Press Releases

Helsinki, Finland and London, England – 1 July 2009 – Xtract, the pioneer in social intelligence, announced that the Finnish operator DNA is deploying its newly launched Social Links On-Demand solution. DNA will have the advantage of utilising Xtract’s sophisticated targeting technology, as a service, for effective marketing. This means that DNA’s 2.4 million subscribers will enjoy the benefits of targeted and personalised marketing delivering the right advertising and marketing messages to the right people in the right context.

Jarkko Utriainen, head of business intelligence at DNA says: “This is a revolutionary solution for customer insight. It helps us increase our marketing efficiency by harnessing the viral effects within social networks. At the same time, deploying the solution as an on-demand service that is hosted by Xtract saves us cost, resources and time in implementation.”

Xtract CEO Timo Laaksonen says: “Operators need to make their marketing messages and methods less about ‘them’ and more about the subscriber. With Xtract, campaigns become more engaging, spreading through the operator’s subscriber base virally. Offering social intelligence as a service means lower initial costs for the operator, getting it up and running more quickly, and enables using the service flexibly wherever marketers are based.”

Social Links On-Demand is a new delivery channel for Xtract’s flagship solution Social Links. It helps operators gain a unique three-dimensional picture of its subscribers for use in more targeted marketing. Social Links analyses behavioural, demographic and social network data from subscribers in an anonymized form thus protecting privacy.

Social Links On-Demand key components include: social network analytics, data warehouse/data storage, database maintenance/filing, and infrastructure services (virus protection and firewall). Operators can revolutionise strategies such as churn management based upon the service’s three-dimensional subscriber profiling.

Xtract press contact
Emily McDaid
emily@hatch-pr.com
+44 7748 6333 55

DNA press contact
Helena Melamies
Helena.Melamies@dna.fi

Social Links On-Demand gives mobile operators 39 per cent faster payback time

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 20 May 2009 - From today, Xtract will offer its flagship social intelligence product, Social Links, as a service, while the software licensing model still remains fully supported. Called Social Links On-Demand, it enables mobile operators to cash in on the social networking phenomenon for targeted, viral marketing on a pay-as-you-go service model.

The On-Demand model means minimum upfront investment and no operational hassle. Xtract estimates that Social Links On-Demand is 74 per cent faster to set up than traditional in-house implementations and offers 39 per cent faster payback time.

Julien Theys, mobile industry analyst at Screen Digest, said: “Efficient analysis is key to leveraging the power of social networks and eventually monetising them through relevant content and advertising. An on-demand solution can provide access to social network intelligence that is light, flexible and financially less cumbersome than traditional software licenses. It is therefore ideally suited for operators who prefer not to invest heavily in in-house analytics and database marketing solutions and resources, especially in the current economic climate.”

Social Links On-Demand combines software, hardware, implementation, customer support, operations and maintenance in a bundled service, hosted by Xtract. This means operators don’t need to invest upfront in software licenses or hardware platforms. Social Links On-Demand is delivered via a service level agreement that best suits each operator’s business needs, e.g. dependent on the number of subscribers served, amount of data or level of security required. All data is processed anonymously and customer transaction results are processed in a way that complies with data security and privacy regulations.

Business users such as marketing and campaign managers are provided with a secure browser-based graphical user interface which they use to: view social intelligence dashboard reports and graphs; create Social Links analytics runs; define campaign targeting; configure and export target lists; and, view their community dynamics.

About Xtract Social Links
Social Links is the first commercial software that uses social network analytics to enable companies to leverage social intelligence in marketing. Social Links utilises anonymised subscriber transaction data to generate customer insight based on social intelligence, predict the behaviour of subscribers (e.g. for churn management and product up-sell/cross-sell) and to understand the network of influence between subscribers. Social Links is based on advanced analytics that dig deep into the granular communication patterns between subscribers to draw highly accurate profiles and targeting. Social Links has won several industry awards for being successfully deployed by top-tier mobile operators worldwide.

Social Links offers benefits for mobile operators’ marketers, campaign designers, product managers, analysts and CRM managers. The information provided is used in highly accurate targeting, and gaining customer insight for campaign and product planning. Social Links also supports subscriber lifetime valuation and campaign design.

About Xtract
Xtract (www.xtract.com) 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 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.

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 5 May 2009 - Xtract has announced that it recruited three new members to its management team. These new members form a critical part of Xtract’s drive towards global market leadership in social intelligence solutions and services.

Gerry Gross – Vice President, Global Sales
Gerry Gross brings 20 years of executive sales and marketing experience in ICT business sector. At Xtract, Gerry has complete revenue ownership and is responsible for building and managing the global sales and partnerships’ team. Prior to Xtract, Gerry championed the worldwide sales efforts at First Hop, prior to its acquisition by Airwide Solutions. He has also held executive management positions at Surfkitchen in London and Beenz in New York City and strategic sales positions at Sprint Corporation in the US.

Sari Aapola – Vice President, Product Management
Sari Aapola has been appointed VP of Product Management at Xtract, responsible for product strategy, product marketing and product lifecycle management. A seasoned executive in the ICT sector, Sari’s most recent roles were as VP of Marketing and Product Marketing at Basware and before that at Tecnomen. Both are public companies belonging to the group of Finnish success stories in international software product and services business. Sari’s most recent project has been authoring a book on ‘Sustainable Thought Leadership’ published by BookSurge.

Mikko-Pekka Bertling – Vice President, Services
Mikko-Pekka Bertling has been with Xtract for the past two years. In his new role he is responsible for Xtract’s Social Links On-Demand solution, professional services, training and consulting. He brings a long experience in pre-sales for Active Data Warehousing and Customer Relationship Management Solutions. Mikko-Pekka has also worked as a hardware and architecture advisor and has managed Professional services’ operations in Finland and the Baltics. Mikko-Pekka started his career at IBM where he served in product development, product management and sales roles. Later on, he held several senior positions at CMA Teradata. Prior to joining Xtract, Mikko-Pekka was ADWH and CRM solutions’ expert and pre-sales owner of loyalty factory solutions at CapGemini.

“These key appointments maintain our tradition of hiring only absolute top-level executives with unmatched professional experience and market insight,” said Timo Laaksonen, CEO. “Xtract works on social intelligence technology, solutions and services that bring immediate and tangible value to our customers. Furthermore, our solutions enable the development of completely new kinds of mobile and internet on-line services and customer engagement models that can revolutionise the way that companies serve their own customers – targeted, personalised, timely and proactively. This is a new market where one can succeed only with the right combination of experience, insight, leadership, drive and innovativeness. I believe that with the addition of Sari, Mikko-Pekka and Gerry we are ideally positioned to have what it takes to become the undisputed market leader in our focus business.”

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 and online companies to define accurate target groups for their marketing campaigns. www.xtract.com

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.

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.

Response to reports in the US that questioned the privacy implications of mobile marketing
19 January 2009 - Helsinki, Finland and London, UK - Xtract, providers of social marketing intelligence solutions that enable internet and mobile operator marketing to become more personal, relevant and targeted, has today released details of its 3D profiling engine which ensures the highest levels of privacy in mobile marketing. Using data analytics technology, mobile subscriber data can be kept completely anonymised, never sacrificing on user privacy but delivering a highly-personalised mobile experience through relevant and engaging marketing.

Providing Mobile Subscriber Privacy Today
Xtract Social Links is the first commercial software that enables users to leverage social intelligence in their marketing actions. By default, all customer data is automatically anonymised when imported to Social Links, thereby all data used in analytics is always anonymous.

Xtract’s methodology, defined as ‘3D user profiling’, maps users against categories of interest, rather than making individual data visible to third parties, thus ensuring the highest levels of privacy. The cornerstone of Xtract’s approach is that there is no need to link the results back to subscriber data that contains sensitive information, such as what number has been called. All subscribers are linked to profiles, classes, and score levels based on predictive models and profile characters.

Initiative for Industry Standards for Privacy in Mobile Marketing
To highlight the opportunity that the mobile channel can provide for highly personal and relevant advertising, Xtract has decided to set up a forum on privacy for the mobile marketing industry. This group will promote the adoption of industry-wide standards that ensure the highest levels of subscriber privacy.

Jouko Ahvenainen, Vice President and Co-founder of Xtract, said: “Using analytics tools, mobile operators do not need to mine data directly from individual accounts and so analytics tools provide the very foundation for privacy that users demand. Customer details are kept hidden, with the data always anonymised. Without using analytics tools such as Xtract, one could imagine a world where all mobile subscribers are blanketed with irrelevant ads and promotions that are useless to most of the recipients.”

Timo Laaksonen, CEO of Xtract said: “Aggregate data is a key asset that is underutilised in mobile today, and can unlock the next, more sophisticated, iteration of mobile advertising. We don’t support methods that use subscriber data directly for targeted marketing, as some social network operators in mobile and internet have tested. We recommend that mobile operators and social internet communities use data aggregates and behavioural data patterns to gain a better understanding of their customer base, instead of making user data visible coming from the network level. ”

Xtract also addresses six points for mobile marketing privacy in its ‘Brands Need People, People Need Brands’ whitepaper, available on www.xtract.com.

Customers’ Close Social Community and Influence Play a Significant Role in Purchasing Decisions and Defining Customer Value

Mobile Asia Congress, Macao, SAR of Republic of China – November 19, 2008 – Xtract Social Links’ new feature, Social Revenue, measures the value that a mobile subscriber brings by influencing his or her close social community in mobile purchasing decisions. With Social Revenue, mobile operators can estimate their customers’ value more accurately than with any other method used on the market today.

Consider, for example, an individual with large social community consisting of high ARPU customers versus another individual with a smaller social community consisting of low ARPU customers. Clearly, from a return on investment point of view, the individual having a large social community with high ARPU customers should be the focus of marketing activities for the mobile operator.

Our friends, family and social communities influence greatly our decisions to purchase goods and services. Often, we ask our friends for recommendation on which phone model we should purchase or on whether they have been satisfied with the new service provider. Word of mouth travels and has an impact on our decisions that is stronger than pure marketing and advertising by brands. Studies show that word-of-mouth is the most powerful selling tool, and 78% of people trust the recommendation of other consumers [Source: Trust in Advertising, A global Nielsen consumer report, October 2007].

“Companies are constantly trying to identify the revenue, profits and costs directly related to a customer. However, the traditional customer value measures do not take into account the social value that a customer brings”, says Hanna Kettunen, Product Manager at Xtract. “This leads to either overestimating or underestimating the real value of a customer.”

Xtract Social links takes into account whether a customer is influential or not when measuring how much that individual is worth to the company. In addition, not only the level of influence but who that influence can be inflicted on plays a role. With Social Links’ capability to estimate customers’ social revenue, mobile operators can include the indirect social revenue generated by a customer into the equation, therefore estimating much better the real customer value.

Helsinki, Finland – 30 October, 2008 – Xtract announced today that the GSM Association (GSMA) selected its Social Links solution as a top finalist for the 2009 Mobile Innovation Global Awards Competition – APAC Tournament. The Mobile Innovation Global Awards Competition encourages breakthrough technology, applications and services in the mobile industry by bringing together innovative mobile products, industry investors and mobile operators. Xtract with its Social Links solution, a social marketing intelligence product, has been selected as one of three finalists in the ‘Most Innovative Carrier Infrastructure or Platform’ category.

Timo Laaksonen, CEO of Xtract said, “We are very proud to be recognised by the GSMA for the second time this year. This shows again that the operator community is starting to utilise their rich user data for marketing, making it more flexible, cost efficient, accurate and relevant to their customers. With Social Links, mobile operators can utilise their marketing budgets more effectively to tackle churn, acquire new customers and launch new products to the market. Operators that have already adopted Social Links are gaining tangible returns on their marketing investment right from the start of taking the solution into use.”

Xtract was a finalist for the 2008 Mobile Innovation Global Award Competition at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last February, and has now been recognised for the second time for the APAC tournament.

About Xtract Social Links
Xtract Social Links is the first carrier-grade product that analyzes customers’ real social networks from massive amounts of calls and messaging data. It utilizes this information to better predict the behaviour of customers in operators’ networks. Social Links can be extended with its add-on modules that are designed for specific business applications including: customer insight, customer acquisition, product marketing and customer loyalty. Social Links has already been successfully deployed by several top-tier mobile operators worldwide with very positive results. Xtract’s customers range from top-tier operators such as T-Mobile to innovating challengers such as Blyk.

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 and manage their campaigns. Xtract works with over 50 blue-chip companies with intensive customer data. Headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland.

Meet us at GSMA Mobile Asia Congress Mobile Innovations Zone