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Joint Solution Enables Companies to Gain Deep Customer Insight and Better Target Their Advertising

Helsinki, Finland and San Mateo, Calif. – 25 June 2008 – Xtract, the leader in social advertising intelligence, and Greenplum, a leading provider of database software for business intelligence, today announced strong customer adoption of the Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence (SAI) solution which includes software from Xtract running on the Greenplum Data Warehouse. Top customers in Europe and Asia are deploying Xtract SAI to better target their marketing and advertising to strengthen and grow customer communities in the telecommunications, advertising and retail markets.

Xtract SAI is a powerful solution for advertisers and marketers to target and manage personalized and automated advertising campaigns. With highly accurate, three-dimensional profiling based on customers’ social, behavioral and demographic information, Xtract SAI revolutionizes customers’ marketing and multiplies the results from their advertising campaigns. Xtract SAI is powered by the Greenplum Database and is sold as a turnkey solution to Xtract and Greenplum’s shared customers. These customers are using Xtract SAI to improve business across a range of market segments including telecommunications, advertising and retail.

Fonecta Group is the market-leading directory services company in Finland, offering a variety of directory services to meet the contact information needs of customers. Fonecta’s services are used more than 1.5 million times each day. Fonecta has deployed Xtract SAI in its datacenter for extremely fast analytics across a massive dataset of contacts.

“Our SMS services have been increasing rapidly, and we were looking for a better way to understand our customer segments to target our SMS marketing,” says Rami Meling, Business Development Manager, Fonecta. “Working with Xtract, we were able to create a clear segmenting of our customers and also begin to target and personalize our SMS marketing online. We are thrilled about the results.”

Broadcasting company Plus TV has over 250,000 subscribers and customers utilizing its pay-per-view television service. Plus TV is using Xtract and Greenplum to perform demographic data analysis for its marketing and customer retention efforts.

“Analytics are extremely important to us. We needed a partner with the top people building the right solution,” said Jari Vanhanen, CTO of Plus TV. “Xtract delivers a reliable solution and Greenplum Database has worked extremely well. Together these products are helping us to improve our profitability.”

“Xtract enables companies to gain competitive advantage from their data, and the combined Xtract and Greenplum solution allows customers to achieve critical insights with greater speed and scale,” said Frank Bien, VP of Business Development at Greenplum. “The market traction we’re seeing for Xtract SAI underscores the significant value companies derive from our joint solution.”

About Xtract
Xtract is the global trusted partner and innovator in Social Advertising Intelligence. We have the technology and competence to turn large user data into cash flow. Our solutions create accurate and automated consumer profiles for mobile and online advertisers based on social interactions, behavioural and demographic data. Xtract operates across Europe and Asia, working with over 50 companies with intensive customer data ranging from global leaders such as Nokia, T-Mobile and Vodafone to innovative challengers such as BLYK and Fonecta. Headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland and London, UK.

About Greenplum
Greenplum is a data warehouse software company that has developed the world’s fastest, most scalable database software for business intelligence. Designed to handle extremely large and fast-growing data volumes, Greenplum Database enables companies to gain critical insights into their data and extend their competitive advantage in the market at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. Greenplum Database powers the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance and is being used by some of the leading companies in the world, including Reliance Communications, Comcast, Skype, AirTran and O’Reilly Media.

The latest Technology Review has an interesting article about social network business and how social networks still have a lot of challenges to monetize their communities. New models, but also new solutions, are needed. And a key issue is to get advertising work properly in the social media.

Technology Review summarizes the new technologies to get advertising work in social media: “Startups that help advertisers and marketers better target the users of social-networking sites are fashionable investments for venture capitalists in North America and Europe. Such startups hope to sell advertisers detailed information about individual social networkers. They include the brand-new 33Across (which we profile in our list of 10 notable startups, which begins on page 50) and the more established Finnish company Xtract, which counts Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Blyk among its customers and has begun selling its software to advertising agencies and online marketers and publishers. ”

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, commented in the Millenium Prize event that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” It is nice to see that we have really found a way to build solutions to monetize digital communities.

Xtract is proud to sponsor the 6th International Workshop on Mining and Learning in Graphs that features such keynote speakers as Fan Chung (University of California, San Diego), Thorsten Joachims (Cornell University), Mohammad Mahdian (Yahoo! Research) and Hannu Toivonen (University of Helsinki). The registration is still open; for a discount price for today only. The workshop will be held in Helsinki, our home city, on 4-5 July.

Quoting from the conference web-site, MLG’08

“will be the premier forum for bringing together different sub-disciplines within Machine Learning and Data Mining that focus on the analysis of structured data. Of particular interest is data that consists of interrelated parts or is characterized by collections of objects that are interrelated and linked together into complex graphs and structures.”

Last year our team participated in MLG’07 in Venice with the paper Inferring vertex properties from topology in large networks (Janne Sinkkonen - Xtract, Janne Aukia - Xtract, Samuel Kaski - TKK) and won a prize for distinguished contribution.

Our team has a paper in the workshop this year, too. I’m excited in meeting you all there in a cozy scientific atmosphere and venue for insightful presentations and discussions.

We have a new white paper online on the topic Social Advertising Intelligence: How to reach consumers with active advertising.

Customers are increasingly moving from mass broadcast media to social media, making current advertising processes less effective than before. Until now, the tools for planning and buying online and mobile advertising have been lacking.

In the white paper, we analyze the four main challenges that advertisers face with online and mobile advertising, that is:

1. Measuring the full impact of the ads
2. Lack of tools
3. Ads cannot be bought in a unified way
4. Lack of information on online users

The white paper also presents, how Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence can be used to target campaigns effectively, solving some of the challenges with multi-channel advertising.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

Yesterday we had the privilege to listen to Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi give an interesting presentation on the Science, Technology and Business of Digital Communications. He has been working in the middle of the mobile communications revolution and has left his mark in the field in many ways. Does the Viterbi algorithm sound familiar?

Dr. Viterbi is one of the Millennium Technology Prize Laureates for 2008. His lecture was a part of the Finalist Symposium that was held at the Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo, Finland. This year, the main Millennium Technology Prize, the largest technology prize in the world, was presented to Robert Langer from MIT for developing innovative biomaterials for controlled drug release.

The organizers of the symposium had also invited three promising Finnish companies to introduce themselves. All three companies combine science and technology with communication and are making solid business that aims “to someday repeat the success of Qualcomm”, as the organizers put it. One of these companies was Xtract and Jouko Ahvenainen gave the presentation that you can see below.

The presentation was about how to monetize digital communications and to deliver more relevant advertisements to end users at the same time guaranteeing more returns for the advertisers. In the audience was also Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of MIT Technology Review. He commented that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” Afterwards we had some good conversations around the subject over some coffee and other refreshments.

Last week I bumped into Francois Mairesse’s open source Personality recogniser, of which he has a web demo where you can input emails, essays, chat logs, thoughts or other texts produced by you and get your personality scores for all Big Five traits (Extraversion, Emotional stability, Conscientiousness and Openness to experience) as well as the model used to compute them. Statistical models which can be used are SVM with Linear Kernel, M5 Model Tree, M5 Regression Tree and Linear Regression, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) being the most general one.

Obviously, the more text you feed the recogniser the more accurate it gets.

How this works is quite interesting. Here’s a summary of how markers are grouped (Mairesse, et. al., 2007):

• standard counts (e.g. words count, word per sentence, syllables per words, frequency of use, words longer than 6 letters, negations, articles, pronouns)
• psychology processes (e.g. positive & negative emotions, causation, tentative, references to people)
• relativity (e.g. past tense verb, future tense verb, up, down, inclusive, exclusive, motion)
• personal concerns (e.g. school, work, achievements, TV, movies, music, moeny, religion, death, sexuality, eating, sleeping)
• utterance (e.g. ratio of commands, questions, assertions)
• other dimensions (e.g. ponctuation, swear words, fillers, familiarity rating, meaning fullness Paivio norm, different Kucera-Francis frequencies)