Filed under: Actionable Insights, Ad Network, Analytics, Data, Datarati | Tags: Mixrank
Y Combinator-incubated MixRank has raised $1.5 million from 500 Startups, Mark Cuban, IAB founder Rich LeFurgy, MediaTrust chairman Peter Bordes, Leadclick founder Robert Afshar, Adify co-founder Larry Braitman, Chart.io cofounder David Beyer, Tom McInerney, Matt Ocko, and Zachary Bogue. The startup’s technology analyzes millions of ads every day to automatically identify the most effective ad copy and traffic sources in any market.
MixRank, which launched in July, is a competitive intelligence research tool for display advertising that uses machine learning algorithms and predictive modeling to automatically identify the most effective ads and traffic sources.
Large-scale data gathering and analytics are quickly becoming a new frontier of competitive differentiation. While the moves of companies such as Amazon.com, Google, and Netflix grab the headlines in this space, other companies are quietly making progress.
In fact, companies in industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to retailing to telecommunications to insurance have begun moving forward with big data strategies in recent months.
Together, the activities of those companies illustrate novel strategic approaches to big data and shed light on the challenges CEOs and other senior executives face as they work to shatter the organizational inertia that can prevent big data initiatives from taking root.
From these experiences, we have distilled four principles that we hope will help CEOs and other corporate leaders as they try to seize the potential of big data.
More: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Seizing_the_potential_of_big_data_2870
Mintigo, a company that provides big-data analysis for customer acquisition, has $9 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital, Giza Venture Capital and other private investors.
Mintigo helps companies sift through data sets to find leads and potential customers. The startup’s Mintigo, customer targeting and acquisition solution is a custom engine that analyzes a company’s unique customer acquisition goals and then crawls the web, looking for prospects with high potential and receptiveness to the product offered.
Mintigo’s software analyzes a company’s existing customer base to find its distinct ‘Customer Code’ which the company compares to the DNA of a company. The startup can identify this profile and search the web to find other companies and customers that match it. The service crawls company websites, directories, boards, and social media networks including Facebook and LinkedIn to find the most qualified sales leads in a sea of unstructured Web data.
Mintigo is already working with businesses in the technology, mobile and insurance industries to improve their sales conversion rate. In one recent case study Mintigo was able to identify the correct contact (email and phone) in 90% of leads, 87% were new leads that were unavailable from other sources, and the leads produced a four times to eight times higher response and conversion rates in a direct email campaign.
Filed under: #mktgcloud, CRM, Data, Datarati, Datarati.TV, Marketing Cloud | Tags: Dreamforce, Salesforce
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Analytics, Data, Datarati, Social Media, Twitter | Tags: Analytics, Data, Twitter
How much traffic does your website receive from Twitter? Twitter Web Analytics, a new tool announced Tuesday, should help provide some clarity to website owners who rely on the information network for content distribution.
Twitter Web Analytics is intended to give website owners more data on the effectiveness of their Twitter integrations. It’s powered by BackType, the social analytics company that Twitter acquired in July.
Twitter Web Analytics, explains BackType founder and new Twitter platform staffer Christopher Golda, will help publishers and website owners understand three key things: How much of their content is being shared on Twitter, how much traffic Twitter is sending their way and how well Tweet Buttons are performing.
The tool is free and currently in beta. A small group of partners will gain access to Twitter Web Analytics this week, and Twitter will roll it out to all website owners in a few weeks. An API will also be released for developers.
More: http://mashable.com/2011/09/13/twitter-web-analtyics/
Locu, a data-focused startup founded by MIT graduates and computer science researchers, is closing a seed round of over $600,000 from East and West coast investors, including Factual founder Gil Elbaz, Google’s Bruno Bowden, Cloudera founder Jeff Hammerbacher, Hubspot’sDharmesh Shah, Twitter VP of Engineering Michael Abbott, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, MIT’s Ed Roberts, Jean Hammond, Matt Ocko and Mitch Roberts. Early stage investment fund Quotidian Ventures is also involved.
Locu plans to create the world’s largest real-time, structured repository of small business offerings data, such as restaurant menus, with the goal of helping better local search.
The seed round was for $623,000, to be exact. 60% came from East Coast investors (Boston, New York) with 40% from West Coast investors (San Francisco, Los Angeles). There were also a couple of other Boston-area investors involved and one other early stage fund, who did not want their name disclosed.
The startup’s founding team includes Rene Reinsberg, Marek Olszewski,Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos and Marc Piette, and is advised by Sep Kamvar, Professor of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford. The founders’ backgrounds include an impressive array of experience with Google, Cisco, IBM, Bloomberg, VMWare, Microsoft, Sun, McKinsey and Morgan Stanley.
The founding members originally came together at MIT, where they won last year’s MIT Linked Data Ventures competition, supervised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Since then, Locu has grown its engineering team, but is still actively looking to hire more people over the next few months.
The first product from Locu is the soon-to-launch MenuPlatform.com, which is designed to be a simple way for restaurant owners to keep their menu system up-to-date. The platform will include features like automatic import from any file format, integration with Facebook and other sites across the Web, a mobile application for on-the-fly, real-time editing, and, most importantly, fast and easy updating.
More: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/07/local-business-data-provider-locu-raises-seed-round
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Algorithms, Data, Datarati, Sydney Data Miners | Tags: Data Mining
Filed under: #mktgcloud, CRM, Data, Datarati, Marketing Automation, Revenue Performance Management (RPM) | Tags: CRM, Marketo
According to Fauscette, Marketo took a “completely fresh-from-the-start, ground-up approach” to marketing automation.
“They have a really good interface, really good user experience, and they built out a really deep set of functionality pretty quickly and have gotten good traction.” Although it’s a relatively new solution, Fauscette maintains that it is more “feature-rich than some of the major players in this market.”
Usability also establishes Marketo as the leader. “Marketo’s the hot darling in the space, as we see users gravitate to its user experience and ease of design,” Wang says.
http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=76485&PageNum=3
Faced with an increasing stream of data from the Web and other electronic sources, many companies are seeking managers who can make sense of the numbers through the growing practice of data analytics, also known as business intelligence. Finding qualified candidates has proven difficult, but business schools hope to fill the talent gap.
This fall several schools, including Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, are unveiling analytics electives, certificates and degree programs; other courses and programs were launched in the previous school year.
International Business Machines Corp., which has invested more than $14 billion buying analytics industry companies such as Coremetrics and Netezza Corp. since 2005, has teamed up with more than 200 schools, including Fordham, to develop analytics curriculum and training.
Full Story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903885604576486330882679982.html
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Data, Datarati, Marketing Automation, Visualisation | Tags: Data Visualisation, Infographic
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