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Yesterday was a long day. The long flight from Helsinki to San Francisco via Frankfurt wasn’t really enjoyable, but the OpenThread made up for that. OpenThread was an OpenSocial developer event organized by SocialMedia and held at their unique office in SF.

The event opened by overview of OpenSocial by Lane LiaBraaten from Google and continued with Paul Lindner from Hi5 giving an excellent hands-on tutorial on writing the first basic OpenSocial app. The crowd consisted of developers so the discussion frequently went to more into details. Somebody was asking Paul about a Hi5 specific problem where his app was having problems with the 5s time-out from Hi5. Paul was quick to reply that he can change it to 8s if that helps – how is that for supporting developers. OpenSocial is currently moving into v0.8 which is promising to give even more tools for developers to write rich and connected apps. One of the main ideas behind OpenSocial is to unify development across the different Social Networking sites. Currently the status seems to be “learn once, use everywhere.”

The following panel discussion revealed that the main problem currently in writing to a new container is to learn which viral channels to use and what and how the users like to use them. So it seems that OpenSocial is getting close to the goal. The discussion seem to concentrated also much around what kind of apps would be the top apps in years to come (are we still pinching and poking)? Some offered that it might be those apps that can be monetized – which still seems to be very difficult. A few claimed that they were profitable by using micropayments and many agreed that there is a difference between the different geographical areas when it comes to monetization.

In the end, I started thinking that as OpenSocial has persistence features and furthermore provides developers methods to make requests to their own servers through the container, it might be possible to write a full-fledged social network spanning over all existing OpenSocial sites. It would not matter where your users are originally logged in, they could still participate in your network. However, you would probably need to provide server capability and therefore the monetization comes to play an important part again.

The night ended with SUN sponsored OpenBar and some interesting discussions. Unfortunately I had to retire quite early after the long day. Overall, it was a good meeting, so if you have chance to visit future OpenSocial meet-ups, just go!

London, UK and Helsinki, Finland – July 8, 2008: Xtract, the leader and innovator in social advertising intelligence today announced that it has closed its series B round of funding with EUR 7,5 Million ($11.74M) from leading early-stage technology investors Creandum, ETF III advised by Eqvitec Partners and InnovationsKapital.

Xtract enables mobile and online companies to refine their customer data creating highly accurate 3 Dimensional profiles combining social interactions, behaviour and demographic information. It answers a crucial need in the advertising industry by making the advertising in social media and mobile effective. By using Xtract, customers have seen the average ad income increase with as much as 82% and in mobile campaigns response rates have increased, on an average, with 30%.

Staffan Ingeborn, Managing Investment Director of InnovationsKapital comments: “Xtract is a very exciting company with a unique proposition for targeting of digital advertising. Its solutions have been shown to create substantial value for its customers, and we believe that Xtract is very well positioned to become a winner and a leader in this space.”

Xtract works with over 50 companies with intensive customer data ranging from global leaders such as Nokia, T-Mobile and Vodafone to innovative challengers such as BLYK and Flirtomatic. Xtract makes complexity simple and actionable via a unique and patented set of products that based upon social interactions, behaviour data and other dataflow can create accurate and dynamic real-time customer profiles. Xtract can ensure delivery of the right audience to the right commercial message at the right time and accurately report on the effectiveness of any campaign. Something which up until now was not possible.

Xtract board member Juha Mikkola of Eqvitec Partners said: “This investment opportunity had a lot of demand and clearly marks the very interesting market and expansion opportunity that Xtract represents in the fast growing social intelligence market.”

“We are delighted to have added two new prominent investors, InnovationsKapital and Creandum in addition to our original investor ETF III advised by Eqvitec Partners. This investment round combined with an exceptional organic growth enables us to expand to new markets outside Europe,” says Kimmo Kiviluoto, CEO of Xtract.

About Creandum
Creandum is a Nordic venture capital firm investing in early-stage technology companies. The firm has 120 million Euros under management and is today the fastest growing independent partnership of its kind in the Nordic region. Creandum invests in innovative companies in high growth markets led by outstanding entrepreneurs. All investment professionals at Creandum have started companies or been part of successful startups. For more information, please visit www.creandum.com.

About Eqvitec Partners Oy
Eqvitec Partners Oy is one of the largest technology focused venture capital and private equity firms in Northern Europe. The company was founded in 1997 and employs 15 investments professionals in Helsinki and Stockholm. Eqvitec Partners currently advises 6 funds with the total capital base of 500 million Euros. The funds invest in technology companies in all phases from start-up to buyouts. At the moment the funds have investments in 40 companies and have carried out 35 exits. More information can be found at www.eqvitec.com.

About InnovationsKapital
InnovationsKapital is a leading independent venture capital firm in the Nordic region with capital commitments of EUR 317 million in four funds. Years of experience and a strong network within academia and industry enable InnovationsKapital to invest in successful early stage and growth companies. InnovationsKapital supports talented entrepreneurs to help them create successful high growth businesses. Since 1994, InnovationsKapital has made over 60 investments and a number of successful exits in the life sciences and technology sectors. For more information, please visit www.innkap.se.

About Xtract
Xtract is the global trusted partner and innovator in Social Advertising Intelligence.
We have the technology and competence to turn large user data into cash flow. Our solutions create accurate and automated consumer profiles for mobile and online advertisers based on social interactions, behavioural and demographic data.
Xtract operates across Europe and Asia, working with over 50 companies with intensive customer data ranging from global leaders such as Nokia, T-Mobile and Vodafone to innovative challengers such as BLYK and Fonecta. Headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland and London, UK. www.xtract.com

Joint Solution Enables Companies to Gain Deep Customer Insight and Better Target Their Advertising

Helsinki, Finland and San Mateo, Calif. – 25 June 2008 – Xtract, the leader in social advertising intelligence, and Greenplum, a leading provider of database software for business intelligence, today announced strong customer adoption of the Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence (SAI) solution which includes software from Xtract running on the Greenplum Data Warehouse. Top customers in Europe and Asia are deploying Xtract SAI to better target their marketing and advertising to strengthen and grow customer communities in the telecommunications, advertising and retail markets.

Xtract SAI is a powerful solution for advertisers and marketers to target and manage personalized and automated advertising campaigns. With highly accurate, three-dimensional profiling based on customers’ social, behavioral and demographic information, Xtract SAI revolutionizes customers’ marketing and multiplies the results from their advertising campaigns. Xtract SAI is powered by the Greenplum Database and is sold as a turnkey solution to Xtract and Greenplum’s shared customers. These customers are using Xtract SAI to improve business across a range of market segments including telecommunications, advertising and retail.

Fonecta Group is the market-leading directory services company in Finland, offering a variety of directory services to meet the contact information needs of customers. Fonecta’s services are used more than 1.5 million times each day. Fonecta has deployed Xtract SAI in its datacenter for extremely fast analytics across a massive dataset of contacts.

“Our SMS services have been increasing rapidly, and we were looking for a better way to understand our customer segments to target our SMS marketing,” says Rami Meling, Business Development Manager, Fonecta. “Working with Xtract, we were able to create a clear segmenting of our customers and also begin to target and personalize our SMS marketing online. We are thrilled about the results.”

Broadcasting company Plus TV has over 250,000 subscribers and customers utilizing its pay-per-view television service. Plus TV is using Xtract and Greenplum to perform demographic data analysis for its marketing and customer retention efforts.

“Analytics are extremely important to us. We needed a partner with the top people building the right solution,” said Jari Vanhanen, CTO of Plus TV. “Xtract delivers a reliable solution and Greenplum Database has worked extremely well. Together these products are helping us to improve our profitability.”

“Xtract enables companies to gain competitive advantage from their data, and the combined Xtract and Greenplum solution allows customers to achieve critical insights with greater speed and scale,” said Frank Bien, VP of Business Development at Greenplum. “The market traction we’re seeing for Xtract SAI underscores the significant value companies derive from our joint solution.”

About Xtract
Xtract is the global trusted partner and innovator in Social Advertising Intelligence. We have the technology and competence to turn large user data into cash flow. Our solutions create accurate and automated consumer profiles for mobile and online advertisers based on social interactions, behavioural and demographic data. Xtract operates across Europe and Asia, working with over 50 companies with intensive customer data ranging from global leaders such as Nokia, T-Mobile and Vodafone to innovative challengers such as BLYK and Fonecta. Headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland and London, UK.

About Greenplum
Greenplum is a data warehouse software company that has developed the world’s fastest, most scalable database software for business intelligence. Designed to handle extremely large and fast-growing data volumes, Greenplum Database enables companies to gain critical insights into their data and extend their competitive advantage in the market at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. Greenplum Database powers the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance and is being used by some of the leading companies in the world, including Reliance Communications, Comcast, Skype, AirTran and O’Reilly Media.

The latest Technology Review has an interesting article about social network business and how social networks still have a lot of challenges to monetize their communities. New models, but also new solutions, are needed. And a key issue is to get advertising work properly in the social media.

Technology Review summarizes the new technologies to get advertising work in social media: “Startups that help advertisers and marketers better target the users of social-networking sites are fashionable investments for venture capitalists in North America and Europe. Such startups hope to sell advertisers detailed information about individual social networkers. They include the brand-new 33Across (which we profile in our list of 10 notable startups, which begins on page 50) and the more established Finnish company Xtract, which counts Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Blyk among its customers and has begun selling its software to advertising agencies and online marketers and publishers. ”

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, commented in the Millenium Prize event that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” It is nice to see that we have really found a way to build solutions to monetize digital communities.

Xtract is proud to sponsor the 6th International Workshop on Mining and Learning in Graphs that features such keynote speakers as Fan Chung (University of California, San Diego), Thorsten Joachims (Cornell University), Mohammad Mahdian (Yahoo! Research) and Hannu Toivonen (University of Helsinki). The registration is still open; for a discount price for today only. The workshop will be held in Helsinki, our home city, on 4-5 July.

Quoting from the conference web-site, MLG’08

“will be the premier forum for bringing together different sub-disciplines within Machine Learning and Data Mining that focus on the analysis of structured data. Of particular interest is data that consists of interrelated parts or is characterized by collections of objects that are interrelated and linked together into complex graphs and structures.”

Last year our team participated in MLG’07 in Venice with the paper Inferring vertex properties from topology in large networks (Janne Sinkkonen - Xtract, Janne Aukia - Xtract, Samuel Kaski - TKK) and won a prize for distinguished contribution.

Our team has a paper in the workshop this year, too. I’m excited in meeting you all there in a cozy scientific atmosphere and venue for insightful presentations and discussions.

We have a new white paper online on the topic Social Advertising Intelligence: How to reach consumers with active advertising.

Customers are increasingly moving from mass broadcast media to social media, making current advertising processes less effective than before. Until now, the tools for planning and buying online and mobile advertising have been lacking.

In the white paper, we analyze the four main challenges that advertisers face with online and mobile advertising, that is:

1. Measuring the full impact of the ads
2. Lack of tools
3. Ads cannot be bought in a unified way
4. Lack of information on online users

The white paper also presents, how Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence can be used to target campaigns effectively, solving some of the challenges with multi-channel advertising.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

Yesterday we had the privilege to listen to Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi give an interesting presentation on the Science, Technology and Business of Digital Communications. He has been working in the middle of the mobile communications revolution and has left his mark in the field in many ways. Does the Viterbi algorithm sound familiar?

Dr. Viterbi is one of the Millennium Technology Prize Laureates for 2008. His lecture was a part of the Finalist Symposium that was held at the Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo, Finland. This year, the main Millennium Technology Prize, the largest technology prize in the world, was presented to Robert Langer from MIT for developing innovative biomaterials for controlled drug release.

The organizers of the symposium had also invited three promising Finnish companies to introduce themselves. All three companies combine science and technology with communication and are making solid business that aims “to someday repeat the success of Qualcomm”, as the organizers put it. One of these companies was Xtract and Jouko Ahvenainen gave the presentation that you can see below.

The presentation was about how to monetize digital communications and to deliver more relevant advertisements to end users at the same time guaranteeing more returns for the advertisers. In the audience was also Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of MIT Technology Review. He commented that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” Afterwards we had some good conversations around the subject over some coffee and other refreshments.

Last week I bumped into Francois Mairesse’s open source Personality recogniser, of which he has a web demo where you can input emails, essays, chat logs, thoughts or other texts produced by you and get your personality scores for all Big Five traits (Extraversion, Emotional stability, Conscientiousness and Openness to experience) as well as the model used to compute them. Statistical models which can be used are SVM with Linear Kernel, M5 Model Tree, M5 Regression Tree and Linear Regression, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) being the most general one.

Obviously, the more text you feed the recogniser the more accurate it gets.

How this works is quite interesting. Here’s a summary of how markers are grouped (Mairesse, et. al., 2007):

• standard counts (e.g. words count, word per sentence, syllables per words, frequency of use, words longer than 6 letters, negations, articles, pronouns)
• psychology processes (e.g. positive & negative emotions, causation, tentative, references to people)
• relativity (e.g. past tense verb, future tense verb, up, down, inclusive, exclusive, motion)
• personal concerns (e.g. school, work, achievements, TV, movies, music, moeny, religion, death, sexuality, eating, sleeping)
• utterance (e.g. ratio of commands, questions, assertions)
• other dimensions (e.g. ponctuation, swear words, fillers, familiarity rating, meaning fullness Paivio norm, different Kucera-Francis frequencies)

London, UK and Helsinki, Finland: Xtract, the leader in social advertising intelligence today announced it has closed new funding of EUR 3,5 Million led by Creandum, a leading early stage technology investor together with renewed commitment from existing investor ETF III, advised by Eqvitec Partners.

Xtract answers a real need in the advertising industry which is making the advertising in social media and mobile effective. By using Xtract, customers have seen the average ad income increase with as much as 82% and in mobile campaigns response rates have increased with 30%.

“Our solutions provide genuinely innovative ways to ensure delivery of the right audience to the right commercial message at the right time and to accurately report on the effectiveness of any campaign in an automated way, something that up until now was not possible,” said Kimmo Kiviluoto, CEO of Xtract. ”We are delighted to have Creandum join the company which clearly underlines the confidence in our offering and in the management team,” he added.

Staffan Helgesson, Managing General Partner at Creandum, said: “We are very impressed with Xtract’s success in the telecom sector where leading mobile operators use Xtract to increase revenues and reduce churn. We also believe that Xtract’s approach is unique from the traditional approach in mass advertising. The transition from the traditional static advertising to the more dynamic advertising is going to happen and the brand managers and advertising agencies understanding this change will be the ones surviving the transition to digital advertising. Xtract has a unique position to be one of the leaders driving this change.”

Xtract board member Juha Mikkola of Eqvitec Partners said he was pleased by Creandum’s decision to invest. “This investment opportunity had a lot of demand and clearly marks the very interesting market and expansion opportunity that Xtract represents in the fast growing social intelligence market”

About Xtract
Xtract is the global trusted partner and innovator in Social Advertising Intelligence.
We have the technology and competence to turn large user data into cash flow. Our solutions create accurate and automated consumer profiles for mobile and online advertisers based on social interactions, behavioural and demographic data.

Xtract operates across Europe and Asia, working with over 50 companies with intensive customer data ranging from global leaders such as Nokia, T-Mobile and Vodafone to innovative challengers such as BLYK and Fonecta. Headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland and London, UK. www.xtract.com

About Creandum
Creandum is a Nordic venture capital firm investing in early-stage technology companies. The firm has 120 million Euros under management and is today the fastest growing independent partnership of its kind in the Nordic region. Creandum invests in innovative companies in high growth markets led by outstanding entrepreneurs. All investment professionals at Creandum has started companies or been part of successful startups. For more information, please visit www.creandum.com.

About Eqvitec Partners Oy
Eqvitec Partners Oy is one of the largest technology focused venture capital and private equity firms in Northern Europe. The company was founded in 1997 and employs 15 investments professionals in Helsinki and Stockholm. Eqvitec Partners currently advises five funds with a total capital base of 440 million euros. The funds invest in technology companies in all phases from start-up to buyouts. At the moment the funds have investments in 40 companies and have carried out 35 exits. More information can be found at www.eqvitec.com.

Around one month ago I moved from the research team here at Xtract to marketing. This change is an interesting one, since often people consider research and marketing to be opposites: marketing deals with presenting concepts to customers in a concrete fashion as quickly as possible, while researchers work on abstract concepts which might take years to develop into something useful.

What is surprising is that marketing and research are in many ways quite similar and even many of the skills required are the same: in both jobs, one needs to be able to innovate, present ideas effectively and communicate by writing. Also, in both jobs one has to have a vision on where the business is moving and how we can help our customers with our tools and skills.

Now I just need to get some grasp of the marketing speak, which is quite different from the technical jargon I am more familiar with. Instead of “mixture models”, “bayesian inference” and “functional programming”, I now need to be able to talk fluently about “permission marketing”, “value propositions” and “behavior targeting”. In a way, this is like learning a new languge.