SEO Werkt!

Big data startup Birst has raised $26 million in its fourth round of funding, with a goal accelerating growth and product development, the company announced today.

Birst is part of a relatively crowded field of business intelligence players including QlikTech, SAP, IBM, Oracle, GoodData, and Microstrategy. But Birst claims it only allocates “one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI,” while still being available as in SaaS form and on-premise. That sort of flexibility is quite attractive, and Birst can connect to multiple data sources, such as CRM, ERP, financial, and operational systems.

The new funding round was led by big dog VC firm Sequoia Capital with additional participation by prior investors Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures.

“This is an extraordinary time for us,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-Founder of Birst, in a statement. “We founded Birst to change the way the world used and interacted with BI and by pushing the envelope of possibility we are witnessing great success. This investment furthers Birst’s ability to continue to drive innovation and expand our solution to new markets and new audiences. We are thrilled to have world-class investors such as Sequoia Capital by our side.”

San Francisco-based Birst was founded in 2004 and has now raised a total of $46 million, including today’s funding.

Check out a video describing Birst’s dashboards below:

Filed under: cloud, deals

Scott Thompson has reorganized the company around three ‘groups’: consumer, regions, and technology. But his long term plan is totally unclear, despite having taken three months to get set. My sense is that he’s moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic, rather than addressing the gaping hole in the side of the boat.

However, trying to centralize the business on capturing user information exhaust does at least line up with what others — Facebook and Google, for example — are planning, so at least he’s looking in the right direction.

Yahoo C.E.O. Hints at a Strategy – Nicole Perlroth via NYTimes.com

With 700 million visitors, Yahoo still maintains one of the largest audiences on the Web, but has been unable to increase revenue. The company continues to cede advertising market share to competitors, notably Facebook and Google, and has frustrated shareholders with its reliance on cost-cutting rather than new areas for innovation and growth.

Based on the restructuring, it appears Mr. Thompson plans to hedge much of Yahoo’s future on the media and content properties it hopes will tether visitors to its site and lure back advertisers, as well as on the data it has on its users.

Mr. Thompson has yet to elaborate on how Yahoo plans to use that data. Sources inside the company, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak, said that it was still unclear how, or even whether, the company could leverage the information to its advantage.

There is certainly room in the marketplace for a large media player to innovate in media based on mining big data from social exhaust. We’ll have to see if Thompson is trying for that, since he’s been fairly silent on strategy, but it looks like a viable option for Yahoo, at least.

There are some reports via Google Webmaster Help forums that the Webmaster Tools API results do not match up always with the Webmaster Tools web console.

One developer noticed the differences and posted a question in the forums asking:

I’m using the Google Webmaster Tools API to get data about our site’s keywords (in Google’s eyes).

It’s great.

But something’s strange- the keywords showing up in the API feed are not quite the same as what’s showing up when we used the web-based tool.

Has anybody else noticed this difference in the data?

I know that the web-based data is quite a few days behind, so one theory I have is that the API data is fresher. Just guessing at this point.

This is not uncommon being that the data is refreshed often and data filters can play a role in the results. But also, sometimes, APIs access slightly different data sources and can throw the numbers off. Finally, Webmaster Tools is known to have reporting bugs often – so that can play a factor also.

Or maybe, this was just a random fluke? Do you have this as an issue also?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

In a finite world, individuals specialize, but organizations don’t have the same limitations. Given enough specialists, you can do it all. The challenge is in managing them. Somebody has to get on top of all these silos.

In my ten-minute pretend-keynote at last year’s Defrag conference, I asked people to look beyond the existing silos of data and analytics to consider what more we could do. I challenged them with this simple idea:

Analytics + Intelligence –> Strategic Value of Information

What I’m doing is applying and not or to analytics and intelligence. Applying math when that works and finding facts when that works. Around here, the starting point for data is social media, but that’s another boundary that turns out to be arbitrary. The same reasoning applies to other data sources.

We use labels like intelligence and analytics to divide the analysis of social media data into closely related specialties. In the process, we risk losing sight of the bigger goal, which all of these specialties support:

Uncover the information in the available data in order to develop insights that support the business.

We’re all looking for useful information in data. In the social media realm, some of the data is unstructured content, and some of it is structured data generated by our activities. That distinction is driving some segmentation among the vendors, but it’s worth remembering that intelligence vs. analytics isn’t an or question; it’s an and question—you need to consider both.

In the next post, I’ll show you the model that applies intelligence and analytics to expand what we might find in what people say online. There’s more to it than the usual summary of opinions.

Photo by Pablo David Flores.

The Ad Age Power 150, a ranking of top marketing blogs, has become more dynamic with today’s introduction of the PostRank metric. The new metric, developed by the folks at AideRSS, is based on social engagement or how interesting/relevant people find content to be. To measure such a thing, PostRank uses an algorithm that combines numerous online activities such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, RSS subscriptions, post comments, etc. This is the first Power 150 metric that scrutinizes your blog on a post-by-post basis… and adds a lot more daily excitement to the list.

Please read Charlie Moran’s detailed Ad Age blog post about the Power 150 upgrade and feel free to comment. Because we crave your feedback, anyone who comments on this blog post, Charlie’s post, our Facebook group or sends me a related comment via Twitter @toddand before Sunday at noon (Chicago time) will be entered in a raffle to win Power 150 prizes (t-shirts and pens). I’ll update this post with the winners then.

Most of your questions about why PostRank was added and it’s impact on the list can likely be addressed by reading Charlie’s explanation. Questions about the new metric will probably best be answered by PostRank’s “How It Works” page, but I’ve highlighted a graphic below from the PostRank website that lists several examples of engagement data sources that are included in PostRank. Bottom line, we’re hoping this new metric helps keep the Power 150 relevant and useful. More new features are in the works so stay tuned.

UPDATE: I picked two winners for Power 150 t-shirts and pens. The two winners are David Mullen and Jim Murphy. Thanks to all those who commented.