This past year has certainly been the year of analytics acquisitions. First went Omniture, next Coremetrics, then Unica and now NedStat. comScore has acquired Dutch web analytics software: NedStat, to unify their digital management platform. Nedstat went at a price tag of over $36 million. This move by comScore further proves the importance of measurement in online strategy, furthermore analytics as a part of of a holistic strategy which should include things like: voice of customer and competitive intelligence. comScore also purchased mobile analytics company: Nexius earlier this year - another complimentary product to web analytics.

Part of the Press Release below:

"The acquisition of Nedstat is another important step towards fulfilling our vision of making the Unified Digital Measurement platform the global standard for digital measurement," said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore President & CEO. "In addition, our clients are asking for a new class of business applications to maximize the monetization of their audiences using the UDM data we already collect.

"We are excited to join forces with comScore, a recognized global leader in digital measurement," said Michael Kinsbergen, CEO of Nedstat. "comScore's 'Unified Digital Measurement' platform presents a compelling vision of the future of digital measurement, and we are eager to play a vital role in helping to make that vision a reality. We believe that Nedstat web analytics can add substantial value for clients when combined with the existing comScore measurement platform."
Upon the acquisition, Nedstat became a wholly owned subsidiary of comScore. Mr. Kinsbergen will be helping in the transition and will continue to be involved by joining comScore's advisory board. In addition, Fred Appelman, Nedstat's Chief Technology Officer, and Michiel Berger, Nedstat's co-founder and Chief Innovations Officer, will join comScore in senior strategy and technology roles.

comScore believes that the Nedstat acquisition will contribute approximately $4 million of additional revenue for the remainder of 2010. comScore anticipates that due to transaction-related expenses and transaction-related accounting adjustments the transaction will be dilutive to 2010 GAAP and non-GAAP net income, but accretive to quarterly GAAP and non-GAAP net income within the first half of 2011.

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Family reunions and quick getaways have become a Labor Day tradition for most people, but which apps work best for taking holiday trips? Grip’d.com spent several months testing various apps on each platform to see which ones make Gripd.com’s top five travel apps. If you have an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone, here’s a quick rundown of the best 5 travel apps:

Weatherbug – The simplicity of Apple’s Weather app, but with a few extras for your phone. It’s the largest network of professional weather stations in the US and is the only source for truly live, local weather (as taken from their site).

BePut - enables users to share their whereabouts with people they want to find them. Users simply use the application to locate their exact position and with a touch of a button, have the opportunity to send an email or text message to the desired recipient with their exact location. The recipient gets a special FindMe Key which is secure. The only guaranteed way to not get lost.

Car Care & Roadside Emergencies - I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate it when things don’t go according to the plan. You have this important presentation, and you end up with a flat tire in an express way. Or maybe you are trying to get home from a concert, and your car doesn’t start up. These situations happen all the time, and they usually tend to happen when you expect them the least. Now some of us have a knack for breaking and fixing things as far as cars are concerned.

Waze - Waze is a social mobile application that enables drivers to build and use real-time road intelligence. The service includes constantly-updated road maps, alerts on traffic and accidents, and data providing users with the fastest route to get to wherever they need to go. Map and traffic updates are automatically collected and generated as users drive with Waze activated, but drivers can also actively report and update other users with what's happening on the road.

Shazam – In the car for hours and can’t figure out the song playing on the radio? When you hear a song and wonder what it is, Shazam is there with the answer. Hold your iPhone to the music and within seconds Shazam will tell you the artist and track name. You can even download the song through iTunes on your iPhone.

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Apple's revolutionary tablet computer, the iPad, was announced January 27, 2010. The iPad Wi-Fi version was first released on April 3, 2010. The 3G version was released April 30, 2010. In the first 80 days, 3million units were sold. Projected sales for 2010 will be 10 million units worldwide. The iPad has been breaking sales records in a world wide recession. One can only wonder what sales would have been in better economic times.

Apple had to delay international release of the iPad due to overwhelming US demand for it. Apple released the iPad to nine countries on May 28, 2010. Preorders were available May 10, 2010. The nine countries are Germany, Great Britian, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and Australia.

On July 23, 2010, Apple released the iPad to Hong Kong, Singapore, Belguim, Netherlands, Mexico, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Austria, and Ireland.

For the US and international markets, 60% of sales were made to people aged 30 to 54 years old. One difference between US and international users is the level of interest in technology. US iPad owners are focused more on social media, video, and audio. International users are more interested in the more traditional computer applications such as web research and could computing.

Japan has shown special interest in the iPad. 50% of the computer and technology magazines featured iPad cover stories for May and June 2010. One of the most interesting demographic features of the Japanese market is the interest level among the elderly, age 55+. They like the iPad for its simplicity and forgiving nature in regards to mistakes.


About the author: James Mowery is a computer geek that writes about technology and related topics. To read more blog posts by him, go to laptop computers.

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Testing is an essential part of online strategies and Visual Website Optimizer is an ideal tool to help you get up and running with AB/Multivariate testing very quickly. I had a chance to chat with Founder, Paras Chopra to get his insight into Visual Website Optimizer.

Manoj:Give us the 'elevator pitch' on your technology.

Paras Chopra: Visual Website Optimizer is the world's easiest A/B and multivariate testing tool. Meant for marketers who want to take charge of conversion rate optimization for their business, the tool eliminating involvement of IT resources by removing all HTML code and integration hassles. Using the tool, a marketer can rapidly test headlines, images, buttons, forms, styling, layout etc. to find out the best converting version of the landing page and/or website. Till now 2000+ enterprises, small businesses and agencies have used the tool to increase sales and conversion rates by as much as 90%.

Manoj:Can you please highlight some of the features which provide the most value?

Paras Chopra: There are three main features in Visual Website Optimizer that provide most value. The first one is the tagless integration where you we require a user to upload a small snippet of code into his/her website only once and after that s/he can create unlimited number of (different kinds of) tests without needing to touch code ever again. So, we don't require the user to add separate code for separate sections of test or for different conversion goals. The single code snippet works any kind of test that a marketer might want to do. This saves a lot of time, that would have otherwise be spend in integrating every new test into the website.

The second valuable feature is the WYSIWYG editor which lets a marketer create variations using a familiar, MS-Word like interface. S/he is not required to know HTML or JavaScript while creating a test. This really speeds up the tests. So for an example, if you want to do a simple test involving button and headline change. You can select those sections in the visual test designer and then simply change the button and headline in WYSIWYG editor. That's it and you are done. No HTML; no technical complexities. Here is a screenshot:



Clickmaps and heatmaps is another feature that our customers love. In addition to quantitative conversion rate report, in our tool you also get access to a heatmap which shows visually which parts of your page (or test variation) gets mosts clicks. Our users love this report because it complements the conversion rate data they have and it shows other opportunities on page for optimization. Here is an example:



Manoj:What is your competitive advantage over similar technology?

Paras Chopra: Our competitive advantage is the usability of the tool, our focus on marketers and the price-point for the features we offer. Ours is the first and only tool that makes A/B and multivariate testing a fun and easy job. Fun because the tagless integration allows you to always keep testing your hypothesis without worrying about implementation. So, for example, if you want to do a quick test to finding out if 'Add to Cart' works better than 'Buy Now' you can create and execute that test in less than 10 minutes. And since reports are realtime you can instantly start getting feedback on your test variations. All these minor features that promote ease-of-use add up to make Visual Website Optimizer the only "marketer-friendly" testing tool out there.

Manoj:Who is your intended target market?

Paras Chopra: Our target market is divided into three segments: a) small/medium sized businesses who do testing in house; b) marketing agencies & consultancies; and c) large enterprises. Our current customer base is a mix of these three segments. Even though our focus has been one SMBs and agencies, we are starting to see great response from enterprises as well. For example, today we have Microsoft, Rackspace, 99Designs, Threadless, AWeber, amongst other enterprise users. In all we have 2000+ users (in first 6 months of launching).

Manoj:Tell us about new features/integrations/improvements that are on your product road map

Paras Chopra: Soon we are going to launch the report segmentation and targeting feature which will allow you to segment test results by different parameters: country, traffic source, search keyword, time of day, etc. So, you will be easily analyze if one of your variations works better for a particular segment (say visitors from UK who searched for "shoes"). That variation may not be overall winner but if it works best for a particular segment, we will then allow the user to setup targeting to always show that particular variation to that particular segment. We believe the segmentation and targeting feature will take our product to the next level because marketers and analysts will have all CRO resources and tools within a single application: testing, analyzing and targeting.

For SMBs and agencies, pricing plans range from $49-$249/month. For enterprises (or other users) with large traffic requirements, we have custom plans where the price typically ranges from $500-$3000 per month.

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If you're looking for a multivariate/landing page testing solution then I highly recommend you take a look at http://www.whichmvt.com/ (developed by the Conversion Rate Experts). WhichMVT is a complete guide to the most popular multivariate testing platforms available and provides information on each vendors such as: Price, Technology, Features, Support, and Reviews. Here is quick summary on what you can find on a few of the vendors:

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