

June 9, 2009 | Camille Ricketts

Existing techniques for measuring mobile traffic to Web sites are pretty awful.

Motally, provider of an analytics platform for mobile phones, has emerged from stealth with $1 million raised from BlueRun Ventures and well-known Silicon Valley angel Ron Conway. The company says it wants to establish analytics standards for the mobile space like those that Google, comScore and Nielsen use to measure web site traffic and data on the internet.

The San Francisco company is one of the first to offer a service that any site can use to gauge its presence and traffic no matter what carrier or device someone is using to browse the web. This has been a major challenge for other companies and ad networks attempting to offer the same — specifically identifying individual users who happen to be roaming, or who change operators. Recently, for example, a lot of web sites were registering heavy traffic from Canada. It turns out that Blackberry maker Research in Motion routes some of its traffic through Canadian servers. Motally claims to have solved this problem and others like it by using its own servers to measure mobile traffic. And with talent drawn from Yahoo Mobile, IBM, Novell, Oracle and Helio, it seems to be on the right track.

Before receiving the $1 million first round of funding, Motally had been bootstrapped. It plans to use the new money for product development and to grow its headcount in hopes of bringing in revenue by the third quarter of this year. The plan is to charge customers (the company says it has a few already) a fee for the service ranging up to $10,000 for a fully-featured enterprise system. Even so, it will probably need to raise additional funds if it wants to stay ahead of the game. Companies like Google, Omniture, AdMob and Bango are all piecing together similar offerings.

Here’s a screenshot of the Motally platform: