Archive

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 25 February 2009 – Xtract, providers of social intelligence solutions, has announced Flirtomatic is using its flagship product, Social Links, for improved customer insight for its online and mobile services. Flirtomatic is a web and mobile social network and flirting service for ages 18 and over. Social Links is the only readily available solution in the market able to analyse the social networking influence and behaviour patterns of members, and Flirtomatic applies the intelligence to create more compelling services for each customer segment, and targeted, relevant and personal marketing and promotions, via web and mobile.

Xtract’s Social Links provides Flirtomatic with a dashboard-style view containing 3D profiles of its members. The 3D profiles comprise basic demographic data, behavioural data and social networking influence information. Influential community members can be targeted with campaigns, resulting in viral take-up throughout the community via crucial word-of-mouth marketing. This approach works two-fold, because influential members have both direct pull over purchasing decisions (by recommending products to their friends) as well as indirect pull (by friends’ desire to imitate or mimic their friends’ purchases).

Having gained this new level of customer insight, Flirtomatic plans to expand usage of Social Links later in 2009 to build a third-party advertising revenue stream. The attraction for third-party advertisers is the strength of the community, as well as the ability to pinpoint accurately described segments and influential members with relevant ads.

“The early results from customer segmentation are very insightful and exciting. We can now see considerable potential, as the business scales, to directly improve our revenues through a sophisticated view of our customers, their behaviour and the pattern of their relationships,” said Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic. “Xtract’s tool hands us an effective, powerful CRM solution. We’ll be expanding use of the tool following the completion of our US launch.”

Timo Laaksonen, CEO of Xtract said: “We ensure that Flirtomatic takes full advantage of its unique capability to understand better who their members are, what drives them and who are the most influential members for viral campaigning. The use of this intelligence for highly targeted promotions allows Flirtomatic to immediately boost sales of its value-added services.”

About Xtract
Xtract delivers software products for social marketing and advertising intelligence. The company refines social interaction, personal behaviour and demographic data to create accurate 3D user profiles. These profiles for the first time enable companies to utilise data as a dynamic tool in the day-to-day business of marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of digital advertising, viral campaigns and predictive churn management. Xtract’s products and solutions are automated, self-learning and capable of analysing billions of customer transactions. They make complexity simple with easy to use and actionable tools for marketers and advertisers to define accurate targets for their campaigns. Xtract works with over 50 blue-chip companies with intensive customer data. Headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland.

Social links analysis company certifies its solutions to run on massive-scale database to support customer competitive advantage

Helsinki, Finland and San Francisco, California. – 25 February 2009 – Xtract, providers of social intelligence solutions for marketing and Greenplum, a leading provider of database software for the next generation of data warehousing and analytics, today announced that Xtract’s software solutions are certified on Greenplum Database 3.2.

Xtract’s social intelligence solutions analyze social interactions, behavior and demographic data that mobile operators and online companies already have, to create accurate, real time consumer profiles. Xtract software is deployed on Greenplum Database in a variety of scenarios, including on-premise software at customer sites and in hosted offerings at Xtract and other service providers around the world.

Greenplum database 3.2 was released in late 2008 and features substantial enhancements in key areas such as programmable parallel analytics, MapReduce and in-database compression. As Greenplum’s customers and partners migrate to Greenplum Database version 3.2, they are able to garner considerable enhancements in performance and scalability.

“Greenplum is our database of record, and as Greenplum advances the state of their technology it enhances the solutions in use by our customers,” said Mikko-Pekka Bertling, VP of Services at Xtract. “Customers such as TeliaSonera, Fonecta, Vodacom and PlusTV are reaping the benefits of Xtract’s analytics software running on Greenplum Database, and we look forward to future enhancements from Greenplum.”

“Xtract’s social intelligence solutions are a perfect example of how customers gain value from their data,” said Frank Bien, VP of Business Development at Greenplum. “As data volumes explode, partnerships such as the one between Xtract and Greenplum ensure that customers can utilize all their data for competitive advantage.”

About Greenplum
Greenplum is a database software company that is reinventing how companies gain insight and competitive advantage from their data. The company’s flagship product, Greenplum Database, is built to support the next generation of data warehousing and large-scale analytics processing. Supporting SQL and MapReduce parallel processing, Greenplum Database offers industry-leading performance at a low cost for companies managing terabytes to petabytes of data. Greenplum Database is used by major global organisations including NASDAQ, NYSE Euronext, Reliance Communications, Skype and Fox Interactive Media/MySpace. Greenplum partners with Sun Microsystems to power the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance. For more information visit www.greenplum.com.

About Xtract
Xtract refines social interaction, behaviour and demographic data to create accurate 3D user profiles. These profiles for the first time utilise data as a dynamic tool in the day-to-day marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of marketing campaigns and advertising. Xtract’s Social Links is an automated, self-learning solution capable of analysing billions of mobile transactions with easy to use and actionable tools for operators to define accurate target groups for their marketing campaigns.

Last night’s Business of Mobile 2.0 session at Mobile World Congress was a big success, so I have consolidated some key takeaways from the session in the below, from Xtract.

It was MWC’s largest attendee session outside of the keynotes, suggesting the merits of this topic on mobile industry executives’ minds.

Here are some talking points attributed to Jouko Ahvenainen, founder and VP of Xtract, social intelligence solutions provider, who led a portion of the session.

“Mobile 2.0 is about doing things together and sharing: co-creating, co-developing, co-funding, and co-succeeding. It is about individuals, conversations and communities.”

“2.0 business is about having high transparency, and it’s important to not that 2.0 enterprises are not new technology enterprises.

What they do have:
- New business models
- New ways of helping people to do things together

“That being said, there are many funding and earning model challenges to Mobile 2.0. As a crowd we cannot underestimate the importance of this fact:
mobile 2.0 can be run most cost-effectively but to be scalable and have a growth model, funding must be achieved for most businesses.”

“Social media has good opportunities to monetise services, but it cannot use old models to do it. When it comes to funding, new models are needed.”

The main challenges are:

- Content is not the main reason to use mobile or social media, it’s about people
- Search advertising is weak
- Contextual advertising inventory doesn¹t work properly
- People can create content and contexts in social media
- Mobile push media is not linked to Internet type context
- It is not possible to use direct social contact or personal data
- Segmentation and categorisation is key to respecting privacy
- Brands and advertisers are interested in user profiles
- Media agencies need metrics and measurable results
- “If 2.0 businesses are to survive on an advertising appetite, audience
- exchange must be interactive – a two-way street. Refined customer profiles are a high priority; user privacy is key; and optimising revenue for advertisers to give them measurable benefit are paramount to the model.”

New Gigafone and Xtract partnership enables mobile subscribers to engage with marketing as never before

London: February 17th, 2009 – Gigafone, the leading mobile marketing solutions group, has announced that it has formed a partnership with Xtract, leader in social intelligence solutions for online and mobile applications, to provide a targeted and comprehensive mobile marketing platform for mobile operators, publishers, agencies and advertisers. Gigafone will utilise Xtract’s unique Social Links solution to provide marketers with a better view of whom, how and when their marketing is being consumed and to track campaign performance.

The new partnership promises to revolutionise the way advertisers traditionally target audiences. Xtract’s Social Links application identifies the social network structures within the customer base and finds the most influential people for marketers to target. When incorporated into Gigafone’s targeted mobile marketing solution, where consumers can choose the type of ads they want to receive in return for incentives such as discount vouchers or free mobile minutes, the result is a completely new level of customer experience and a tangible tool for increasing the effectiveness of targeted marketing activities and measuring return on investment.

Jouko Ahvenainen, vice president and co-founder of Xtract, said: “We wanted a partner that offered a solution that overcomes the last mile delivery problem of mobile marketing. Mobile marketing simply falls short at the last mile without the ability to capture user preferences and profiles in an engaging way. Gigafone’s full service mobile marketing solution fulfils this need and its established links in the mobile advertising ecosystem places us in a great position to take this proposition to market.”

Gregory Khaldey, President of Gigafone commented: “Xtract’s powerful offering greatly enhances our mobile marketing solution. Operators and marketers have been demanding clear metrics on advertising campaigns along with the ability to ‘add social’ to the mix for some time now. Our partnership with Xtract delivers on this and will provide real benefits to mobile operators and advertisers who are now able to evaluate return on investment and optimise future campaigns.”

Both Gigafone and Xtract will be exhibiting at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (Gigafone at stand AV 16 and Xtract at IZ31 in Hall 7) from February 16 – 19.

About Gigafone

Gigafone, the mobile marketing solutions group, enables operators to monetise mobile marketing.

Gigafone’s RingMate platform enables operators to deliver targeted mobile content to end users on an opt-in basis. Ads are non intrusive and are displayed on the mobile screen when a voice call, text or multimedia message is received.

Gigafone employs more than 100 mobile technology and marketing experts around the world with offices in Russia, Asia-Pacific and Europe. It is a member of the Mobile Marketing Association and an Associate Member of GSMA.

For further information, please see: www.gigafone.com .

About Xtract
Xtract refines social interaction, behaviour and demographic data to create accurate 3D user profiles. These profiles for the first time utilise data as a dynamic tool in the day-to-day marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of marketing campaigns and advertising. Xtract’s Social Links is an automated, self-learning solution capable of analysing billions of mobile transactions with easy to use and actionable tools for operators to define accurate target groups for their marketing campaigns.
For further information, please see: www.xtract.com

Social Links 3.0 new graphical interface enables operators to view and understand their subscribers’ social interactions, demographics and behaviour

Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain — 16 February 2009 – Xtract announced today the newest version of its flagship social intelligence solution, Social Links 3.0. Social Links 3.0 comes with a new comprehensive graphical interface for operators to view and understand their subscribers’ social behaviour and utilise this intelligence for effective targeting of marketing and to support strategic business decisions.

Xtract Social Links analyses social interactions, behaviour and demographic data that mobile operators and online companies have on their customers and members, to create accurate, automated consumer profiles. These profiles are used for effective and personalised marketing which is a necessity in today’s business environment.

“Digital data is one of the most powerful assets mobile operators have and Xtract helps to monetise it. Social Links can revolutionise operator marketing and CRM operations with insightful customer intelligence that takes the social dimension into account. Leveraging this intelligence, operators can deliver marketing that is personal, relevant and compelling to their subscribers,” says Timo Laaksonen, CEO of Xtract.

Social Links is a unique customer intelligence solution that sharpens targets for effective marketing campaigns to prevent churn, launch and cross-sell new products and acquire new customers. With the new dashboard style interface, in an easy and visual way, mobile operators will benefit the following:

• Understand and utilise social intelligence on subscriber groups to get more relevant support for strategic business decisions

• Find out how influential subscribers, the Alphas, differ from other subscribers and utilise that information for churn, cross-sell and up-sell campaigns

• Calculate the social monetary value of your subscribers to support the subscriber valuation with individual’s monetary influence on others

• Measure the actual effect of your viral marketing campaign including the viral effect

• Get social intelligence enabled insight on prepaid customers’ demographics for targeting them with more relevant offers

• View and predict churn and its viral effect – for taking action early to prevent churn before it actually happens.

The Social Links 3.0 graphical interface is easily customisable and offers vast possibilities for customer insight. The new version will be available for first customer deliveries at the end of March 2009.

End user data privacy in Social Links
Data privacy is an integral part of Xtract’s working practices. The Social Links with its standard modules complies with the strictest data privacy policies. A stand-alone module makes sure that all individual level information is made anonyms and all the results are categorised into groups relevant for marketing.


About Xtract – showcasing at the Mobile Innovations Zone at Mobile World Congress

Xtract delivers solutions for social marketing and advertising intelligence. The company refines social interaction, personal behaviour and demographic data to create accurate 3D user profiles. These profiles for the first time enable companies to utilise data as a dynamic tool in the day-to-day business of marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of digital advertising, viral campaigns and predictive churn management. Xtract’s solutions are automated, self-learning and capable of analysing billions of customer transactions. They make complexity simple with easy to use and actionable interface for marketers and advertisers to define accurate targets for their campaigns. Xtract works with over 50 blue-chip companies with intensive customer data. Headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland.