Youseeble is a brand-new Internet tool that lets you see your website the way that your visitors see it. Is your most important content as visible as you think it is? For all you know, you may have put the best part of your website out of sight. Or, you might be cluttering the screen with too many distracting design elements.

It records the activity of each visitor to your website and generates three different “heat maps” that graphically display the aggregated visitor data. You see the manner in which people interact with your website design, which lets you see which important parts of your website are actually being ignored.

Youseeble does not replace your current analysis tools, but is rather an addition to your analytic toolbox. You’ll see if your design is pointing out your content in the way you want, and, if not, then you’ll see why it isn’t. And, from that data, you’ll be able to improve your website and point visitors directly to your targeted content.

The process to use Youseeble is simple — insert some short segments of HTML code into all your website’s pages, and Youseeble takes care of all the rest. User behavior is recorded, and graphic displays called “heat maps” are created with the results. You can even playback any of the recordings of visits to your website, and watch the actions of a real visitor, in a real visit.

Visitor recordings are all well and good, but you don’t have the time to watch every recording of every visitor. That’s why there are the three types of “heat maps”:
- The Interaction heat map shows what items visitors are noticing, and which are being ignored.
- The Attention heat map shows visitor cursor movement (which can be correlated with visitor attention).
- The Visibility heat map shows what visitors actually see, based on possible screen resolutions and browser window dimensions.

No plug-ins are required because Youseeble uses JavaScript and HTML to operate within your website’s code.
One limitation is that Youseeble works at its best for statically-generated websites, although the code can also handle some types of AJAX websites. Don’t worry about buying Youseeble, and then discovering it won’t work with your website — use the free option to test out Youseeable’s compatibility with your website.

Once Youseeble is coded within your website’s pages, you won’t have to look at your visitor numbers and guess why no one comes back. With Youseeble, you actually see the actions of your visitors on your site. You won’t believe the nuggets of information you’ll discover with Youseeble: screen resolutions you never planned on, screen contents tucked away in an out-of-the-way corner that you thought was highly visible, screen design that distracts visitors rather than making them focus on what you want them to see. You won’t get this information from the data collected by an ordinary analytic tool.

Youseeble is free to try, and requires only an e-mail address to associate with your account. Overall a great product,which allows you a quick & detailed analysis of your visitor moves.

While much of the mainstream press is focused on the recent scandals at
HP concerning their former CEO Mark Hurd, IBM has quietly purchased
enterprise marketing software company Unica for a reported $480M. This
follows IBM’s recent acquisition of Web analytics provider Coremetrics,
signaling Big Blue’s continued interest in consolidating and
strengthening their already solid position in the Web services sphere.
IBM’s immediate plans for Unica aren’t entirely clear at this point.
But the merger will allow the venerable technology firm the ability to
offer even more focused and effective marketing campaigns and services
to a variety of clients in all spheres of commerce.

Specifically, IBM is spending $21 per share to take control of Unica
and their high-profile list of marketing clients which includes names
like Best Buy, eBay and US Cellular. IBM hopes to use leverage Unica’s
resources and existing customer relationships to provide cutting-edge
CRM applications and services. The two companies have worked together
in the past, so the IBM brass are well aware of how effective Unica’s
software solutions can be. All in all, the merger makes sense for both
parties. Unica gets more than a fair price for the sale, and IBM gets
control of innovative software tools like Unica’s NetInsight, amongst
others.

IBM already boasts the impressive WebSphere Commerce platform, which
will only be strengthened by their recent acquisitions of Unica and
similar software concerns. In addition, IBM plans on shelling out over
$20 Billion by 2015 to snatch other software providers in the Web
Services industry. One concern voiced by many industry analysts,
however, is that IBM will lose out on the business of many smaller
companies who won’t be able to afford expensive marketing software from
the likes of Unica and their ilk. Lower-level firms will no doubt opt
for cheap or even free open-source marketing solutions.

Founded in 1992, Unica has since become the most recognized name in
marketing automation software for multinational corporations who rely
heavily on the web for raising revenue and brand awareness. With
headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, they maintain additional branch
offices in over half a dozen countries around the globe. Possibly the
most lucrative and forward-thinking segment of Unica’s business is
their Interactive Marketing OnDemand. Unica’s services allow businesses
the ability to hone their advertising efforts to specific segments of
their consumer base to obtain the maximum return on investment for
their efforts.

When it comes to providing the full range of Web Services, from Data
Center infrastructure and management to online marketing, IBM appears
to be well positioned to increase their already substantial market
share in the coming years. Their acquisition of other companies such as
Cast Iron Systems, a well-respected data integration provider, is part
of a complete long-term strategy of dominating what many see as the
future of E-commerce. Increasingly, the field of online business will
rely on accurate feedback and data analysis, as well as well-crafted
marketing campaigns aimed as specific niche demographics. Having access
to the expertise and knowledge of innovators like Unica can only help
IBM succeed in the cutthroat arena of online marketing.

If there was ever a service that could be considered evolutionary in the area of web design, Gazehawk is it. This is an awesome service site in which users are paid to view sites while the software tracks their gaze.

It rivals the software of many other sites that offer statistics and charts that cover how many customers have visited a site and how long they stayed on each page. Many companies offer such statistics and one of the most well known names on the web, Google, has one of the most popular.

The unique and most engaging concept for Gazehawk is that the software does not just rely only on computer generated reports to verify results. It involves software and a web cam which results in a greater level of reliability. This gives a more accurate statistical measure.

This new wave of technology, which is referred to as eye tracking, is offered by Gazehawk at lower prices than bigger companies that market technology similar to Gazehawk. This allows them to compete in the market and offer the software to much smaller companies that may not be able to afford the big ticket website monitoring technology that is available.

In addition to lower prices the Gazehawk services and software build extensive relationship in website monitoring that other software and technology simply cannot not duplicate. Many of the competitors for Gazehawk, for example, cannot show the extensive detail of how users interact with your site. Gazehawk however uses the webcam to bring forth an entirely new experience to view how customers view your website. There are colorized charts and a variety of results that not only show you how users use your site but also how you can improve your site.

This software plays an important part in the design for many websites today. There is a great need for companies that are unsure of whether the web design that is in place is in need of improvement. And there is no true way to know this without bringing forth some form of web monitoring via eyetracking into place.

With costs as low as $50 per user Gazehawk is the perfect solution for a problem that has plagued so many companies and their websites.

As rumors ran rampant just the day before, Sysomos heightened the mystery by refusing to make any comment. It has now been revealed that the rumors are true – Sysomos has been acquired by Marketwire for an estimated $35 million.

Statements were made forthwith by representatives of both companies.

Michael Nowlan, president and CEO of Marketwire said of the deal, “This is a critical step in our integrated communication solution strategy. To date we have been a leader in providing our clients with ways to reach out to their key audiences by innovating the publishing and distribution of news releases. The rapid changes in communications as a result of social media now make it imperative to immediately understand the impact of outbound messaging: what happens to it, what’s the reaction to it, and how is it used to evaluate and strategize future messages?”

President and co-founder of Sysomos stated, Nick Koudas’ statement hints that the deal couldn’t have been better. “There is a natural fit and synergy between Marketwire and Sysomos. Our common goal is a customer-centric approach in applying technology to meet the challenges of communicating in an ever-evolving environment,” Koudas said.
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I’ve been toying around with various social media analytics vendors over the past years and been finding a lot of these tools often not too useful. Even the expensive social media analytics tools and reputation management analyzers are not really as good as I expect them to be.

After heaving a brief discussion with Marshall Sponder, who is one of the most well-known social media analysts, I have to agree with him that a. organizations (too often) don’t care about numbers & b. in depth analysis takes enormous resources,which is something startups or medium sized companies cannot provide.

Regarding a. it’s unfortunate, but a lot of organizations are built around positive news. Nobody wants to hear the negative or even neutral findings, which often come out of a social media analytics report. Obviously this has to do with responsibilities, hierarchies and other company politics, which is probably material for a PHD thesis and not for a post on a mediocre blog (such as this one). At the end inconvenient news and numbers are too often thrown away. Be it the incapability of re-acting or just the complexity of the results.

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IBM, long considered a behemoth of the technology industry, has often also been considered on the “outside looking in” for many of the last decades’ web technology developments.

As the company moves to solidify it’s position as a vendor that can provide data computing power, their acquisition of web analytics firm Coremetrics adds a specialized product line that helps close the gap.

This move could be a shot right into the heart of online powerhouse Google and Adobe (which acquired Omniture). Coremetrics focuses their offerings on product analytics for the online commerce market, tracking data to a granular level, such as comparing the average sale for a specific company versus sales for other companies in the same or different sectors. The company also heavily relies on cloud computing strategies to enable more flexibility for it’s customers’ needs. All interesting fields for IBM.

Coremetrics’ prowess in web marketing analytics may allow IBM to gain a foothold in the market where Google and Adobe remain market forces. While the company was considering an IPO, an enticing offer from IBM and last minute deal making solidified the acquisition.

Coremetrics was a dot-com company in the days where venture capital flowed to internet startups in obscene amounts. The startup was able to secure an initial $113 million in support of it’s core business model.

After the dot-bomb years the company was again able to secure a capital infusion of approximately $111 million from new partners.

Much of the appeal of Coremetrics for IBM was not only it’s staying power, but the quality of the company’s existing clients, which include such heavyweights as Office Depot, Bank of America, Holiday Inn and Virgin Atlantic Airways. In addition to larger clients, scores of smaller online sites and retail outlets rely on Coremetrics analytics and metrics to improve their bottom line.

What’s really interesting about this deal is that specific monetary details have not as yet been disclosed. IBM does not see this as the buyout and elimination of a competitor, but an add-on to their own line of product offerings. The core product line of Coremetrics is expected to continue to be developed and enhanced over time.

One of the attractive services that IBM hopes to integrate and offer to it’s existing customers is the ability of Coremetrics to enable companies to collaborate across business silos. Often, within an existing organization, data is segmented and walled off from shared sources, and offering a way to break those barriers is an attractive option for Big Blue.

The company and it’s employees will be integrated with IBM’s existing corporate structure, bringing Coremetrics 2,100 existing customers along for the ride. It’s hoped that by creating a lasting partnership with existing customers, IBM will be able to offer a wider array of services to those same clients.

Overall after the Adobe-Omniture deal another interesting deal in the web analytics market.

If you have an online business or are in the process of developing one, you probably are aware that getting traffic to your site is not an easy task. The best approach to turn visitors into customers is testing multiple options.

Two popular tests for your website are A/B testing and multivariate testing. For those of you not familiar with these terms, A/B testing is simply the process used to test one element of your site at a time. These include headings, a unique URL, your call to action and even button sizes and colors. Multivariate testing is the process of choosing several elements of your site and then creating variations of them. You will then test the effectiveness of each variant to determine which will offer the best results.

This type of testing is a monumental task and most site owners don’t know where to begin. That is where Visual Website Optimizer comes in. They have developed an assortment of tools that anyone can use to help turn their site visitors into customers. These tools will help you:

Develop Versions of Your Website Visually: You can quickly create multiple versions of your buttons, headlines, forms, and images with a simple point and click process. You are able to preview these variations right away and there is no need to create separate pages for your test.

Editing HTML: The editor used is a very robust word processor; HTML knowledge is not needed. It is very simple to use and allows you to preview all the variations you create, immediately. This editor allows you to test different elements of your page like buttons, headlines, tables, forms and even images.

Spliting Traffic: Visual Website Optimizer allows you to split web traffic between unique URLs to determine which works best. The great part about this process is it allows you to test as many versions as you wish.

Setting up different conversion goals: You will be able to test the impact that your variations will have on the overall site. You can measure the number of visits to a particular page, the number of times a link is clicked, and even submissions of forms on your site.

Reporting: Visual Website Optimizer offers your results in real time reports and easy to understand charts. You receive performance charts daily, including the number of visitors and total conversions, and the impact that variations have on the overall conversion rate.

Segmenting customers: VWO will test customer types, keyword searches, whether they are returning or new, and even the referring URL. Segmentation will also allow you to modify your test based on the customer’s selections in their shopping cart.

Tagging: VWO avoids the need for tagging. It allows you to add a line of code once to perform any number of tests.

Analyzing: Google Analytics and Omniture Site Catalyst can be integrated quickly.

HTML testing: HTML as well as CSS based testing, JQuery based API and syntax highlighted HTML.

Summary:

VWO is one of the best solutions to build a robust Multi-variation testing environment. It’s super easy to use, dirt cheap and still robust. Ideal for pretty much any small webmaster, who doesn’t have the resources to setup a high-end testing ground. .

Managing business and personal reputation, once the province of public relations, has increasingly moved online, and this has led a number of firms to specialize in managing reputation in the online universe. In the early days of online reputation management, companies focused on monitoring search results and trying to move positive results up in search rankings. As the social web has grown, firms have begun to pay more attention to blogs, review sites and services like MySpace and Facebook.

Reputation Observer offers services designed to track and manage online business and personal reputations. But not only that. The highly complex way of sentiment analysis is managed in a different way than most other tools (which heavily rely on 2-3 different Sentiment API vendors).

FEATURES

Reputation Observer, despite the somewhat passive implication of its name, positions itself as “a revolutionary way of tracking, measuring and repairing your brand or name online.” It breaks its services down into a variety of features, including:

• Monitoring. Reputation Observer promises to provide constant monitoring of search, social media and other online media outlets.

• Protection. With what it terms “intelligent online media protection,” Reputation Observer offers to analyze, control and protect your brand or your personal reputation.

• Reputation building. This feature promises to enhance your reputation and to counteract negative information online.

• Social web integration. Earlier tools that were applied to reputation were often specialized variants of the strategies used for search engine optimization. As a result, they focused on enhancing the content of search results. Reputation Observer covers this as well, but it also monitors blogs, review sites and forums, and adds tracking of specific sites that it considers critical to online reputation, including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Orkut.

• Social Media Worflow management.  Social Media  Analytics enterprise workflow-management for small and large organizations.

• Alerts. Customers are notified by email, text or phone of events considered critical.

COSTS

Reputation Observer does not disclose the cost of its services on its web site. Links on both the US and international sites  seem to point to sources of additional information point instead either to blog posts about online reputation tracking and management, or to a contact form whereby a prospective client may request further information.

The services are offered in a tiered system that segments online media into those considered more or less difficult to manage. A similar hierarchy separates those media according to the identity of the client, assigning different levels of importance to different media for businesses and individuals.

EFFECTIVENESS

Reputation Observer lays out a reasonably complete menu of services and it’s effectiveness is well-known in the web industry. Especially for corporations operating in international markets Reputationobserver’s  unique approach of high-end technology paired with an objective human social-media rating system is highly effective.

Mouseflow Analytics is a fairly new in depth website visitor tracking software available. The amount of information that you receive through a Mouseflow report far exceeds the basic numbers reporting that you get through similiar tracking software. You will be able to see exactly how visitors behave when they visit your site, down to the movement of their mouse and the amount of scrolling they were willing to do. Here some of the functionalities:

Replay a Visitor Session

When someone visits your site, Mouseflow Analytics will record every second of their viewing session (similar to Robotreplay and others). Once they have navigated away from the site, you can access the record and watch exactly what the visitor did while they had your site open. The live stream option will even allow you to keep track of a visitor while they are currently on your site. This feature gives you immediate information about how users are viewing your site and how they behave while they are visiting.

Heatmaps Provide a Visual Report

The visitor heatmaps are excellent tools for a quick overview of your site’s most popular features. What a heatmap does is create a color coded image that shows you where people are clicking on your site. You may discover that visitors are clicking images that don’t contain links, which may lead you to create a link on those images to keep customers engaged. You can also view heatmaps that have color guides of where a visitor’s mouse moved and hovered on your page the most often. The heatmaps collect information from several different visitors and combine that information to give you a complete overview of the site’s effectiveness. You can compare heatmaps from different time periods to see if changes to the site have drawn attention toward the site areas that you most want visitors to notice.

Viewport Feature Gives Visitor Scrolling Information

It can be difficult to gauge the impact of scrolling on your website. Most web tracking tools don’t have any way to measure scrolling activity, so developers and designers have had to create sites based on their hopes and expectations rather than factual research. Mouseflow Analytics includes a feature that will give you solid information about how visitors treat the pages of your site that scroll. It will tell you how far down visitors scroll on average, and whether they bother to scroll at all.

See Your Site the Way Visitors Do

Mouseflow Analytics provides you with information from a visitor’s perspective. You can look at load times on different types of connections and computer browsers. You will see how often visitors receive bounces instead of loading your site. You will also discover whether visitors spend time reading and scrolling on your site and the amount of interactivity that occurs in a general visit. The page analysis tools give you an authentic way to analyze your site’s appearance and reliability from the perspective of someone visiting from a remote location. Once you know how the site is being perceived by others, you will have the power to adjust the site to meet the needs of more visitors.

Summary:
Mouseflow is a unique product in the web analytics space: It not only records, but also lets you live stream user behavior on your website.
A must-have for any data driven organization and a great feature set for most webmasters.

Oh boy….I am a PC, but somehow ended up with an IPad today and here is my review of the Ipad 16 GB version. Written on an Ipad:

I am not getting into the unboxing nonsense. It is pretty much like the Iphone. 2 small pages and 2 cables, which includes the charger. That’s it.

First installation is quite annoying since I need to have the latest Itunes version installed. Also my PC with Windows 7 showed me the classic bluescreen, once I plugged the 16 Gb Ipad in. First time I have seen the bluescreen for years.

Well..turned on the Ipad after it synched all my Itouch Apps. Fine…did not know that all apps work on the big iPod…ahem…iPad as well.

Ok…so far so good. First test with the keyboard. One thing I was always unhappy with. It actually works, but if I type with my 10 fat fingers it looks like this:
I am trying to write wih 10 fingers, but it is not that easy bc i have fat fin gets.

So a little downer..but not bad at all. I then went on Facebook an noticed that Flash is still not supported. Darn Apple….drive the 10 min to the Adobe office and get this fixed or I will switch to the next Pad producing company. I just want to stream Athde live soccer without hazzle and once in a while watch Youtube within FB.

Anyways I kept instaling and removing apps and watched a few TED videos,which was pure fun.

To summarize it:
The Ipad 16 GB is a great toy, but tough to use for work. Multi-tasking, no flash and the walled Apple garden are some issues that a lot of people don’t accept.
However, the iPad is a Kindle killer and just great to watch movies.
Overall I am sure it will sell like hotcakes. It is just too cheap for not being the No. 1 new Holiday gadget in 2010.
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