July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cisco Systems announced on its blog today that it will acquire Denver-based BroadHop for an undisclosed sum. The technology will be used to shape mobile data traffic and will be folded into Cisco’s service provider networking group.

According to Cisco’s VP of Corporate Business Development, Hilton Romanski, global IP traffic is projected to increase threefold in the next five years. For this reason, the networking giant had its eye on BroadHop, a policy control and service management technology for carrier networks that has been around since 2003. BroadHop is deployed by more than 70 wireline and mobile carriers around the world.

BroadHop has an open policy platform, which is designed to make it easier for service providers to control and monetize any service, regardless of whether the network has new or legacy components. In a nutshell, the technology allows a carrier to develop service tiers based on bandwidth or application.

According to Romanski, the technology will benefit Cisco’s service providers, as users will be incentivized to purchase ”customized premium service packages,” such as on-demand streaming.

The BroadHop team will report to Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s software and applications group.

The networking giant acquired three companies last month — most recently, Cariden for $141 million in cash. In an interview with VentureBeat, Cisco’s cloud computing CTO Lew Tucker stressed that the company is always on the look-out for potential acquisition opportunities to bring innovation to its suite of products.

However, GigaOm’s Kevin Fitchard pointed out, Cisco is not the first to jump on board the policy bandwagon. Aging giant Citrix whisked away Bytemobile earlier this year.

After being announced about a month ago, analytics startup Chartbeat has finally begun to roll out its radically different user interface that prioritizes social traffic.

The move coincides with Chartbeat’s just-announced new funding round of $9.5 million led by DFJ and Saul Klein of Index Ventures. Chartbeat is raising money to help it hire aggressively and expand the product offering to compete better with Google Analytics.

As a Chartbeat lover who views the site a few times each hour, I’m always in the mood to go deeper with data to find out exactly where traffic is coming from. The site has prioritized social engagement and added new diagrams that help you better analyze traffic trends. On our site this morning, for example, “social” and “internal” traffic were beating out “search.”

“The big goal is to make everyone feel like a data scientist,” Lauryn Bennett, Chartbeat’s head of brand, told us. “We want to make sure the people on the front lines of these sites feel like they can … understand, react, and predict how to capitalize on their traffic.”

The user interface now features five tabs in the top-left corner of the screen: Overview, Content, Social, Traffic Sources, and Geo. This is how Chartbeat describes each tab:

• Overview: A “how I’m doing right now” summary view
• Content: Deep-diveable view into how users are engaging with your content
• Social: Collective view of all your mentions, likes, shares, tweets
• Traffic Sources: View where your traffic is coming from and going to
• Geo: See where in the world people are coming from

Overall, we really like what we’re seeing. With more information about the people visiting the site, the better we can take advantage of those patterns and know when to publish stories and which social networks could use work. My fellow VentureBeat writers Devindra Hardawar and Jolie O’Dell were enthusastic about the changes, with O’Dell even calling it “sexy.”

Charts photo: Dusit/Shutterstock

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Web traffic dropped significantly during this past Sunday’s Super Bowl football match between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, according to a Sandvine report published today. But with this year’s game bringing in a record 111.3 million viewers, the Sandvine’s findings aren’t entirely surprising.

Overall internet traffic during the game was 20 percent lower compared to an average Sunday evening, as shown in the graph embedded below. And in this case, the biggest loser of the night was Netflix and not the Patriots (unless you’re a Pats fan). Compared to the average Sunday evening traffic, the popular streaming video service saw a whopping 40 percent decrease in activity during the game (see graph below).

Alternately, the NBC Sports official website, which legally streamed the live event for the first time, saw a noticeable bump in visitor activity. Sandvine reports that the site accounted for 6.2 percent of all downstream internet network traffic at 9 p.m. ET. However, the legal Super Bowl live stream didn’t have much of an impact on the the television viewership, which is exactly what NBC Sports digital head Rick Cordella predicted prior to the game.

In addition to NBC Sports, social media networks saw a large surge in visitor activity during the game. Microblogging site Twitter was at the forefront of that surge — with the Super Bowl breaking a new traffic record for the highest non-anime-related tweets per second (TPS) metric.

Loser movie poster image from Sony Pictures: Netflix; Graphs: Better Broadband Blog

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google on Thursday finally launched real-time traffic tracking tools for its already-good Google Analytics service. On top of that, the company introduced premium Google Analytics accounts that offer more ways measure data.

For quite some time, Google Analytics has offered webmasters a free way to measure traffic of their sites 24 hours after the action occurs. But since real-time traffic startups like Chartbeat (a service we use) and Woopra came onto the scene, Google Analytics has looked slow in comparison. Thankfully, that’s remedied with these new stats tools, which include social media impact and campaign measurement.

The company said its real-time stats are only available in the newest version of Google Analytics, so you’ll have to click the “New Version” link in the top right corner to get started. After that, you can read real-time reports by going into the Dashboards tab.

Google used the Analytics spotlight to launch more feature-rich Premium accounts targeted at its largest customers. In the pilot phase, Google coordinated with the likes of Gucci, Travelocity and eHarmony to collect feedback.

Google lists the following new features for Premium accounts:

• Extra processing power – increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis – attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support – experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call – all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees – service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Google did not list the fee it charges for the Premium service, but it said the fee was annual for users in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

A video introduction to Google Analytics Premium can be viewed below:

Keynote Systems, a mobile and internet cloud monitoring service, said most news web sites held up pretty well. One major unnamed site got hit pretty hard with traffic. The site saw delays and sharp increases in response time due to a social media content item that didn’t “break” the page but delayed the loading of a particular region of the web site. By 7 am, the site removed that item from the page and the response times were back to normal, Keynote said.

The BBC site got hit pretty hard as did mobile carriers O2,  Vodaphone and T-Mobile. But none of the web sites monitored by Keynote saw outright failures.

Monitoring service Compuware Gomez also said that the BBC UK site and the BBC News site saw an eight-fold increase in response time during the wedding and post-wedding coverage, starting around 2 am Pacific time on Friday. Some users saw wait times of 30 seconds or more, while some pages wouldn’t load, especially for fresh photos of William, Kate and the crowds.

ITV saw a seven-fold increase in response time. Sky News saw a 3 to 4-fold increase in response time.

The Associated Press said that millions followed the live video streams on computers and left comments on social media sites. The royal family’s own web site broadcast the event live, as did YouTube. Clarence House, the prince’s official residence, offered live tweets.

Akamai Technologies, which handles 20 percent of the world’s web traffic, said page views peaked at 5.4 million a minute early Friday morning for 100 news portals that it serves. That was the sixth-largest amount of traffic ever, short of the 10.4 million record page views set on June 24 during the World Cup last year. The number was high considering most North Americans were asleep at the time.

Livestream — which delivered video to sites such as The Associated Press, UK Press Association, CBS and Entertainment Tonight — hit a peak of 300,000 concurrent live streams. Yahoo saw its largest live video traffic ever, up 21 percent from Michael Jackson’s live funeral broadcast.

Facebook said more than 6.8 million people commented on the wedding in the past day, with soccer star David Beckham’s arrival at the event creating a surge. YouTube saw 100 percent availability, according to web performance site AlertSite. The royal wedding site was available 74 percent of the time.

[graphic source: Keynote Systems Inc.]