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Benoît Méli fait un reportage sur les tendance du marketing digital au salon Online Marketing Düsseldorf, où il y interview trois “acteurs européens innovants”, l’un des trois étant Xtract. Sa traduction décrit clairement notre approche:

“Notre approche est différence de l’approche traditionnelle du marketing digital, car nous ne nous basons pas sur les contenus d’une page Web ou des résultats de recherche, mais sur les comportements des internautes sur les sites du Web social.”

En effet, notre solution analyse les comportements sociaux des internautes pour trouver les utilisateurs Alpha, qui sont les influenceurs des sites en question. Ca fait plaisir de lire news sur Xtract en francais!

Helsinki, Finland – September 24, 2008 – Xtract today named Timo Laaksonen, 46, Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. A top ICT industry executive, Laaksonen has more than 20 years of experience from First Hop (now Airwide Solutions), Sonera SmartTrust, Teamware (Fujitsu), ICL and Nokia.

“Timo is a strong leader and has a track record for driving growth and building world-class teams. I look forward to benefiting from his knowledge and experience,” said Kimmo Kiviluoto, Xtract’s Deputy CEO and Co-founder.

At Xtract, Laaksonen will be responsible for developing and executing company’s long-term growth and market strategies as well as leading the management team. “I am both thrilled and honoured to take on the position as Xtract CEO. Thrilled thanks to the significant market opportunities available to the company, and honoured because of the position and recognition Xtract has already won as one of the absolute top tier companies in social marketing and advertising intelligence” said Timo Laaksonen, Xtract’s CEO. “Xtract’s innate strength lies in its unique skill set, knowledge and technology. There are very few companies out there who would have as unique strengths and as much potential for competitive differentiation as Xtract does.”

Prior to Xtract, as CEO of First Hop, Laaksonen performed a central role in the company’s growth to become a leader in mobile service delivery and business management solutions through building a world-class team into First Hop, defining the market strategy and positioning, setting up and controlling sales and product operations, as well as directing the related corporate financing activities. He has also held executive and business management positions at Sonera SmartTrust, Teamware Group (Fujitsu), ICL and Nokia Data.

Laaksonen graduated with honours and gained a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Turku School of Business Administration in Finland. He is fluent in five languages.

This was now our second real stand (the first being last year’s 4m2 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona) and our first time in the context of online. The next one will be in Adtech, NY, November 3-6th 2008.

OMD was A LOT bigger, than I was expecting. It’s funny when suddenly all these digital companies meet, and everything which before seemed so virtual felt so real. There might to be a market around online marketing, after all. LOL

So, the stand…
This time, we (Richard Sirén from Pen&Hammer and myself) designed the stand using some interesting material: foam. Two types of Polyether foam actually, the white ones were made of mattress foam and the red ones of sponge foam.

We sketched and designed  four little people: man and woman hands down, and man and woman waving. These little foam people were ordered from a company who makes mattresses and sponges. “400 of these, please!”
Turned out quite voluminous! I was then supposed to take these with me from Helsinki to Düsseldorf. Now, that’s about 4 of the largest trash bags. I asked DHL and UPS for an offer and they gave me an estimate which was over 1000 euros! For 5kg!? They call it dimensional weight. Luckily, airberlin didn’t have anything like this. “It’s all about the kilos”, their customer service told me, “it can be 10 bags, as far as the total weight is below 20kg”.

In Düsseldorf, people seemed really friendly! At least, everybody was smiling at me as I was walking around with my luggage, weekend bag, 4 transparent plastic bags filled with little people and a backpack.

The stand was designed with the thought that it would be an eye catcher. I never thought that would still work with the stand packed in plastic bags!

Anyways, 1pm on Tuesday, the black foil was in place on the walls, so I could finally start gluing these little people with 3M’s flexible spray glue to the walls. Took around 10h.

% 7

I am quite please with the result. We got excellent feedback and large interest at OMD and it even ended up being great material for us when presenting the company and what we do.

The second competition of our competition series opens today: Xtract International Student Design Competition 2008. It is opened for all students of the following art schools:

• London School of Communications, London, UK
• University of Art and Design Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
• Akademia Sztuk Pieknych w Warsawie, Warsaw, Poland
• Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA
• California College of the Arts, San Francisco, USA
• Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan

We are trying to educate people through this competition what real social networks are, not facebook buddies, but social networks of people who REALLY communicate.

This week, the University of Antwerp has been hosting the ECML-PKDD conference. It is a good opportunity to hear the newest thinking in machine learning and knowledge discovery, and talk directly to researchers. The organizers have worked very hard to make the conference a success. One of their many good ideas is to have every paper be presented both as a talk and as a poster, so if you have questions that were not answered in the talk, the author can explain the work again using the poster as an aid.

On Tuesday I had the opportunity to chair the Matrix Factorization session, arguably the highest-quality research session at the conference, since out of the four papers presented one received the Best Paper in Machine Learning award, and another one the Best Student Paper in Knowledge Discovery award.

To those of us who didn’t take Linear Algebra 101, Matrix Factorization may sound imposing, but really it is a beautiful, unifying idea behind many techniques such as community discovery, document classification (e.g. into spam and non-spam emails), and collaborative filtering, which is what Amazon or Netflix does when they recommend an item for you based on your previous purchases compared to those of other customers.

In the session, Ajit Singh gave a talk on how the matrix factorization idea encompasses several methods that might not look like matrix algebra on the surface. Alexandros Karatzoglou explained several improvements on Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization, one of the hottest collaborative filtering methods around. Pauli Miettinen discussed factorizing binary matrices, which is quite a different problem from usual linear algebra methods, and Bin Cao et al.’s paper was about a new adaptive way to compute a similarity metric for collaborative filtering.

Dessert served in style at the conference banquet on Wednesday

Today, we are very excited since we are launching our first competition: Xtract Scenario Competition.

If you could see the social connections between your website visitors and find out who are the most influential ones – how could you utilise the knowledge to your business benefit?

Submit a presentation describing how you would utilise insight about your most influential users and the way your user base is networked, for example to improve your online marketing and advertising campaigns.

This is one of a twin pair competition, the other one being a closed competition for certain art schools around the world (opening October 22nd, 2008). We hope that these competitions will give some insight for both the online and mobile communities into the art of social networks and advertising in real social networks.

Any one with good ideas are invited to participate to the scenario competition, as it aims at being a vast brainstorm of scenarios of how to utilise the real social network of web sites.

The first prize is the Wacom Cintiq 12WX, read more on the competition website.

Xtract’s Scenario Competition opens at Online Marketing Show in Düsseldorf

Helsinki, Finland and Düsseldorf, Germany – September 17, 2008 –If you could see the social connections between your website visitors and find out who are the most influential ones – how could you utilise the knowledge to your business benefit? This is the theme of Xtract’s first international social advertising and marketing competition announced today at the Online Marketing show in Düsseldorf, Germany. The goal of the competition is to recognize online marketing and advertising ideas that incorporate the importance of social networks. More information at: http://www.xtract.com/competition2008/.

“Marketers have known for a long time that peer-to-peer communication has a strong impact on consumer purchasing, but measuring and utilizing it for marketing and advertising has been very difficult. With new technologies we are now learning more about large scale consumer networks and are therefore capable of understanding their needs better,” says Jouko Ahvenainen, chief strategy officer of Xtract, a provider of social marketing and advertising intelligence products.

The competition is addressed to online marketers and advertisers from traditional media companies to in-house marketers at long tail social media websites, blogs and social networking sites.

Entrants are requested to submit a presentation summarizing how they would utilise insight about their most influential users and the way their user base is networked to improve their online marketing and advertising campaigns.

Applications will be judged on two criteria:
1. Visual and effective presentation (are the ideas presented in a visually appealing way that gets the message across effectively?)
2. Creativity and practical application (how innovative are the ideas presented? Are they plausible and applicable to online marketing and advertising campaigns?)

Prizes
• First prize receives a Wacom Cintiq 12 WX or cash price of Euro 1100
• Second prize receives an iPod Touch 32GB or cash price of Euro 400
• Third prize, receives a one year subscription to lynda.com premium training video or cash price of Euro 300.
Additional awards will be given to the Best of Marketing Scenario, Best of Advertising Scenario, Best User-centered Scenario and Best Visual Design.

Jury
The jury includes world class experts in advertising, marketing and web 2.0 communities:

Alan Moore
Alan Moore is the creator of the principles of Engagement Marketing and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands. His ideas and practices are at work within companies such as Nokia, Microsoft, T-mobile Germany, EMAP, Telia Sonera, SonyBMG, The Coca Cola Company, H&M, Hewlett Packard, IPG and News International. Alan’s blog was voted one of the top 20 most influential blogs in 2008.

Brian Jacobs
Brian has worked for over 35 years in media and advertising agencies in the UK, Europe and the USA. He has been International Media Director of Leo Burnett, MD of Carat International, and EMEA Regional Director of Universal McCann. Before launching BJ&A he was EVP of Millward Brown.

Ajit Jaokar
Ajit is author of Mobile Web 2.0 and OpenGardens books and founder of the London- based publishing company futuretext. Currently, he plays an advisory role to a number of mobile start-ups in the UK and Scandinavia. He is also a member of the web2.0 workgroup and chair for Oxford University’s next generation mobile applications panel. His thinking is widely followed in the industry and his blog, The OpenGardens Blog

Jouko Ahvenainen
Jouko Ahvenainen is co-founder and chief strategy officer at Xtract. He is regarded in the industry for his knowledge in Social Advertising Intelligence. A veteran international business management consultant, Jouko has worked and lived in several countries including UK, Finland, Malaysia and U.S. where he held senior positions at Cap Gemini, Ernst & Young, Powerwave Technologies Inc., Nokia and Sonera.

How to participate
1. Enroll at: http://www.xtract.com/competition2008/
2. Create a (pdf or ppt) presentation of a detailed scenario on how you would utilise information regarding social connections between your website visitors and who the most influential users are in your online marketing and advertising campaigns.
3. Submit the file using the following file naming convention. The proposal of tom.jones@company.com would be tom-jones-company-com.pdf
4. Share your final presentation with us (competition2008@xtract.com) using the free service www.slideshare.net by October 20, 2008. Check the option that makes it possible for us to download it.

Winners will be contacted by October 27th, 2008 and announced during Adtech, NY, November 3-6th, 2008.

Xtract at Online Marketing Dusseldorf: Booth # 11 / B45.

Yesterday, the second floor of Molly Malones offered a nice and friendly environment for mobile people from all industries to connect with each others in the event organized by Mobile Monday (MoMo). The topic of the evening was Earning models in Mobile Entertainment, which is also an important question to many of our customers.

Our board member Alan Moore gave interesting insights into the big opportunity in utilizing the players with different roles in social networks. This topic is closely related to what we do here at Xtract for mobile operators and other customers.

Other speakers gave also fascinating presentations. Dr. Josef Noll from Norway spoke about privacy issues in entertainment business. He forecasted that privacy matters will be huge business in the future. Dr. Madanmohan Rao pointed out that in India, where Bollywood and cricket are the most popular forms of entertainment, the ones who will understand how to make money from mobile entertainment will earn a lot of money.

The place of yesterday’s event, Molly Malones in Helsinki, was also the place where the idea of MobileMonday was invented. The original founders of MoMo were present at the event and told about how no-one could believe at the beginning (Sep 2000) that eight years later MobileMonday events would be organized in tens of cities all over the world. It is exciting how a good concept, such as that of MobileMonday, has the power to spread all over the world, thanks to world-of-mouth and people networking with each other.

The newest software module brings more customer insight for effective mobile marketing campaigns

Helsinki, Finland and San Francisco, USA – September 10, 2008 – Marketers in the telecom industry are faced with the challenge of ever-changing market conditions that lead to shortage of customer insight, especially in the pre-paid markets. Today at the CTIA wireless show in San Francisco, Xtract announced expanded U.S. availability for its Social Links software, as well as a new module to help mobile operators worldwide better understand their customers in order to deliver more engaging marketing and advertising.

Now playing across the USA
Xtract’s Social Links is the world’s first commercially available software for analyzing social network interactions within large scale mobile communication networks. Social Links ability to deliver a far higher return on investments for its clients has been proven in a series of trials and full-scale projects with mobile operators around the globe. Starting today, Social Links is available to additional mobile operators in the U.S.

Xtract Social Links turns raw customer data into a vital marketing tool for mobile operators. By analyzing the social networks within large scale mobile communication networks it identifies the underlying social network structures within the subscriber base and the most influential people in the network, which Xtract calls Alpha Users. The result is a completely new layer of customer insight and a tangible tool for increasing the efficiency of targeted marketing and advertising.

The add-on modules combine social network with demographic and behavioral information, providing a Three Dimensional (3D) view of the customers for specific business applications including marketing activities by mobile operators as well as targeting for mobile advertising. These modules include: Churn Prediction, Customer Acquisition, Product Marketing, and now Customer Insight. Customers benefiting from Xtract Social Links range from top-tier operators such as T-Mobile and Vodafone to innovative challengers such as Blyk and Fonecta.

New module offers more customer insights, better targeting at a lower cost
To help mobile operators create more effective and relevant marketing and advertising campaigns, Xtract has developed a new Customer Insight Module for Xtract Social Links that can predict the customers’ demographics and behavior based on a known customer sample. In addition, the Customer Insight Module brings customers’ demographic information to the marketers’ fingertips through an easy to use network visualisation tool.

In just one easy-to-install module, Social Links customers can:
• Predict customer demographics such as age and gender for the whole customer base. Knowing age and gender of a fragment of network customers enables the module to accurately predict the same information for the rest of the customer base.
• Adapt the module to their specific markets based on demographic characteristics of these given markets.

By using the Customer Insight Module, mobile operators are able to quickly and easily develop more focused targeting for the marketing and advertising campaigns, and achieve their marketing objectives at a lower cost.

Always ready for the close up
Social Links Customer Insight Module comes with a network visualizer tool which enables visual analyses and viewing of subscribers’ social network. Mobile operators can observe their whole subscriber social network in real time, highlight the Alpha Users (influencers) and select certain communities within the network. They are also able to zoom in and out in order to gain detailed insights about specific customer qualities.

Integration and Availability
Xtract Social Links Customer Insight Module integrates seamlessly into the Social Links base and is available for all customers globally.

About Xtract
Xtract is a trusted partner and innovator in social advertising intelligence enabling mobile and media companies to monetize their digital communities. Our core strengths are in social network analytics. Xtract has developed a unique set of automated products that, based on social interactions, behavior and demographic data, can create accurate and real time consumer profiles for mobile and online marketers and advertisers. Xtract operates across Europe and Asia, working with over 50 blue-chip companies with intensive customer data. Headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland. For more information, visit www.xtract.com.

Social media is becoming more and more important — even more important than other media because it is closer to our human nature. Imagine yourself without any communication with people around you. And then, imagine making all your purchase decisions based on the adverts without an opportunity to ask questions and exchange opinions. How hard could that be? And yet, when we create the marketing messages and adverts we take into consideration everything else such as age, gender and behavior but, the impact of social interactions.

Taking into account social interactionss between people and the impact they have on your brand is very important especially on web and mobile social networks. When we create target groups for our online advertising, we need to utilise tools that take into account how and what people communicate to each other online and how that communication influences their decisions. Marketers have known for a long time that word of mouth has an enormous impact on purchase decision making – we could just not measure it. With web and mobile technologies, that is now possible.

If you’re interested to hear more on the topic and happen to visit CTIA Wireless in San Francisco, come and listen our Chief Strategy Officer, Jouko Ahvenainen speaking on September 9th. This is a special conference the day before CTIA Wireless IT opens doors called Mobile Web Strategies.”