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Mobile Web Usage Insight with Bango VP Sarah Keefe

August 29, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Earlier this week Bango announced that the United States will soon pass the UK in terms of mobile web usage. Finding the topic of mobile web usage very intriguing I thought I would get some first hand insight regarding the latest news from Bango’s VP of Marketing, Sarah Keefe.

[Manoj]: What’s caused the recent increase in mobile web in the US?

[Sarah Keefe]: The two biggest factors are the roll-out of a great choice of data plans by all the major mobile operators in the US and the iPhone effect. The “All you can eat” plans are proving very attractive as they are priced at an affordable level and stimulate mobile browsing. Thanks to the iPhone, people now realize that they can surf the web from their phone and now that the majority of US phones come internet-enabled, it’s opening up the whole world of mobile browsing. Of course, more data friendly devices featuring higher resolution screens and faster 3G networks all helps.

[Manoj]: Do you believe the US and UK will jockey for postion for a while or will the US take the outright lead for the unforeseeable future

[Sarah Keefe]: The UK has punched above it’s weight considering the small size of the market when compared to the US. As the total UK population is the same size as the Sprint network, we feel the US market will take the outright lead from September onwards. The US population is 5 times as big as the UK so there’s a huge potential for growth in the US.

[Manoj]: It appears that there is a lot of mobile web usage in Asia, especially in India, which at 10.8% means a LOT of users.

[Sarah Keefe]: Internet usage outside of North Amerca and Europe is growing and at some point, countries with huge populations such as India and China could overtake the US at some stage. But we don’t see this happening in the short-term.


[Manoj]: How much growth are you expecting to see in mobile web usage globally in the next year and will it take away from traditional internet usage?

[Sarah Keefe]: It’s hard to say exactly how much this will grow as markets like the US have a large potential for growth and countries where internet access is not easily available because of poor landline infrastructure will experience growth too as people find they can access the internet on their phones. Even where PC internet is widely available as in the US, browsing will shift to the mobile. If you look at broadcasters like NBC and the BBC who covered the Olympics this month, then they will have seen an increase in online usage but the real growth will have been to their mobile sites.

[Manoj]: What are the differences between mobile usage in North America vs. Europe vs. Asia?

[Sarah Keefe]: They are surprisingly similar as people have the same interests across the geographies, mainly driven by entertainment – sport, news, music, games and some phone personalization. In the more advanced Asian markets like Korea and Japan, we see more multiplayer mobile games and social networking than we now have in Europe and North America – these are big drivers for mobile usage

Filed Under: bango, Mobile Analytics

WebTrends: China Beats US Broadcasters in Online Traffic During Beijing Olympics

August 29, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Daily online traffic on the web site of China’s largest broadcaster surpassed that of the leading U.S. broadcaster and online channel during the Olympics, according to WebTrends Analytics.

Spurred by national pride and massive growth in Internet adoption in China, CCTV.com, the site run by national broadcaster China Central TV, drew more than 100 million unique visitors during the 2008 Olympic Games. WebTrends Analytics documented an average of more than 6 million unique visitors each day. In comparison, NBC, which maintained broadcast rights to the Games in the United States, reported an average of 4.3 million unique users a day on its Olympics web site. Yahoo!, which also featured extensive online video from the Olympics, averaged 4.7 million, according to media accounts.

“The Beijing Olympics marked the coming of age for the Internet in China,” said Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrends, a leading provider of web analytics and online marketing solutions. “CCTV.com attracted more than 100 million online visitors for the Olympic Games by providing the right content at the right time for a large and ever-growing online audience.”


CCTV.com offered more than 3,800 hours of live Olympics webcasts and more than 20,000 additional hours of news, replays and video-on-demand programs throughout the Olympics. WebTrends Analytics, the gold standard for measurement and analysis of large-scale and global web site traffic, uncovered the following visitor highlights and trends:

  • An increase of more than 2.5 minutes in the average time each visitor remained on CCTV.com, to nearly 11.5 minutes during the Olympics.
  • The opening ceremonies and other activities on Aug. 8 generated the most traffic on any single day, nearly 8.5 million visits. Aug. 9 and Aug. 18, the day Chinese athlete Liu Xiang was scheduled to race in the 110 meter hurdles, attracted the second and third highest visitor counts, respectively.
  • The busiest hour of online traffic was from 11 a.m. to noon on Aug. 18. Nearly 900,000 visits were tallied during the hour in which Xiang was scheduled to race. The second busiest hour was during the opening ceremonies.
Filed Under: Web Analytics, WebTrends

BooRah: Semantic Restaurant Search

August 28, 2008 By 2 Comments
BooRah is a restaurant search site that employs NLP to extract sentiment from the wide swath of online reviews across the Internet, bringing to you the bad (“Boo”) and good (“Rah”) aspects of a restaurant.

The BooRah platform uses patent-pending Natural Language Processing technology to generate quantitative scores for domain specific attributes from plain English text, automatic summaries from most relevant user sentiments and enables a highly customizable search based on personal preferences. This technology can be extended way beyond restaurants and will revolutionize the concept of business and service search.

Review coverage & Ratings:

BooRah aggregates reviews form a wide variety of sources – blogs, local newspapers, consumer review sites, and professional critics. Each review is semantically analyzed and sentiment references to food (specific dishes, taste, presentation), service, and ambiance are collected. Such type of content analysis helps consumers customize their searches and provides relevant results for long tail queries. E.g when you search for good “Pad Thai in San Francisco”, the system essentially gives you a list of restaurants with the most number of positive references for “Pad Thai”, not just keyword matches for “pad thai”.

Here are a few other examples of long tail queries that rank highly in top search engines: best foie gras San Francisco, best calamari Palo Alto, best deep dish pizza in Chicago. Such content pages not only rank highly in major search engines, they can also be used to enhance their organic search results. For instance, BooRah’s award winning SearchMonkey application enhances organic restaurant search results on Yahoo. With BooRah’s SearchMonkey application added to your profile, you will notice an enhanced result for boorah.com links within Yahoo search results. Here are a couple of examples:

BooRah also offers a browser search plugin to make restaurant search even easier. Simply install our plugin and turn your browser into a restaurant search engine.

Accurate ratings for food, service, ambiance and concise representative summaries also enable an optimized mobile browsing experience. Mobile users can simply browse to BooRah.com to experience our simple, yet very effective mobile optimized site.

SMS search: Text “boorah your search term” to 4INFO (44636) to receive results via SMS E.g.: “boorah pho mountain view”

Utility links

We have aggregated hundreds of thousands of useful links so you don’t have to go looking for restaurant discounts, online reservations, or menus. See for yourself: reservations in Palo Alto, discounts in New York, online menus in Los Angeles

Happy Searching!

Filed Under: Local Search

SharePoint Splits Enterprise Market – CMS Watch

August 27, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The rise of Microsoft SharePoint as the predominant departmental portal solution has led to two divergent reactions among traditional enterprise portal suppliers, with IBM, Oracle, and SAP now dividing up the top tier of the marketplace while a plethora of open source alternatives are expanding rapidly to compete directly with SharePoint, according to research undertaken by CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies.

At the top tier, Oracle acquired two more portal products via BEA, but has now positioned its Oracle WebCenter Suite offering as the strategic choice for the future, while IBM continues to expand WebSphere Portal Server. Oracle and IBM have taken to emphasizing complex, enterprise integration scenarios that SharePoint typically cannot meet. “Both vendors are also betting heavily that new Web 2.0 features will keep their portal offerings relevant,” notes CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne, “But many customers remain quite properly wary of extra portal overhead within their social computing projects.”

Meanwhile open source portal projects continue to expand vigorously. “Open source communities increasingly tout themselves as an alternative to SharePoint for simpler scenarios,” points out CMS Watch contributing analyst Janus Boye. Apache, eXo, Liferay, and uPortal have all recently undergone major upgrades.

This analysis stems from research CMS Watch conducted for its recently released “Enterprise Portals Report 2009,” which evaluates twelve portal solutions head-to-head.

CMS Watch also found:

  • SAP has also begun promoting the “Web 2.0″ features of its portal, but remains substantially behind its competitors in this regard.
  • The ranks of commercial portal vendors have shrunk, with Broadvision, ATG, PeopleSoft, and CA having exited the portal marketplace. Longtime vendor Vignette is increasingly bundling its portal offering with its other content management tools in a broader package.
Filed Under: Uncategorized

Google Continuously Experimenting to Provide a Better Experience

August 27, 2008 By 2 Comments
Ben Gomes over at the Google Blog posted about how Google continuously runs experiments on its results pages in order to further enhance the experience of users. Gomes wrote that Google runs anywhere from 50-200 experiments on Google sites across the world. The interesting part of the post is the examples of past experiments that Google has run where the experiments are so subtle that it’s very difficult to notice the difference between A and B.

Below is one example that Ben Gomes provides, can you spot the difference?

In this case, the difference in user interaction is so clear and marked we could tell extremely quickly which one worked better: the difference is in the thickness of the plus box next to the stock quote. Now, coming to the conclusion that one is “better” is tricky, and there’s many a possible slip on the way there. Does more interaction with the plus box mean that it is better? How about if users then miss good results because they are distracted by the more prominent plus box? If we’ve done our job right, almost without your noticing, things will work just that little bit better for you.

Filed Under: Google

US Will Soon Pass UK in Mobile Usage Says Bango

August 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Mobile web data release by Bango today confirms that mobile web usage not only is gaining traction in the United States but soon will surpass the United Kingdom, where consumers have accessed the Internet from phones for years.

According to Bango data, the top five countries accessing the mobile web via Bango in July 2008 are the UK at 19.35%, the US at 18.88%, India at 10.82%, South Africa at 8.82% and Indonesia at 4.08%. Bango identifies users by country and network of origin. The ranking is produced by measuring the number of user visits to mobile websites from each country.

“The USA share of the browsing market has grown as an increasing number of phones come with bigger screens and service contracts that include unlimited Internet access,” said Adam Kerr, VP of Bango North America at Bango. “We fully expect the US will overtake the UK in this ranking as early as this month.”

As the mobile web grows in the United States, so does interest from US business. Forrester Research told the Wall Street Journal last month, for example, that the number of inquiries it received from businesses and service providers wanting to talk about the mobile web jumped 40% last year.

“We predicted 2008 would be a pivotal year for the mobile web in the US, and our data is backing that up. Clearly the rate of growth and acceleration is getting faster in the US and around the world,” continued Kerr.

Filed Under: bango, Mobile Analytics, Mobile Marketing

Blogger: Beyond The Basics, Review and Chat with Author

August 25, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Are you considering blogging as a hobby or part time/full time professional career and aren’t sure whether or not to add Blogger to your shortlist of blogging platforms? Well, I suggest you take a look at a recently published booked by Lee Jordan titled, “Blogger: Beyond the Basics.” Jordan touches on every aspect of Blogger including customized templates, integrating RSS/Social bookmarking, working with your blog’s HTML code, linking and adding widgets. In addition to the step by step by examples mentioned in all the chapters, the book comes with a CD so you can easily try out the examples on your own blog.

Blogger: Beyond the Basics, actually starts out by discussing how you can leverage blogs and how to predefine the goals for your blog – which really helps ads some focus before you dive in head first. Coming from a search marketing background, I really appreciated how Jordan took this book to the next level and clearly explained how to apply search engine optimization strategies to improve the performance of your blog and how to use Google Analytics to measure all aspects of your blog. Get your copy of the book here.

I got an opportunity to catch up with the author, Lee Jordan, to get her thoughts on why she wrote the book, who the book is targeted towards, and the benefits of using Blogger.

[Manoj]: What was the inspiration behind writing “Blogger – Beyond the Basics”

[Lee Jordan]: I fell into writing this book. Dave, the acquisitions editor at Packt asked what I thought about an advanced book about Blogger. After looking around I realized it had been about a year (a long time in blogging years) since a book covering advanced topics for Blogger had come out. There had been so many changes too. Blogger had moved to a “new” XML based template structure and was rapidly adding new social media features. I subscribe to the Blogger help list on Google Groups and saw many frustrated people having problems with the same topics over and over. It was a great opportunity to give back to the blogging community and learn more myself.

[Manoj]: Who is the book targeted towards?

[Lee Jordan]: The book is targeted towards people who already know the basics of blogging with Blogger and are now ready to do more advanced work on their blog. Popular advanced topics include transforming a basic template into the three column one, adding custom colors and graphics to the template, adding customized modules, and search engine optimization.

[Manoj]: Is Blogger a legitimate platform for people to use for business?

[Lee Jordan]: You do not have to be a programmer or a web designer to use Blogger successfully. Features include multiple users, customizable templates, podcast and videocast support, and an easy to use administration area.Blogger has a custom domain feature which allows well known corporations such as GirlScouts.org to host the backend of their blog on Blogger and customize it to match the rest of their site. The integration of Blogger with Feedburner, Google Analytics, and YouTube means a business can quickly set up a social media blog. The developers of Blogger are constantly working on improvements and new features. Add in the vibrant help community on Google Groups and you have an active support system for businesses and entrepreneurs who blog.

[Manoj]: How does Blogger compare against other platforms such as WordPress/Typepad

[Lee Jordan]: All three make it easy to post. The real differences come with features, administration, and templates. Blogger is best for those who want someone else to deal with keeping the blog software updated and are looking for an inexpensive way to start blogging. WordPress and Typepad are better for people who have a technical resource or the time to keep up with software patches.

Blogger does not come with a wide range of templates for businesses that can be customized, but makes it very easy to manage modules and other features. The WordPress interface has an extensive number of templates, but managing the blog requires multiple administration dashboards, some hidden where the beginner would have difficulty finding them. It also does not give hosted users the option to use a rich text editor for text modules. Typepad has great commenting features, but I haven’t seen many new things happening with it feature wise.

[Manoj]: The biggest advantages Blogger has is ease of administration and flexibility. Another advantage is Blogger blogs are free. You can easily add modules and do not have to pay additional fees to edit the CSS or perform other customizations. WordPress users who want to customize or add modules are better off downloading a copy of the WordPress platform and hosting it themselves to avoid paying for the right to edit the CSS files or install modules. This will require paying for a domain name and a hosting provider, but it may cost less in the long run.

[Manoj]: If you could pick out 3 or 4 main objectives or lessons readers should get from this book, what should they be?

[Lee Jordan]:

  1. Create a “mission statement” – Plan the focus of your blog to guide you when making decisions about how it looks, content, and interactivity.
  2. Generate useful content focused on visitors – Don’t be afraid to “go deep” on a particular feature or process. Blogs are a great medium for creating a library of information over time.
  3. Set a schedule for posting and updates and keep to it. Consistency over time is crucial in establishing a fan base and maintaining a track record of content with search engines
  4. Optimize your blog for search engines using “White hat” techniques and visit the search engine guides of Google and other major search engines regularly for changes

[Manoj]: How has blogger grown and developed as a platform in the last 2-3 years.

[Lee Jordan]: Originally Blogger lacked many of the features such as linkbacks that users of WordPress and Typepad took for granted. It was a basic blogging platform for beginners. It has matured into a rich and robust platform with many options and tools for bloggers of every level, from beginner to expert. The greatest changes have happened over the last year, with more features added than can be listed here.

Filed Under: Blogger, Blogging, SEO