Contrary to what it sounds like, Twitter’s acquisition of Bluefin Labs does not signal a desire by the social network to get into the fishing business. It is, however, stepping up its game when it comes to social TV analytics.

Twitter confirmed yesterday’s rumors of its Bluefin Labs purchase in a blog post detailing why the startup is an important addition to Twitter’s overall strategy. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Bluefin Labs provides data about Twitter users while they watch various programs on television as well as demographics that are similar to what Nielsen has traditionally supplied to media companies. Most of the user data is collected from what people include into their Twitter profiles as well as what people tweet out publicly using hashtags or mentions during a particular program.

“We believe that Bluefin’s data science capabilities and social TV expertise will help us create innovative new ad products and consumer experiences in the exciting intersection of Twitter and TV,” Twitter COO Ali Rowghani wrote in the post.

The purchase makes sense given Twitter’s push to become an essential part of the media industry, and Bluefin Labs will undoubtedly help Twitter create a new “social ratings system” in partnership with Nielsen.

Bluefin isn’t the only company Twitter works with to help gain a window into the media world. The company also has a contract with Austin-based Mass Relevance, a startup that focuses on managing a brand or TV program’s crazy feed of mentions rather than analytics.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce has added a wider array of services to its Marketing Cloud toolset, including Klout, Kred, Kanjoya, and PeekAnalytics, to help businesses not only listen to customers but also better understand them, the company announced Friday.

The company introduced Marketing Cloud back in September. It uses the power of Salesforce acquisitions Radian6 and Buddy Media to give marketers a massive social toolset. and companies like HP, Ford, and the National Football League are using it.

But now Marketing Cloud will get even better with a full ecosystem of services. Previously, it offered just four services, a la carte. Now it offers 20, and even the most basic package gives people “credits” to use on any of these services without paying extra for them.

“The goal is to not just get behind the ‘what’ and ‘where,’ but get to the ‘who,’” Rob Begg, VP Marketing for Marketing Cloud, told VentureBeat. “You can use these new social analytics providers to make sense of large data sets. It can provide intelligence, influence, and intent.”

The 20 services Salesforce now offers inside Marketing Cloud are:

• Bitext
• Calais
• Caterva
• Clarabridge Link
• EpiAnalytics
• Kanjoya
• Klout
• Kred
• LeadSift
• Lexalytics
• LinguaSys
• Lymbix
• Metavana
• OpenAmplify
• PeekAnalytics
• Rapleaf
• Solariat
• Soshio
• The SelfService Company
• Trendspottr

By using these services, you can boil down your data into things like who has influence and what demographic a customer belongs to. With those analytics in hand, it’s way more feasible to take action on your data.

The most basic version of Marketing Cloud offers “social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation, and measurement,” starts at $5,000 per month, and includes 1,000 partner credits. Extra block of 10,000 credits costs $100.

You can get more info on Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud in the video below.

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.

Jeff Tseng, chief executive of San Francisco-based Kontagent, said the company will use new funds to solidify its position as a leading analytics solution for social applications — such as analytics for games on Facebook. It will also use the money for research into product innovations and for an expansion into the mobile and web markets.

The money comes from Battery Ventures, Maverick Capital and Altos Ventures. Roger Lee, general partner at Battery Ventures, will join Kontagent’s board.

Kontagent will now invest more heavily in products and features that provide sophisticated data mining and predictive analytics, which help customers make better real-time business decisions.

Kontagent was founded in 2007. Its customers include Electronic Arts, Warner Bros., PopCap Games (now owned by EA), Ubisoft, Gaia, A&E and others. Kontagent tracks more than 1,000 social apps with 150 million monthly active users. It processes about 15,000 messages every second. Kontagent has 65 employees.

Rivals include Mixpanel and Kissmetrics, but Tseng says Kontagent’s biggest competition is in-house metrics systems.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Exact terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Google launched Google+ a few months ago, and while the new social network has attracted a fair amount of headlines, it still has a long way to go to catch up to Facebook and Twitter in size. One way the company will help Google+ grow is by deepening its feature set and depth of third-party apps. Adding a premium analytics service that companies and brands can use to track and monitor accounts would certainly be a step in the right direction.

SocialGrapple was founded a year ago by Y-Combinator-bred Andrey Petrov with the goal of giving Twitter users interactive charts and better data representation of Twitter statistics. The service lets you compare different kinds of followers, see changes in your follower count, among other analytics.

Petrov writes on the SocialGrapple homepage about the acquisition:

SocialGrapple started a year ago, and launched only a couple of months later as a social graph analytics service. It was an amazing learning experience and I am incredibly grateful to all the users who supported this venture. Much of what was built over the months came directly from your needs and requests, so I feel like we were all on this journey together.

Since the first launch, we also explored keyword tracking and branched out to other social networks, but this was only scratching the surface. I’m looking forward to taking these ideas to the next level and revealing metrics on an incredibly larger scale.

Thank you again for being a part of my journey. I strive to continue building tools that make the world more transparent and empowered, and I can’t imagine a better partner than Google.

Do you think SocialGrapple could help Google improve Google+ account tracking?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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 of order — to programs that track app usage. But the company’s analytics algorithms specialize in out-of-order processing, said Kontagent CEO Jeff Tseng.

“We can track how long they were in the application, if they started playing on Monday or if they came back and played on Tuesday,” he said. “As long as you’re dealing with out-of-order processing you can provide the same metrics.”

Kontagent’s gaming analytics tool updates its web-based dashboard with feedback on social game usage every 10 seconds. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company can pretty much pick up everything that happens with an app — from virtual good sales to when a player completes a level. It regularly processes 10,000 social events per second and is moving to tens of thousands a second.

Developers put Kontagent’s “tags” on events within an app to keep track of them. That’s useful for developers that want to find out if something is going wrong with an app, such as too few people clicking on a button for spending money. The dashboard can also reveal if the app has crashed.

Tseng said the real-time monitoring can significantly lower the risk associated with deploying new features or updates. That’s important because social app makers have to continuously monitor the behavior of users and tweak their app ever so slightly to make sure users stay engaged and spend money.

Kontagent said it tripled its head count in 2010 but is hiring at an even faster pace now. The company recently announced that its analytics is now tracking 100 million users via the customers who subscribe to its analytics platform. The company has raised more than $6 million from Altos Ventures, Maverick Capital, The Facebook Fund, Extreme Venture Partners, The Hit Forge, and many angels. Kontagent was founded in 2007.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Mountain View, Calif.-based Claritics calls its work “social intelligence.” Claritics has been testing its cloud-based analytics with partners that range from game companies to utilities and media companies. It’s all about getting enough data and organizing it in a way that it becomes “actionable.”

The company recently raised $1.5 million from Cervin Ventures and TiE Angels. Raj Pai is the chief executive. The company will use the money to expand its sales and marketing and to improve its product.

The company’s analytics are designed to allow developers to optimize their reach, retain users, and launch revenue campaigns on the fly, all based on user behavior. The data become useful not just for looking back but for predicting the future, Pai said. The company offers metrics and other data on a real-time basis.

Rivals include Kontagent, Kissmetrics and Mixpanel in games as well as Omniture and Webtrends in the broader analytics business. Claritics hopes to reach beyond social game companies to the broader market of social commerce, said Neeraj Gupta, managing director of Cervin Ventures. He said that companies have to harness the incredible amount of data available and make immediate changes to their content or marketing campaigns.

Claritics’ platform has been in private beta testing with a number of media, Facebook app, and game companies — including Grab Games, ChaYoWo Games and Hallmark’s Social Calendar. The company was founded in 2010 and has 10 to 15 employees. Claritics offers its analytics as a software-as-a-service platform targeted at marketers, app developers and game designers. Under the Claritics Social Intelligence beta program, developers can analyze up to 100,000 users free of charge.

An example of Claritics’ value is that it lets developers segment their users into small groups, or cohorts, and analyze the behavior related to movement, game sessions, viral activity and monetization. Eric Pei, co-founder of Facebook game maker Galatea Systems, said the Claritics suite has been valuable in helping the company get the most out of its analytics information.

That’s why social-analytics firm Kontagent is stepping up today with its real-time social app monitoring system. Kontagent president Albert Lai says that for the first time, social app developers can get real-time insights into the behavior of users. Kontagent’s new tool can update its feedback on application usage every 10 seconds. This development will give the makers of the world’s most popular social apps more fine-grained control over their relationships with customers.

San Francisco-based Kontagent can pretty much pick up everything that happens with an app. It regularly processes 10,000 social events per second and is moving to tens of thousands a second. To put this in context, the highest number of messages sent per second on Twitter is less than 7,000.

Developers put Kontagent’s social tags inside their apps so that data can be collected. They can then look at a dashboard that shows all of the relevant metrics that a developer needs to watch. That’s especially important for finding out if something is going wrong with an app, such as too few people clicking on a button for spending money. The dashboard can also reveal if the app has crashed.

Kontagent says the real-time monitoring can significantly lower the risk associated with deploying new features or updates. That’s important because social app makers have to continuously monitor the behavior of users and tweak their app ever so slightly to make sure users stay engaged and spend money.

“As an agile social gaming company, we need to release multiple times a week, and sometimes even multiple times a day, but we have game experiences and third-party integrations, that while critical, can be quite fragile,” said Ali Nazer, co-founder of Lionside, a social game company that recently launched NBA Legends, the first NBA licensed game on Facebook. Nazer said the Kontagent real-time monitoring is just what his company needs.

Kontagent said it has tripled its head count in 2010 but is still hiring at a faster pace now. The company recently announced that its analytics is now tracking 100 million users via the customers who subscribe to its analytics platform.

Kontagent has raised more than $6 million from Altos Ventures, Maverick Capital, The Facebook Fund, Extreme Venture Partners, The Hit Forge, and many angels. Kontagent was founded in 2007.

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