Pattern Finder

Sorry, Not Everything is Public Domain

Boy, I sure piqued some interest with my Tuesday post, where I noted that I could think of a workaround to the NetRatings patents.  I got a number of e-mails -- from both the vendor and analyst camps -- asking me what I was thinking of.

Sorry, but my clients get the first crack, not the public at large.  Also, what I have in mind is not a clean replacement, but a workaround -- a bit of a kluge that's not as functional as what people have in place at the moment, but at least would get NetRatings off of a vendor's back.

So hold off the e-mails -- but think outside the box.  I can't imagine my idea is the only alternative.  If enough people think up other ways of tracking online behavior, NetRatings will ultimately find it holds patents no one wants.

The NetRatings Patent Party Continues

Although it only posted the press release today, a week ago Nielsen//NetRatings announced that it had also sued SageMetrics, Sane Solutions, Visual Sciences for patent infringement, as Eric Peterson noted in his blog.  This follows suing Coremetrics and Omniture on May 19th.

My guess is that the second group refused to pay royalties to Nielsen//NetRatings even after their larger competitors were sued, so NetRatings did the, "Have a nice day" routine.  Given that NetRatings has talked to ten companies, the others are either paying up or bracing for suit round number three.

The patents in question are 5,675,510 (Computer use meter and analyzer); 5,796,952 (Method and apparatus for tracking client interaction with a network resource and creating client profiles and resource database); 6,108,637 (Content display monitor); 6,115,680 (Computer use meter and analyzer); 6,138,155 (Method and apparatus for tracking client interaction with a network resource and creating client profiles and resource database); 6,643,696 (Method and apparatus for tracking client interaction with a network resource and creating client profiles and resource database); and 6,763,386 (Method and apparatus for tracking client interaction with a network resource downloaded from a server).

The patents are nice and broad, but interestingly also point to a lot of prior art.  (A general rule of thumb is the more prior art you cite, the stronger the patent because you've done your homework.)  Although Eric believes that these suits will lead to faster consolidation in the Web analytics space, I don't think it will be that strong a driver.  While I think consolidation will continue -- after all, I pointed out a year ago that the major Web analytics vendors had reached feature parity, so consolidation was the next step -- this patent war is not a slam dunk on NetRatings part.

There are a number of ways to deal with a patent argument:  pay a royalty, fight in court, or code around it.  From my quick reading of the patents, I for one can think of a workaround that would nicely avoid all of NetRatings claims....

New CEO at Poindexter Systems; Revisionist History

Nil Shah has joined Poindexter Systems as CEO.  In his bio in the Management Team section of the Web site, there's a bit of revisionist history -- or more specifically, artfully telling only some of the story.  It notes he was previously CEO at Interelate, an analytics ASP.  It says, "Under Nil's leadership, the company expanded rapidly and positioned itself for future growth."  The longer story is that Nil was brought in as an interim CEO in January 2002, replacing company founder Wade Myers after 17% of the company had been laid off.  (Of course, assuming that Nil brought the company back to its previous staffing levels, PR speak would probably characterize it as "rapid expansion.")

Larry Jones eventually took over the CEO spot in January 2003.  The company continued to struggle during the dot.bomb era, and Interelate was eventually purchased by eLoyalty for the paltry sum of $4.9 million in June 2004.  Twenty-eight employees joined eLoyalty, a significant drop from the 100 or so employees the company had in 2001.  (I say paltry because it had received $75 million in VC funding over the years.)

I met Wade when he was starting Interelate and I was an analyst at Aberdeen Group.  In fact, I spent a day at the company, meeting with management and talking to employees in its halcyon days.  So my ears have always perked up when I've heard Interelate mentioned.  Although VCs and the market viewed Interelate's prospects as bright at the height of the dot.com era, the ultimate story isn't as positive as the Poindexter bio makes it out to be.

The Musical Chairs Acquisition Party

It's been a busy week in terms of M&A.  Between June 14th and June 21st, six companies announced acquisitions:

1. Watchfire acquired COAST Software
2. Aprimo bought DoubleClick's Enterprise Marketing Business Solutions Unit
3. I/PRO announced it had purchased Accrue's technology
4. Oracle bought TripleHop Technologies
5. Stellent acquired e-Onehundred Group
6. Hummingbird agreed to buy RedDot Solutions

So what does all this mean?  It splits into three categories.  The first category is called, "one man's trash is another man's treasure."  Transactions two and three fall into that group.  DoubleClick wants to get back to online marketing, so it sold SmartPath and Ensemble to Aprimo, a company in the MRM (Marketing Resource Management) space.  Accrue (eventually named Datanautics) was a Web analytics powerhouse in 2000, but the dot.bomb debacle decimated its installed base.  Left with only its technology, Accrue sold that to I/PRO, which plans to use it to help media buyers optimize their buys.

The second category is called, "working your way upstream in the ecosystem."  Oracle has decided to get into the Enterprise Content Management space, and so bought TripleHop, a search supplier.  Stellent, seeing the big boys such as Oracle and IBM horn in on its content management space, is going more vertical -- the e-Onehundred Group offers compliance solutions.  Meanwhile, Watchfire also got into the compliance act by purchasing COAST Software.  To recap, with the infrastructure providers going after horizontal platforms, the platform companies are scrambling to offer applications.

The third and remaining category is, "solidifying your position."  Hummingbird, a content vendor in the broadest sense -- it offers ETL for structured data and has the PC DOCS technology for managing documents -- acquired RedDot Solutions, a content management provider that had been a partner for some time.

So, different strokes for different folks.  But more activity than has been seen for a long time. 

 

Web Analytics for Giveaway Disks

The New Zealand Herald recently published a story about a company called Media Technology that monitors what content people look at on giveaway disks.  To give it some zing, the June 10th article by Owen Hembry sports the headline, "Company Accused of Covert Data Gathering," but as the company's marketing manager points out, people have been doing this on the Web for years.

Vendors contract with Media Technology to put their collateral on disk; when the user puts the CD in their computer, the CD calls home and tell Media Technology which pages and at what time they were viewed.  If you aren't connected to the Internet, the disk asks if it can send the monitoring information; if you are already connected, it doesn't ask and sends the info.  Because the technology doesn't collect any personal information, privacy advocates are reduced to sputtering, "If it's not [illegal], it damn well ought to be."

I think the software should notify the user that it's going to send the data and let users opt out if they wish to, but other than that, folks should get used to the real world.

Monitoring is going to be/is already everywhere (Web sites, blogs, IM, e-mail, PDAs, Tivo, etc.).  In my discussion with Allan Kaplan (CEO/President) and Chris Butler (CTO/COO) of I/PRO yesterday, it was clear that they see this monitoring ubiquity coming and are going to capitalize on it.

As Marshall McLuhan pointed out decades ago, we are headed for the Global Village.  Three hundred years ago, when virtually everyone lived in a village, everyone else knew what everyone else did.  Cities brought some anonymity for several hundred years, but the pendulum is swinging back again.

New CEO at Intelligent Results

Intelligent Results, a text mining company, today announced that it had appointed a new CEO, John Moscicki.  Kelly Pennock, a co-founder who had been both CEO and President, will remain as President.

Moscicki previously worked at consulting firms (always good when trying to get Partners at consulting firms to pitch your product) and had been VP of Product Development and Marketing at ADP.  This isn't the only management change at Intelligent Results.  At the end of May, Tom Croswell, VP of Product Engineering, vanished from the Management Team page.  At the time, I sent an e-mail to Trevor Rubel, the VP of Marketing, querying him about the change, but didn't get a reply.

Intelligent Results is one of those companies that's improving the results of data mining by adding text information to the analyzed data.  I'm a fan of the technology (witness my DMReview.com column in September 2004 entitled, "Duo-Mining: Combining Data and Text Mining," but it seems to be taking awhile for companies to adopt it.  I think enterprises just don't know what's possible now -- and the technology is only going to get better.  As (1) more and more companies recognize that e-mail (with customers and partners) is a gold mine of information and (2) voice-to-text translation improves, text mining technology will stop being optional and become standard.

The Groxis View

I had a briefing with Adreanne Radonich, the Operations Manager at Groxis this morning.  Since what we talked about is under embargo until next week, I'll limit myself to talking about what they've already admitted to on their Web site: a browser-based version of myGrokker.

myGrokker is one of those search tools that is often misunderstood. People look at it and figure that it's eye candy.  It creates a dynamic bubble map of content based on common concepts; you click on one of the bubbles and you go down a layer.  When you get to a square you're finally at a document.  The size of the bubble tells you how much content is grouped within that concept.

Button-down accounting types muse, "Why do I need to have people twirling around in their search results?"  Well, the reason is that you aren't searching so much as you are learning or researching.  You aren't searching to act -- you're searching to learn.

Something like myGrokker is great when you're trying to learn a new area.  The concepts and how they're connected to each other are new to you -- in short, you're trying to learn the discipline's taxonomy.  Looking at such a visualization helps you figure out what's connected to what.  You're getting the lay of the land, to keep piling on the metaphors.

It's areas like this that Google is pretty lousy at:  a long list is way too democratic.  Vivisimo makes a big deal about its clustering of results, but I still think visualization, with its size and color cues, is even better.  To Groxis' credit, it realizes that it's not the great savior of search.  But it can serve as a productive front end for folks trying to get the lay of the knowledge land.

I think a great application would be looking at the concept/news landscape in blogs.  That's a topography that changes by the day.  I think PR folks would gladly pay money for that application.

Oracle Acquires TripleHop

Oracle announced today that it had acquired the assets of TripleHop Technologies, an enterprise search vendor.

It will be interesting to see how the technology surfaces within Oracle's efforts to attack the content management market.  In the BI space, the history has been that Oracle snaps up great or good technology and then it drops out of sight.  Let's hope there's a TripleHop champion at Oracle that will keep it from vanishing beneath the waves.

Konfabulator

For the past month or so I've been running Konfabulator, software written by a company named Pixoria.  It's a widget platform:  you install it, and then you can run mini-applications anywhere on the screen that monitor CPU usage, tell the time, display weather information, etc.

It's seductive software -- you don't really need it, but once you install it you get used to it.  I like having my laptop chime on the hour (brings back memories of the clock chiming at college), tell me the outside temperature, and display a small calendar.  My wife prefers having the TV schedule on her laptop screen.

You run the applications on your desktop.  But you can run them on a second desktop as well.  Via the feature called Konspose, you press F8 and a screen appears with other widgets on it.  You press F8 again, and they disappear.  So I run the current weather, a calendar, and a clock on my current desktop, and a CPU monitor, a battery monitor, a wireless monitor, a TV schedule, the top BBC stories, and the five-day weather forecast on my second desktop.  That way, by pressing one function key, I can access the additional information I want without cluttering up my desktop.

Not for everyone's taste, but perhaps worth a look.

It's Official: I/PRO Bought Datanautics

Two weeks after I noted that I/PRO had purchased Datanautics, the two companies finally made it official in a press release.

The press release is interesting in several ways.  First, it's entitled, "I/PRO Corporation Acquires Accrue Software Technology" -- it refers to the company's initial name (Accrue), not the name it has used for the past 20 months (Datanautics).  Admittedly, probably not a bad idea, as folks in the know have heard of Accrue, while the Datanautics name never caught on.  (I've been asked a lot over the past several years, "What ever happened to Accrue?".) 

Second, proofreading is apparently not I/PRO's strong suit.  The major link to the press release (on the home page under "Recent News") incorrectly points to a July 6, 2004 press release.  And if you are able to discover the I/PRO press release (go in via "News" at the top), the following paragraph occurs twice (at least through 5:00 PM ET on June 15).

The Accrue technology takes its place among I/PRO's other recent innovations in Internet audience measurement which include the Audience Profile and Business Demographic reports delivered in partnership with MRI, the Behavioral Audit delivered in partnership with 24/7 Real Media, and the I/PRO Agencies for Interactive Audits program.

Finally, the press release names Macys.com as a customer, but Macy's is running Coremetrics code (per the HTML source).  While Macy's can certainly run both (Accrue uses a network sniffer to collect Web traffic data, rather than browser tags), most companies can't afford the luxury of paying for two clickstream analysis solutions -- except for a several month overlap period when they're migrating.  (Lands' End exhibited the same dual-mode behavior when it migrated from Accrue to Coremetrics.)

Accrue being a shadow of its former self and being acquired for a second time saddens me a bit, as I've been a fan of the Accrue technology for a long time.  Back when NetGenesis was growing its business by marketing, Accrue was growing its revenue by doing heavy technological lifting.  It looks as if the Accrue technology will be absorbed into I/PRO's holistic vision; it will not be front and center any more.  Still, I suppose there are worse fates in the quickly moving technological world.

The Aficionados are a Force

An article in The New York Times today, "On Board the Message Board," made a very interesting point -- namely, that online communities are a force to be reckoned with.  The article describes Continental Airlines hosting a gathering for members of FlyerTalk.com, a travel Web site with message boards.  Members discuss among themselves travel likes and dislikes, travel hints, the intricacies of Frequent Flyer programs, etc.

Apparently, Dean Burri, a FlyerTalk member, and Lawrence Kellner, Continental Airline's CEO, linked up via e-mail, and eventually got to talking about the power of sites such as FlyerTalk.  Burri claimed they're a view into the collective mind of an important constituency; Kellner countered that it was just a small group (and hence implying not worth worrying about).  Kellner claimed the site had maybe 60 Continental flyers; Burri said more.  So they agreed that if more than 60 site members would make their way to Houston, TX (paying their own airfare and lodging), Continental would throw a bash which would include an airport tour, a dinner, and a meeting with Kellner.

Kellner lost: 274 people turned up.

This debate is raging with corporate walls today -- but is rarely settled in such a definitive fashion.  Online communities -- whether supported via blogs or sites with message boards -- are becoming a powerful force.  They are not populated by nuts, but by aficionados who are the most discerning -- and demanding -- customers that a company can get.  Listen to them -- it's better and cheaper than a focus group.

Firefox Usage = Techie Quotient

On May 10, WebSideStory announced that Mozilla Firefox's share of the Web browser market was nearing 7%.  However, this is the least common denominator story.  There's a much larger one lurking here.

It struck me recently as I sat through a vendor presentation and realized that they were running Firefox -- as had the previous vendor, and the vendor before them....  All of a sudden, the 7% number seemed real low.  So I did a quick check of the Web analytics results for the three sites I run:  (1) my college class (www.williams75.org), (2) my Ballardvale Research site (www.ballardvale.com), and (3) this blog.

The browser share stats were real interesting.  The Williams '75 site is visited by my college classmates.  As a general rule, they are hesitant about techie things (I got an e-mail last week from a classmate asking how to print out a page on the site), and Firefox's share on that site is 0, zippo, nada.  The Ballardvale Research site appeals to tech-savvy managers and users -- the Firefox share there is 17%.  Ballardvale Blog, frequented by super-techies, has a Firefox share of 36%.

So the Firefox share is a proxy for the techie quotient.  This finding has far reaching consequences.  If you're a tech-centric site and are not testing how your site behaves when viewed via Firefox, you are making a big mistake.