Salesforce Acquiring Jigsaw
Salesforce.com has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud, for approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.
Awesome move by Salesforce.
Integrating its CRM business software with Jigsaw’s cloud based data collection services, allows the company to enter the emerging cloud based B2B data services market & makes it a major player in the lead Generation market overnight.
“With Jigsaw, we’ll make it as easy as Wikipedia to source data, as easy as iTunes to buy data and as easy as Facebook to stay updated as the data changes.” – Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com.
The model makes especially good sense for B2B, as these decisions are more often data- and information-driven, not emotionally charged as the advertising-juiced B2C domain so often is. And more and more B2B purchases start and end with an online search.
Jigsaw are building the up-to-date meta directories of who’s who and what’s what online. The data is being contributed by us, the internet users – just by being online.
You want the benefits of the Internet, you give up some data about yourself along the way. If you want privacy, stay off the Internet. Businesses want to be known and to know about others. Such data is indispensable for modern businesses.
Maybe buyers and sellers enter into a more efficient data-driven lead generation process. The money now spent on advertising will be moving aggressively to the lead generation portion of the equation, where the ROI is precise and understood by all.
The lead generation economy does away with the murky nature of advertising’s true value and return. In a lead generation process, you spend X to get Y. All the variables are measured and adjustable — and it scales up as well as down.
Library Of Congress To Acquire Entire Twitter Archive
The U.S. Library of Congress, (the biggest library in the world) announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of public Twitter tweets since the inception of Twitter. The Library has a massive printed collection as well as an extensive collection of other digital assets.
Readwriteweb opines that:
“The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization’s offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big.”
Twitter Growth and Statistics Announced By Founders
Twitter organized a developer conference called Chirp, in SanFrancisco on Apr’14 – 15.
Here are few takeaways from Evan Williams’ (one of the founders) keynote.
Twitter statistics:
- Twitter has nearly 106 Million registered users
- 180 Million unique visitors.
- 300,000 signups per day
- 55 Million tweets/day
-
1500% growth each year for the last 3 years
- 75% of traffic comes from outside twitter.com, through 3rd party apps etc
- 3 Billion requests a Day via Twitter API
Twitter Priorities:
- 0 – Infrastructure
- 1 – Friction
- 2 – Relevance – realtime, most relevant info & geographic relevance
- 3 – Revenue – Organic, user-beneficial & eco-friendly
Twitter Goal:
Twitter goal is to grow the user base by enhancing basic twitter experience because it improves the context of the service.
What can we expect in the near future?
Ev revealed that twitter is going to be rolling out more location specific features. (something nearly similar to Foursquare & Gowalla, though he said “We’re not trying to duplicate Foursqare and Gowalla. What we care about is what is happening in that place. Not just where you are.”)
Access Google Analytics On the Move With Iphone and Blackberry Apps
If you are as obsessed with web analytics as I am and if you start to feel the withdrawal symptoms if you can’t access the data, then this post might be for you.
Iphone App
“Analytics App“, a full featured Google Analytics Iphone app has been released for the iPhone in Feb`10.
The application is stocked with the good interface & features. The app supports for multiple accounts, makes 29 stat reports available, the ability to create your own custom stat reports, as well as cleanly designed graph analysis. There are more than 40 reports available currently in Analytics App, leaving only a handful of reports that have unique data structures that don’t quite fit the model of data for the app at this time. Any custom report can be created within Google Analytics to give you access to all of your data, any way you want to slice it.
The other apps that are built to access Google Analytics data via your iPhone are MyAnalytics and Analytics Pro.
Blackberry App
Analytics Tool, which is a BlackBerry client for Google Analytics was recently released by Vimukti Technologies. It lets you check your stats from wherever you are. It also lets you access multiple profiles so you can see all of your stats. Analytics Tool gives you access to your Google Analytics: Dash Board, E-Commerce, Visitors, Goals, Site search, Traffic Overview, & Event tracking Overview.
Features include:
- Huge data & custom reports of your websites
- Simple & Easy to use interface
- Around 50 reports can be seen using this application
- Gives you the graphs for analysis purpose quickly
- Get to view the detailed overview reports for multiple statistics
- Safe & secure connections
- Multiple accounts & multiple websites can be worked at a time using this application
- Displays Google Analytics Dashboard statistics for all profiles
Analytics Tool is available now in the App Store for $8.99 which is pretty reasonable considering it will probably be a business tool. It gives you access to data that Google only really lets you view from your desktop. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Mobile Website SEO and Analytics Recommendations
Google supported mobile markup languages
RECOMMENDATION: XHTML basic, XHTML Mobile Profile, WML, and cHTML
Preferred server side languages: PHP, Perl, JSP, ASPX
Metatxt file
MetaTXT will capture a site’s URL, location, mobile site entry points, keywords, and description and more helping search engines return the most relevant content, rendered appropriately for the mobile device used.
http://metatxt.org/?page_id=25
Metatxt file generator to provide a template for you to amplify on http://www.gomobileseo.com/
Google’s strict guidelines about mobile content
Request headers from Google’s mobile crawl will always use the HTTP “Accept” header to explicitly tell our site that it should return documents with mobile content types, if available, rather than standard HTML. Our site must respect this standard and should return mobile content correctly to the mobile crawl.
Mobile Validator
http://validator.w3c.org/mobile
Mobile sitemap
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648&cbid=1qd7sven6cse6&src=cb&lev=answer
Check site development on emulators as well as devices
Blackberry developer supported emulator http://www.blackberry.com/developers/downloads/simulators/index.shtml
Most used for iPhones http://www.testiphone.com/
For Sony & Nokia (and most other phones) http://mtld.mobi/emulator.php
Opera mini (the most used mobile browser) emulator http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/
Now for the relatively obvious points
Domain
Short, concise titles.
Connect, or link to, legitimate and popular mobile web sites.
Ensuring mobile crawlers are not disallowed from spidering the site.
Design for low-end phones
Keep the URL structure as simple as possible
Specify the doc type in the XML preamble
Specify the character encoding
Keep links descriptive
title tags for link
Submit mobile site for inclusion
Limited screen real estate does not encourage longer query strings. Currently, the average number of keywords per query is 2.3 on standard Web searches. It makes sense to optimize repurposed content for 2-3 word keywords
Mobile Sitemap Submission
Google Mobile Sitemap submission in google webmaster tools
Bing Mobile Sitemap submission in bing webmaster tools
Yahoo! Mobile http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mobilesubmit
Major mobile search engines of focus Google XHTML Mobile Search
Yahoo! Mobile
Bing Mobile Search
AOL Mobile Search
Nokia Mobile Search
Technorati Mobile
4INFO Mobile Search
Analytics for mobile websites:
Many mobile browsers do not yet support javascript, the language that Analytics depend on. So Google Analytics released mobile tracking feature last month.
To track visitors to mobile website, we’ll need a different snippet of code which is not javascript. Currently 4 server-side languages are supported. PHP, perl, JSP and ASPX