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.