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Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 8 June 2009 - Xtract marketing director Arlinda Sipila will be chairing and speaking at the IIR Business & Telecoms Business Intelligence event this week in Amsterdam.

Today, Sipila will chair the pre-conference workshop, “Subscriber data – A goldmine of opportunity for mobile operator marketing.” The agenda for the session includes the following talks:

10.00 Subscriber social networks, social Influence and 3D customer profiling
10.30 Making it easy for the operator to utilise social intelligence for business
11.30 Monetising with social intelligence

In addition, on day two of the conference, Wednesday 10 June, Sipila will deliver a presentation titled “Social network intelligence: Utilising customer data effectively in marketing,” at 10:20am. The presentation will discuss topics including:

• The ‘active’ footprints that users leave behind in social media and how they can be analysed for improved, more individually relevant, marketing and advertising
• Mining the stories that customer data can tell an advertiser, and the sometimes-competing goal of maintaining user privacy

To schedule a one-to-one briefing with Xtract, or to obtain a copy of the presentations, please use the press contact details below.

About IIR Business Intelligence Conference
Held in the Hotel Okura, Amsterdam, Netherlands from Monday 8 June to Thursday 11 June, the conference will include speakers from companies including O2, Orange, Amdocs, Vodafone and Xtract. The programme will focus on practical strategies currently being deployed worldwide to optimise the planning, building and improvement of business intelligence.

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.

Press contact
Emily McDaid
emily(at)hatch-pr.com

Xtract listed as one of the hottest 100 private companies in Europe at 2008 Mediatech 100: http://www.libraryhouse.net/mediatech/2008/mediatech100/

Last night I had a great time listening to Marc Davis, Chief Scientist of Yahoo!, talking about the new developments that they have been cooking at Yahoo! However, the night was first started with two presentations from Idean, who also paid for the pints – thanks guys! So, where is all this free beer and good talks? At MobileMonday, which returned to the roots of where it all started – Molly Malone’s Irish bar in Helsinki.

Marc Davis at MobileMonday in Helsinki

Marc started his presentation of by outlining Yahoo!’s visions of how to combine social networking and mobile into something that is ubiquitous and easy to use and develop for. I’ve always viewed the mobile phone as very good tool for social networking. Of course, you can call your friends, but I’ve also been texting to them for over 10 years now by both SMS and email, nowadays I can do video calls from the mobile too. So how is that changing? Well, I guess it isn’t. We’re just adding more ways to communicate to the same device. Which, let’s face it, is not a mobile phone anymore, but the most personal computer you have.

Marc also told us about Australian Aboriginal tribe, the Achilpa. They carry a sacred pole with them all the time as they wander around the desert to find food and water. To them, the pole marks the center of the universe – Which is very convenient as they never get lost (unless the pole breaks). “Where ever you go, is the center of the universe. And your people are always with you.”

The mobile has definitely become our sacred pole. (What three things do you take with you always when you go outside your home?) If our modern pole breaks, or runs out of battery, we would be lost and without any contact to our people.

However, is it too easy to think that you are in contact with our friends and loved ones if you just check their Pulse? I sometimes think that we are becoming more and more like the people in Solaria, a world envisioned by Isaac Asimov. Solaria is a world that is extremely sparsely inhabited and the people never meet each other in person, only through holographic viewing systems. They even have strong phobia about meeting in person. Isn’t this the direction we are going? Soon all that is required is to broadcast yourself and read the Pulse of your friends? And, in the best or worst case – depending how you look at it, that Pulse is already filtered by some ingenious system that tells me what is important.
I hope not. However, even though it was very nice to go home and give my wife an old fashioned analog hug, I have to admit that I’ve been away from home so many times that to be able to send at least digital hugs is very welcome.

What about the bag of ideas? Well Marc gave a good presentation of new Yahoo! technologies, like BluePrint and Fire Eagle. Take a look, and I’m sure you will get some great ideas. I did.

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.