Google killing off Picnik, Urchin, and other services this year
Looks like the picnic is officially over. Google announced today on its blog that it will be retiring the picnic-themed photo editing service Picnik in April of this year.
The news comes about a week after Flickr announced it will be dumping Picnik, which now seems like foreshadowing of the news that was released today.
If you use Picnik for your editing needs, you can download your images as a zip file with Picnik Takeout … Continue Reading
Kontagent raises $12M to expand social analytics into mobile
Kontagent said today it has raised $12 million in a second round of funding to expand its social analytics business into mobile markets.
Kontagent is one of the “big data” companies that takes an enormous amount of data generated by social games and interprets that data into useful information for social app makers. Those customers can use the data to tweak their applications so they engage users more deeply and make more money from them.… Continue Reading
Google+ adds a boatload of new toys for the visually oriented
Google released of a slew of new social features this morning for its Google+ social network that incorporate strong, fun visual elements.
You can now use Google+ to see popular posts, watch crazy visualizations of post analytics and edit your photos.
The company even threw in some fun Halloween-themed photo-editing tricks. It’s (almost) enough to make me want to sign back up.
“We’re always working on making the product better every day,” a Google spokesperson … Continue Reading
Enkata raises another $4.4M to improve cloud-based workforce and customer service tools
Customer and workforce analytics software company Enkata on Monday announced it has raised a new $4.4 million funding round, with goals of expanding the company and continuing to help improve customer service tools.
“We’re repurposing the industrial engineering techniques from the 1950s and ’60s and applying them to the service industry,” Enkata CEO David Stamm told VentureBeat.
Enkata provides wide-ranging cloud-based software to several Fortune 500 countries to them improve call center management and customer … Continue Reading
Demo: SocialBakers serves up piping hot social media analytics
For those working in the social media world, analytics service SocialBakers just may make your life easier.
The site not only lets brands, agencies and media companies track their references on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it also helps them to track their engagement with social media, as well as that of their competitors. The company showed off the service on stage today at the Demo Fall 2011 conference in Silicon Valley.
“Social … Continue Reading
Twitter unveils web traffic analytics
Twitter today unveiled a web analytics service that keeps track of how much traffic Twitter is delivering to a site.
The service also shows how many page views a website generates for each Tweet. That includes re-Tweets and replies on the site. The service also keeps track of where the Tweets came from — whether they were custom-made or published through the Tweet button that sites embed on their pages. Twitter’s web analytics also has … Continue Reading
Demo: BringShare combines your marketing analytics tools in one place
Cloud marketing startup BringShare launched the public beta of its data service on Tuesday at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference.
BringShare’s purpose is to make marketers’ lives easier when it comes to managing their data and making their workflow faster and more cost-effective when it comes to measuring online marketing efforts.
BringShare CEO and co-founder Justin Spring (pictured) claims that marketing professionals spend five to 10 hours a week aggregating and analyzing data related to … Continue Reading
Swrve raises $2.7M for real-time gamer feedback
In-game advertising is an untargeted mess, and one startup, Swrve, aims to fix it.
Google knows exactly when to hit you with an ad because it has mastered the art of target marketing. Game companies, on the other hand, might very well send you an ad for a shooting game even if all you play is a puzzle game.
Swrve hopes to change that. The San Francisco company is announcing today that it has raised … Continue Reading
What’s more trustworthy: DoubleClick’s AdPlanner or comScore?
A handful of articles this morning argued against the validity of a recently released DoubleClick AdPlanner report showing Facebook reached a trillion page views in June. Both CNN and TG Daily cite contrary data obtained by digital measurement firm comScore, which claims Facebook only reached 467 billion page views that month.
The reason for the large discrepancy has to do with the different measurement methods used by comScore and Google-owned DoubleClick.
The DoubleClick AdPlanner measures … Continue Reading
Claritics expands into mobile analytics for Android apps
Social analytics firm Claritics said today it has launched a new analytics platform for games and apps on Android mobile devices.
Back in May, Claritics raised a $1.5 million round as it talked about helping social game and app developers analyze their data and reap more money from their efforts. Now the company is extending that effort to mobile apps on Google’s mobile operating system.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Claritics calls its work “social intelligence.” Claritics … Continue Reading
Medio will help Angry Birds maker find even more users with predictive analytics (exclusive)
It may seem like everyone on the planet has played Angry Birds, but Rovio‘s mobile game has been downloaded only 300 million times, and the company wants to hit more than a billion users. To that end, Rovio is teaming up today with Medio Systems to take advantage of its predictive analytics service.
The deal isn’t a gigantic one, but it tells you what successful game companies are doing in terms of data mining to … Continue Reading
Business intelligence provider GoodData raises $15M
GoodData, a provider of online business intelligence software, announced today that it has raised $15 million in its second round of funding.
The company runs an online business intelligence service that tracks data from a number of sources — such as customer acquisition or customer relationship management software providers like Salesforce.com — and wraps it up in a neat, easy-to-digest package. It then gives business owners a number of analytics tools for that data, like … Continue Reading
iQU launches marketing and analytics service for online games
Gamer-profiling company iQU is launching an analytics and marketing platform to help online games find more users through mobile and social networks.
The Haarlem, Netherlands-based company was formerly known as MMOTraffic.com and MMO Life, but now it is expanding in the U.S. and rebranding itself as iQU (pronounced “eye-cue”). The company’s goal is to help online game publishers target the right potential customers with promotions and increase their income as a result. If it works, … Continue Reading
Chartbeat maker launches new traffic analytics for news sites
I already spend a good chunk of my time obsessively checking traffic analytics for VentureBeat through Chartbeat. It gives us a breakdown of where our readers are coming from and what stories are popular. Luckily there’s a least upper limit to my neuroticism, because Chartbeat only tracks the top stories on VentureBeat.
Not any more. The developers behind Chartbeat announced today that it is launching Newsbeat, a more in-depth traffic analytics tool geared toward news … Continue Reading
Sector analytics provider Quid nets $10M, Max Levchin joins as an advisor
Quid, a provider of analytics for specific job sectors, announced today that it has raised $10 million in its third round of funding and has added PayPal co-founder and Slide founder Max Levchin to its board of advisors.
“At PayPal, they were able to combine algorithms, visualization and people together to really understand core networks,” Quid co-founder Sean Gourley told VentureBeat. “For us to get that insight of how you use computers, algorithms and data … Continue Reading
Kontagent brings social gaming analytics to mobile devices (exclusive)
Social gaming analytics provider Kontagent is bringing its analytics tools to mobile apps, the company announced Wednesday.
It’s typically harder to collect data on a mobile device than online. Social games that deliver data to Kontagent’s existing analytics program are always connected to the Internet and delivering data, whereas mobile devices like iPhones and tablets are not. So data about events is not delivered as soon as they happen — and is frequently delivered out … Continue Reading
Twitter acquires BackType for improved analytics
Twitter has acquired social media analytics startup BackType, according to a blog post published by BackType today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed in the post.
BackType lets users aggregate and search comments across most blogging platforms and social sites. Its BackTweets product, which helps publishers understand the reach of their Tweets, is likely a big reason for Twitter’s interest in the company.
BackType will offer BackTweets to current users for free, but … Continue Reading
GamesBeat veteran speakers come back for more
Today we’re revealing the tenth group of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. This group is a set of veterans who have spoken at our past conferences and have meaningful updates for our event on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. We like when our past speakers show up again with more to say.
Our new speakers are Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah; Peter Farago, vice president of … Continue Reading
MixPanel’s User Streams tracks individual users in real-time
Y Combinator startup MixPanel debuted a new, free analytics tool today called User Streams that allows web publishers to track individuals browsing their site in real-time and group similar users into clusters.
The User Streams tool will be free to everyone and will complement MixPanel’s premium real-time analytics services that help companies understand how users interact with web applications.
With most real-time analytics tools you get information about tens of thousands of users all interacting … Continue Reading
Sequoia Capital bets on analytics with $25M Mu Sigma investment
Mu Sigma on Monday announced it has raised a $25 million third round from Sequoia Capital. Mu Sigma is a provider of data analytics services to more than 50 Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft and Dell.
Chicago-based Mu Sigma employs more than 1,200 analysts and uses them to crunch numbers and help corporate teams use data in various decision-making processes. The company has its main delivery center in Bangalore, India and describes itself as “arguably … Continue Reading
