Press Releases

Xtract’s superior social analytics tool helps operators drive revenue and reduce churn

FINLAND, 16 February, 2010 – Xtract, the leading provider of social intelligence-based analytics solutions, announced today an upgrade to its flagship social intelligence platform, Social Links. Social Links enables network operators to analyse the behaviours and interactions of mobile subscribers within the network, helping them to monitor and identify the best targets for revenue generating targeted messaging campaigns. Key benefits of the new platform include product launch capabilities for totally new kinds of products, increased personalisation features and new dashboard reporting functionality, allowing operators to effectively monitor churn virality across the mobile network. Social Links is already helping operators worldwide and in one recent case gave the selected operator a percentage product take-up almost 4 times that of the competition.

Mobile subscribers increasingly seek to engage with more applications and enriched services. Industry analysts predict the app download market to generate revenue of up to $4.2 billion by 2013[1] and research predicts that mobile application store users will quadruple to more than 100 million in five years[2]. This presents a major revenue-generation opportunity for operators. On the other hand, churn continues to be a major threat, especially in volatile prepaid markets. Randomly or poorly targeted marketing will result in a lost opportunity in both cases. Xtract has seen several examples in prepaid markets, where incentivising subscribers, who were not going to churn, with campaign offers actually destroys secured revenue. Another recent phenomenon has been to launch new services to subscribers with SNA, but relying only on non-contextual influencers to drive the launch virally – leading to failure.

Xtract believes that successful targeting relies on the operator’s ability to analyse a combination of a mobile subscribers’ propensity to do something, combined with their influence within the fabric of the network. The analysis of mobile subscribers’ social context aware propensity to do something, combined with their influence has proven itself in Xtract’s Social Links platform. It allows operators to effectively harness key influencing factors of customer pull and target even subscriber groups that have traditionally been more challenging to reach, particularly the pre-paid market which makes up 77% of global subscriber share. Social Links also allows operators to benefit from the value of demographic prediction capabilities in targeting pre-paid subscribers, as well as the power of predictive social network analytics (SNA) in churn prevention, new product launches and the top-up marketing required for operators to retain a loyal pre-paid subscriber base.

“Over the past twelve months, we have witnessed a shift in industry perception in the value of social network analytics, as the idea has evolved from initial hype and buzz of conception through to a mature, valuable network asset. As a result, many operators are beginning to recognise the business benefits of analytics as a solution to unlocking the gates to previously untapped revenue y,” said Mika Lindholm, CEO, Xtract. “As leader in this continually developing space, Xtract is ideally placed to forge the way in driving increased awareness of its value and benefits. Our platform allows us to build further on the success of our pioneering technology, enabling mobile operators to expose and harness the value of subscriber network interactions and drive valuable revenue opportunities through a combination of greater understanding, sophisticated product marketing and targeted, personalised campaigns.”

The key benefits of Social Links 3.5 include:
• Product launch capability: Operators are able to use analytics for the launch of more targeted, novel kinds of products
• Tagging targets: The predictive analytics of Social Links produces a scoring list for campaign targeting. Social Links analyses subscribers in the target list, and targets with specific features can be tagged to further personalise messages, media and offers for smaller subgroups. New dashboard reporting on churn virality in the operator’s network.

1) Yankee Group, ‘Forecasting The U.S. Mobile App Gold Rush’, www.yankeegroup.com
2) In Stat, ‘The Apps Store is Born: Smartphones Enable New Marketing and Advertising Opportunities Worldwide’, www.instat.com

About Xtract and Social Links
Xtract is the leading provider of Social Intelligence based analytic solutions and services to mobile operators. Its tools analyse the wealth of customer profile and service usage data to predict the propensity of subscribers and those in their social network to either churn or increase spend, and influence others to do likewise. Consumer behavior is analysed on a far deeper level than by using historical data alone, also gaining insight into and understanding how customers communicate with each other, and who are the most influential in the network. Xtract also provides custom analytics to other verticals especially in the Finnish market. The core offering is dynamic segmentation based on rich data feeds, with other applications include optimization and fraud detection.

Xtract Contact:
Sari Aapola
Email: Sari.Aapola@xtract.com

PR Agency Contacts:
Chrissie McGoldrick
Email: cmcgoldrick@miliberty.com
Tel: 00 44 207 751 4444

Elena Dunn
Email: edunn@miliberty.com
Tel: 00 44 207 751 4444

Helsinki, Finland and London, England – 4 November 2009 – Xtract today announced the GSMA has shortlisted the company for its innovative flagship social intelligence product, Social Links, for the Mobile Innovation Asia Grand Prix Award for the second year in a row. Social Links is used by mobile operators to help them gain more value from their customers through improved churn management and product marketing campaigns, as well as more targeted customer acquisition strategies. This year’s accolade demonstrates the evolution from the great vision behind Xtract’s product to real implementations that are currently achieving vastly improved marketing campaigns for mobile operators. The Mobile Innovation Grand Prix award showcases promising entrepreneurs from small and medium-sized companies bringing innovative new products and services to market.

“It’s been a big year for Xtract Social Links as it evolves to bring real innovation, especially in the areas of churn management and product marketing, to mobile operators from around the world,” said Timo Laaksonen, CEO at Xtract. “We have also made Social Links available as a service with improved graphical interfaces. The GSMA’s recognition is an even greater honour this year, as our product matures and achieves real results for operator marketing.”

Winners of the Mobile Innovation Grand Prix APAC Tournament will be presented at the forthcoming GSMA Mobile Asia Congress, which is taking place in Hong Kong, China from 18-19 November. Xtract will be present at the conference at booth MI11.

About Xtract Social Links
Social Links is the first commercial soft¬ware that uses social network analytic¬s to improve mobile operators’ own 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 targeting and deep insight.

Social Links offers benefits for mobile operators’ marketers, campaign designers, product managers, analysts and CRM managers. The information pro¬vided is used in highly accurate targeting, and gaining customer insight for cam¬paign and product planning. Social Links also supports subscriber lifetime valuation and campaign design. Social Links is available either as licensed software or as a fully managed service, Social Links On-Demand.

About Xtract
Xtract (www.xtract.com) refines social interaction, behaviour and demographic data about mobile subscribers, enabling operators to utilise data as a dynamic tool in their 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

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