WCDMA 3G Wireless: Huawei e1750 
Service Provider: China Unicom
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The Smallthought staff has become part of Twitter’s analytics team, where they will integrate Trendly features and technology into Twitter’s existing systems, as well as help develop new products.
In April, Twitter launched with a limited number of partners like Starbucks and Best Buy the Promoted Tweets program, which is designed to let companies market their products and services on the popular microblogging and social-networking site.
As with all advertising services, a key to the success of Promoted Tweets will be Twitter’s capacity to analyze the popularity and effectiveness of these ads so that campaigns can be evaluated and optimized.
The analytics for Promoted Tweets may be more challenging than for other online advertising programs for a few reasons, including the fact that the ad format for Promoted Tweets will be the same as the format for regular “tweets” and that Twitter’s usage is going through the roof, with 2 billion “tweets” posted in May, according to Web monitoring company Pingdom.
“Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service,” reads Twitter’s announcement of its Smallthought acquisition.
Credit & Resource: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/061010-twitter-buys-analytics.html
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Google Analytics does a great job of collecting your data, but it does a bad job of helping you understand it. For example, at Dabble DB, we are very interested in how many people come to us after searching for online database. Here’s what that keyword’s traffic looks like for the first few months of 2009:
It’s definitely going up and down a lot, but we don’t really care about daily fluctuation, we care about the trend. On average, how many people should we expect each day? And is that changing?
Trendly uses a statistical model to answer that question for us. It assumes that our traffic is going to stay the same for days, weeks, or even months at a time, but every once in a while something is going to change — like our ranking for “online database” improving, sending more people our way. The red line shows how Trendly sees this keyword over the same time period:
According to Trendly, our daily visitors from “online database” went up from 24 to 40 in early January, and then again up to 50 in early February. It reports these changes as items in a news feed:
By boiling several months of data down to a couple of items in a news feed, Trendly helps us keep on top of many different things at once. For example, this same feed actually tracks all of our search keywords:
You can see that our traffic from searches for co-founder Avi Bryant had a bump at the end of January (around the time he gave a talk at CUSEC), but went back down again. The sparklines beside each news item show those patterns concisely.
The news feed is continuous, and shows up to three years of history. If we want to see the earlier change to “online database”, we just scroll down a few weeks:
The news feed does a great job of showing what’s changed, but it’s nice to put those individual keywords into a wider context. A chart running down the left provides the big picture:
The chart is locked to the same timescale as the news feed — and so, unlike most charts, time runs vertically. Each colored layer in the chart represents a single keyword. For example, the big green layer represents visits from “online database”. If I click on either the chart or the news item, the layer will pop out:
You can see how the green layer gets wider at the same time as the news item appears. The wider the layer, the more visits we get each day. The wider the chart as a whole — the sum of all the layers — the more visits we get in total from search. You can also see that Trendly tries to make things more meaningful by clustering similar keyword phrases together: The popup for “online database” shows that, while most (86%) of the searches in this cluster are for exactly “online database”, there are less frequent similar phrases that are also being included here, like “make an online database”.
Trendly isn’t just for tracking keywords. It has feeds for many of the reports you’re used to from Google Analytics: referrals, content, ad campaigns, and more. If you use goal tracking or ecommerce, Trendly also helps you track those:
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http://news.techworld.com/data-centre/3228389/windows-azure-versus-amazon-ec2/
By Jon Brodkin | Network World US | Published: 10:36 GMT, 28 June 10
Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud tackle two very different cloud computing technology problems today, but are destined to emulate each other over time, Microsoft cloud official Tim O’Brien says.
Whereas Windows Azure is a platform-as-a-service cloud, giving developers the tools they need to build and deploy web applications, Amazon EC2 is primarily an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud, offering on-demand access to customisable virtual machine instances.
Azure simplifies the building of web applications in a way that Amazon does not, but Amazon’s cloud-based virtual machines have the benefit of working with multiple programming models, O’Brien says, predicting that over time Microsoft will move more into infrastructure-as-a-service and Amazon will cross over into platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
O’Brien, senior director of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group, discussed his take on the cloud market in an interview with Network World, as well as a public presentation at the recent Cloud Leadership Forum, hosted by IDC and IDG Enterprise.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” O’Brien said in the interview. “The reason people like infrastructure-as-a-service is because it’s programming model agnostic. The bare metal VM doesn’t care what language you wrote the application in, it doesn’t matter what tools you use and what run times you’ve targeted. If it runs on Windows or Linux, give it a virtual machine and it will run just fine. The problem is it’s a lot of extra work. You’re responsible for that virtual machine the same way you’re responsible for a server sitting under your desk. You’re responsible for turning it on. You’re responsible for turning it off. You’re responsible for applying a patch or an update. If Red Hat applies a Linux patch, and you have a Linux VM running on Amazon, you have to apply that patch yourself. They won’t do that for you.”
But there are shortcomings in the platform-as-a-service model as well, O’Brien acknowledges. The biggest problem with PaaS may be difficulty migrating existing applications from the internal data centre to the cloud.
“Platform-as-a-service has a different set of trade-offs,” O’Brien says. “All of that stuff is completely abstracted away, it’s a friction-free development, you basically code up an application, you hit deploy and it’ll go run on the platform that’s supplied by those run times. So in our case its PHP, C Sharp, in the case of Google App Engine it’s Python and Java.” While building new applications is easy, and removes the need for owning internal hardware and software, other than a Web browser, “part of the challenge there is it’s not necessarily optimal for migrating existing applications.”
Microsoft has already announced that “at some point [in the next 12 months] we will be offering the ability to provision a bare-metal VM, and run your application on that,” O’Brien says. While Amazon provides a variety of Windows and Linux virtual machine images through EC2, the company’s Web Services business offers a variety of other tools that might be useful to developers, including databases, storage services and load balancing.
O’Brien predicts that just as Microsoft moves into IaaS, Amazon will build a PaaS offering that more closely resembles Azure than anything Amazon offers today. Amazon’s public relations department could not be reached for comment Friday.
“It’s not a matter of one is better than the other; they accomplish different things,” O’Brien says. “But I think what you’ll see happen in the marketplace is a convergence of those two, where infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Amazon will move up the stack toward platform-as-a-service. You’ll also see PaaS providers like Microsoft provide some of that infrastructure-like capability, just so we can handle those migration scenarios much easier, and the lines will get blurred.”
In his speech at the Cloud Leadership Forum, O’Brien said public cloud services are generally not providing as much customization as customers want, but the cloud model is gaining popularity both among users who want to sidestep their companies’ IT departments, and from small businesses that want to get out of the IT business.
Many small businesses “don’t want to be in the IT business,” O’Brien said. “Private cloud is not in their vocabulary. They want to run their businesses on PCs and mobile phones and get out of the IT business entirely.”
Private clouds simply don’t offer the same economies of scale as public clouds do, he said, claiming that per-server TCO in a 100,000-server data centre is less than half the per-server TCO in a 1,000-server data centre.
Microsoft’s goal in the cloud is to offer customers the same functionality they would expect if they install the software themselves, he said. “If you can write an app for Windows Server you should be able to write an app for Windows Azure,” O’Brien said.
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