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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

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 29 May 2009 - Xtract co-founder Jouko Ahvenainen will deliver the opening speech at London’s Mobile Web 2.0 Summit on 3rd June, at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in Knightsbridge. In his presentation, titled “Mobile 2.0 Business - how to fund and monetise the new ecosystem,” Jouko will discuss how mobile and web operators can make money from social media and the 2.0 revolution, while steering clear of strategies that don’t work such as contextual advertising on social media platforms.

Jouko’s presentation will discuss:
- Delivering advertising over ‘hot’ media that users get involved with, including Wikipedia and Facebook, versus ‘cold’ media such as one-way broadcasting
- Social networkingis about people, not content. Social sites are places to make connections with others, and advertisers must understand the people behind the networks to best leverage the opportunities they provide
- The ‘active’ footprints that users leave behind in social media and how they can be analysed for improved, more individually relevant, marketing and advertising
- 2.0 monetisation and the sometimes-competing goal of maintaining user privacy

About Mobile Web 2.0 Summit
Speakers from companies including Xtract, Orange, Microsoft, Admob, Flirtomatic, Symbian and Telefonica will help lead the two-day conference, focusing on monetising the next generation of the mobile web, via a roundtable format.

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
Hatch PR
emily(at)hatch-pr.com

An Alpha is similar to a champion or an influencer. Nevertheless, in addition to having high influence and links in the community, the Alpha also has high probability to buy some of your products, acquire more customers or churn away. So, there are different kinds of Alphas and today I want to tell you how we find the Acquisition Alphas.

For Customer Acquisition, we use highly advanced analytics software that can process billions of data points. This powerful software is highly accurate. We find exactly those subscribers that have the highest potential to recruit new ones from another network. We take into account their influence level and number of off-net (out of your network) friends.

The illustration shows subscribers that have high or low influence and that might have off-net friends. Xtract identifies that the subscriber with the green circle has off-net friends (the ones in yellow) as well as high recruiting influence. This means that she would be the best target for your member-get-member campaign.

Finding the Alphas in your customer base is like finding gold in a goldmine. Remember! You need your Alphas and you need to treat them well.

With less than three week’s experience at Xtract I can already say that this company is working in an incredibly exciting area – especially for anyone involved in marketing. For years I’ve listened to discussions and read about customer insight, and working to delight customers through real understanding. Yet, marketing has not changed dramatically. Now the emergence of social media is actually forcing a turnaround – consumers are really becoming subjects instead of objects, and the Importance of word-of-mouth is becoming clear to all marketers. I feel privileged to work as part of this.

I’m Sari Aapola, and I was recently appointed VP for Product Management at Xtract. My background is in BtoB marketing and product marketing, and mostly in telecoms and software companies such as Tecnomen and Basware. I’ve recently spent two years in Germany, and one of my projects there was writing a book called “Sustainable Thought Leadership – how to build awareness and credibility to support business”. In it I present a model especially for growth companies with great innovations on becoming thought leaders in their category and target group. I’m now thrilled to work in a thought leader company, promoting its ambition to take its innovative solutions to benefit customers. The book will be out in a few weeks’ time…

A new version of Xtract Social Links was introduced at the Mobile World Congress in February. It includes great improvements, especially as its new interface helps marketers to take full advantage of the product. For the further development of our offering, I’m looking forward to a dialogue with our customers, real insight that will help us delight our customer over and over again.

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!

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.

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.

Xtract was the runner up of a public voting to select Finland’s Most Promising Growth Company. View a 2 minutes elevator pitch for the jury by founders Kimmo Kiviluoto and Jouko Ahvenainen at the Helsingin Sanomat event yesterday. In Finnish only.

Xtract is shortlisted in Helsingin Sanomat’s (the leading Finnish Newspaper in Helsinki) voting where the paper looks for the most promising Finnish growth company. They have an article about all 10 finalists on next Sunday. They have also articles about the companies in the Internet and readers can vote, which of the companies is the most promising to become a leading international company. The companies are shortlisted by the leading Finnish VC’s and business professionals. They have commented that Xtract has fast growth and leading technology and competence. You can find the voting here.

Google has published their mobile and social network platform plans during the last week. Not so many surprises.

OpenSocial is quite natural next move from a company that wants to collect a lot of data. Social networking platform is a valuable source of behavior and social network data. And it is much more than have one or two social sites. The main concept with mobile has similar objectives. Who will dominate mobile usage and social data in the future. And finally who will prevail in digital media marketing.

But is it so simple that one company can prevail all relevant data in the future. Is it even possible that one company can collect all data when there will be more and more data all the time everywhere? I believe they can collect a lot of data. But on the other hand I believe that the services and data will be much more de-centralized in the future.

Intelligence comes nearer users and user devices. Smart analytics, customer profiling, and social intelligence come also to terminals (PC or mobile). The best solution to challenge Google is not to try to collect more data, but to have more intelligence to utilize the data. And this kind of analytics and advertising solutions help media and mobile companies to challenge Google.