Mobile Apps, haven't we been here before?

Ack, how annoying.

The phrase post little and often is a good one. I've had an idea brewing in my head for a bit and then someone goes and publishes something similar in a manner that far exceeds anything I could do.

So I will come back to this once I gather my thoughts on the matter. In the meantime I'll share an curious thought that I was having recently.

I've been pulled into some mobile app tracking and have found the similarities between the issues facing mobile tracking and the early attempts at web tracking.

Web: Early days were log files, and these were determined by the servers - there was no "JavaScript" tagging - i.e. a free method of tracking that would work on almost any site with any browser. There was a big struggle to define "pages" as server requests would record everything. Users accessed these servers through proxies and caches. People didn't really know what they should / shouldn't be measuring.

New Mobile Apps: No JavaScript. Activities performed offline require a log to store activity. There is no consistent method of logging this information or indeed what to log. Pages aren't clear, many apps have clicks and actions, some apps allow content to be downloaded fully and viewed at leisure. Mobile devices operate behind content caches and mobile gateways. People really don't know what they should / shouldn't be measuring.

Seems to me like we're going to have the same old questions when tracking mobile applications.

"What's the definition of significant action?"
"Is there a common method/technology for logging content that does so accurately maintaining sequential and time information?"
"How do we know when some key piece of information is being viewed?"
"What do customers want?"

And all these go towards the bigger questions of "How will having an app improve my business?"

I would say that the good thing about apps at the moment are their limited scope. Because they arent like modern a "website", all singing all dancing, and because they have limited resources in which to work (bandwidth and memory) what they are trying to do with a customer is usually pretty direct and something that reflects key goals a customer is trying to achieve.

However this does mean we have the situation where each app probably has its own "significant actions", designed to work on a number of operating systems and devices, each with its own nuances. Each with its own "key metrics" that will make a difference to the business - so "cross-app cross-business" reporting will be difficult.

To me, this all feels like old school web analytics but with a newer technology.

Fast forward five years and our phones will all have stupid amounts of resource and similarly the applications will have become multi-faceted and probably as useless as many websites are today.

I just wish I was the new google/app aggregator of this world, the company that allows you to find the application your customers want and that you have to pay for the privilege of just being on the list, now that would be cool.

IBM to buy Unica

Well that's interesting.

We know IBM has been purchasing a lot in business intelligence, predictive analytics and campaigns making them a serious player (as if they ever weren't) across a lot of those areas.

The fact this deal comes hot on the heals of the Coremetrics purchase is interesting as I would have to assume they are buying Unica more for the campaign side of the business than the analytics side. Who knows...?

Either way, it means IBM really are becoming the main enterprise competitors for the Omniture business unit in Adobe.

And of course, who's going to buy Webtrends?

IBM bought Coremetrics

1) How soon before Webtrends get bought and by who - noone seemed to want to buy them a while back (SAP/Oracle/Autonomy/Microsoft?)

2) IBM should have a good end to end marketing message - realistically are there going combine Core with their other products (other than websphere) in any short time, I think not.

3) It doesn't change the current Core message. Coremetrics always traded on their close partnership with IBM. Unless IBM pump money into Core (which they wont) the offering will remain relatively the same - i.e. a relatively underfunded and underdeveloped solution that makes sense only due to its ties with other products.

4) I do hope that IBM's process, acumen and money does bring some good fortunes for Core, they've seemed to be in a mess for a while.

I'm a fan of diversification. I hope this is good for the industry.

My concern is that a significant vendors strides forwards in this space will actually be hampered as IBM take their eye of the ball.

I predict Webtrends will get purchased in the next 6 months and then within the space of 3 years there will be a new diversification of analytics companies hanging their hat on something slightly different, my guess is it will be the social media / mobile phone apps trendy bunch who will go through that "lets build a company, lets get data, what do we do with it now? lets sell the company" cycle, maybe IBM will buy them too.