Medialets

As millions of new smartphone users access thousands of new apps on their iPhone, Google and Blackberry devices, we have re-architected our Medialytics Data Server Infrastructure to meet the explosive demand for data. Now, Medialytics can provide publishers and developers with an even clearer and more valuable picture of user analytics.

Our goal in re-architecting the existing Medialytics data infrastructure was three-fold and symbiotic:

• Design for aggressive scalability
• Offer precise user-metrics
• Serve timely, near-real-time data

The stability of the new Medialytics technology stack, in conjunction with improved sub-systems, now allows us to collect an unprecedented amount of user data and offer it in aggregated, multi-tiered analytical reports. For example, future reports may display which apps were run on a unique Nexus One device in Kansas during the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

In addition, a new underlying event-processing system now allows for autonomous server activity which helps drive data delivery and processing when performance and response times are at their most critical.

So what does all this mean to the speed in which your data is collected and shared? Where user-metrics were available within the same day, they can now be available multiple times within an hour.

Visit Medialytics.com to sign up for your own Medialytics account.

Big news today for all Blackberry and Android developers out there…Medialets Blackberry and Android Analytics SDKs are now available.

These SDKs extend Medialets analytics offerings beyond the iPhone, reflecting the strong growth in Blackberry and Android development.

Our analytics SDKs provide developers with a single dashboard that allows for the measurement and tracking of basic metrics as well as complex custom events within all of their Blackberry and Android apps (and iPhone of course). Now you can view deep, customized analytics for your apps across multiple platforms, to make the most informed improvements to your apps. The SDKs can be downloaded simply by signing up for Medialytics at http://www.Medialytics.com.

Here’s a screenshot preview of the dashboard…

The strength of Blackberry’s install base and high value users along with Android’s solid relationships with OEMs, carriers, and users, made it a priority for us to make our unique analytics capabilities available to developers working on these platforms.

And while we’ve spent a significant amount of time developing these SDKs, they are as always, available for free simply by signing up at Medialytics.com. We’re also hosting an Android Developer meet-up at or offices on March 3rd. All are welcome. More info and RSVP here — http://www.meetup.com/androidnyc/

More exciting announcements and product releases across our analytics and rich media ad platforms to come! Stay tuned.

Developers can now define and measure complex custom events within apps

New York, NY: March 1, 2010 – Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad and analytics platform for mobile, today extended its Medialytics offering by releasing a new Analytics Software Developers Kit (SDK) for Android and Blackberry applications. The new SDKs allow developers to track standard application metrics (unique users, sessions, average run-time, run-time frequency, etc) as well as define and measure complex custom user events within Blackberry and Android applications.

These custom events provide a great deal of insight and flexibility to the application publisher. Developers can instrument their application to capture the metrics that are most meaningful to their application and unique to the Medialets platform, developers can store a practically limitless amount of data with their custom events. For example, a game application developer can not only track what level a user has achieved in a game, but also all of the pieces and associated objects the user collected in that level. A content app developer can look beyond simply what article a user is reading and learn how they got to the page, how long the user spent on it, and if they scrolled to the bottom.

Integration of the new Analytics SDKs is a simple and rapid process – taking just a few hours to complete. Data captured through these events is then available in a comprehensive dashboard that also provides standard reporting metrics. Developers and publishers can make educated improvements to their Blackberry and Android apps based on these measurable insights into user behavior.

“Medialets offers analytics that support the high level of innovation that’s going into to Blackberry and Android apps, and go well beyond the basic metrics of simply counting downloads.” said Medialets CEO Eric Litman. “These insights help developers to deeply understand what users do and don’t do with their applications and empower them to make critical decisions about where to focus their valuable development resources.”

Developers can download Medialets’ BlackBerry and Android Analytics SDKs, along with our iPhone Analytics SDK, by signing up at www.Medialytics.com.

About Medialets:

Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. Our clients include The Washington Post, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com and more than 17,000 others who use Medialets to measure their audience and serve award-winning, high impact ads that outperform online rich media by an average of 2.5 times. Medialytics, our mobile app analytics platform supporting the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, delivers in-depth views into both application and ad performance while providing the industry’s only solution for guaranteed post-click ad reporting. We are a privately held, New York-based company with marquee investors and a world-class team. Visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com, email us at connect@medialets.com, or follow us on Twitter @medialets.

More evidence out today that Medialets is the solution publishers are looking for to monetize their mobile content.  The Associated Press, CNN, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com, CNNMoney and The Washington Post have integrated Medialets into their mobile apps.

These publishers are now giving brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones while delivering the highest returns for their media spend.  Below is a press release with more info.

LEADING PUBLISHERS LOOK TO MEDIALETS FOR MOBILE RICH MEDIA ADVERTISING SOLUTION

The Associated Press, NPR, CNN, Variety and others integrate Medialets into their mobile apps

New York, NY: February 18, 2010 — Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad and analytics platform for mobile, today announced that The Associated Press, NPR, The Washington Post, MenuPages.com, CNN, CNN Money and Variety have integrated Medialets’ into their mobile applications. These publishers can now reliably deliver engaging rich media ads into their mobile apps while measuring usage and driving real mobile ad revenue.

“Publishers are turning to Medialets for our ability to provide them with the most engaging rich media ad units in mobile,” said Eric Litman, Medialets CEO. “Through their relationship with Medialets, these publishers can now give brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones and delivers the highest return for their media spend.”

Medialets’ ad technology enables publishers to serve rich media ads into mobile applications, whether those ads are sold in-house or come from an integrated advertising sales partner. The unique ad formats offered by Medialets let brands and agencies create engaging ads that utilize the power of a mobile app with the intimacy and exceptional measurability smartphones provide. The advertisements can include video, animation, sound and other advanced functionality.

Examples of the rich media ads created, served and tracked by Medialets for these publishers can be found at the Medialets blog.

About Medialets:

Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. Our clients include The Washington Post, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com and more than 17,000 others who use Medialets to measure their audience and serve award-winning, high impact ads that outperform online rich media by an average of 2.5 times. Medialytics, our mobile app analytics platform supporting the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, delivers in-depth views into both application and ad performance while providing the industry’s only solution for guaranteed post-click ad reporting. We are a privately held, New York-based company with marquee investors and a world-class team. Visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com, email us at connect@medialets.com, or follow us on Twitter @medialets.

LEADING PUBLISHERS LOOK TO MEDIALETS FOR MOBILE RICH MEDIA ADVERTISING SOLUTION

The Associated Press, NPR, CNN, Variety and others integrate Medialets into their mobile apps

New York, NY: February 18, 2010 — Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad and analytics platform for mobile, today announced that The Associated Press, NPR, The Washington Post, MenuPages.com, CNN, CNN Money and Variety have integrated Medialets’ into their mobile applications. These publishers can now reliably deliver engaging rich media ads into their mobile apps while measuring usage and driving real mobile ad revenue.

“Publishers are turning to Medialets for our ability to provide them with the most engaging rich media ad units in mobile,” said Eric Litman, Medialets CEO. “Through their relationship with Medialets, these publishers can now give brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones and delivers the highest return for their media spend.”

Medialets’ ad technology enables publishers to serve rich media ads into mobile applications, whether those ads are sold in-house or come from an integrated advertising sales partner. The unique ad formats offered by Medialets let brands and agencies create engaging ads that utilize the power of a mobile app with the intimacy and exceptional measurability smartphones provide. The advertisements can include video, animation, sound and other advanced functionality.

Examples of the rich media ads created, served and tracked by Medialets for these publishers can be found at the Medialets blog.

About Medialets:

Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. Our clients include The Washington Post, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com and more than 17,000 others who use Medialets to measure their audience and serve award-winning, high impact ads that outperform online rich media by an average of 2.5 times. Medialytics, our mobile app analytics platform supporting the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, delivers in-depth views into both application and ad performance while providing the industry’s only solution for guaranteed post-click ad reporting. We are a privately held, New York-based company with marquee investors and a world-class team. Visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com, email us at connect@medialets.com, or follow us on Twitter @medialets.

Good news… real time data processing within our Medialytics platform is back. Kudos to our dev team for getting this functionality up and running, enabling Medialets to provide the industry’s only real-time analytics platform for rich media ads within iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps.

Apple has made claims that the iPhone OS 3.0 yields significant performance gains on the 3G model, and that the new 3GS can accomplish the same tasks up to twice as fast as its predecessors. Anecdotally, the new 3GS definitely “feels” faster under certain conditions. But how do Apple’s devices and OS versions really compare to one another? And perhaps of even greater interest, how does the latest hardware from Cupertino compare to smart phones recently released from other vendors?

“Objavectaweb-C” OS?

One of the key challenges in conducting an objective evaluation of software performance across devices that utilize different operating systems lies in accounting for the fundamental differences in the various OSs. While the iPhone 3G and 3GS could potentially run the same app on the same Objective-C-based operating system (making direct comparisons relatively straightforward), Android apps are Java-based, and the Palm Pre runs the entirely new Web OS. Given these divergent OS implementations, is there anything that come close to a standard unit of measure for judging performance of this growing breed of “superphones?”

Finding Common Ground

The common thread between these three OS’s is JavaScript execution in WebKit—the open source project that, in varying degrees, powers web browsing technology for these three disparate operating systems. With the exception of certain browser plugins (e.g., Flash), web rendering technology installed on today’s premiere mobile devices makes almost all—and in some cases even more—features of their ubiquitous desktop web browser counterparts available. Therefore, given the global commonality of JavaScript and WebKit-based web browsers, it becomes possible to compare the performance of these “pocket computers that make phone calls” to the performance of desktop machines.

The Yardstick

The WebKit Open Source Project provides a JavaScript test Suite dubbed SunSpider. According to the description on the SunSpider home page, “this benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other.” We at Medialets have found it to be one of the best attempts to measure real world JavaScript performance in a balanced and statistically sound way.

Medialets ran the SunSpider test suite in the following environments:

1. Safari 4.0.1 on a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo White MacBook.
   The MacBook results were used as a baseline for relative comparisons.
2. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v2.2.1
3. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v3.0
4. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3GS with iPhone OS v3.0
5. The “Browser” app on the T-Mobile G1 with Android OS v1.5 (Cupcake)
6. The “Web” app on the Palm Pre with Web OS v1.0.2

Each device was fully restored and rebooted immediately before running the test suite. Every attempt was made to assure that no atypical background tasks were executing while the tests were running. The SunSpider tests automatically run five times sequentially and the mean average from all five tests are reported. Network speed and latency have no effect on the results of the test.

Results

The results of the iPhone-based tests alone are rather astonishing and seem to indicate that many of Apple’s claims about the performance gains of their 3.0 OS and the iPhone 3GS may hold some water. Using OS 3.0 on the same iPhone 3G yields nearly 3X the JavaScript performance in Mobile Safari vs. using iPhone OS 2.2.1. The iPhone 3GS ups the ante by another factor of 3, bringing JavaScript performance on the iPhone 3GS to just 12X that of a full-powered desktop machine that has well over four times the raw processing muscle alone. The T-Mobile G1 running the “Cupcake” version of the Android OS completed the test suite in about 91 seconds. This makes it about a third faster than the iPhone 3G running Apple’s previous OS (2.2.1). The Palm Pre came storming out of the gate with speeds that closely rival the iPhone 3G running Apple’s latest iPhone OS.

Do any of these numbers really indicate which phone might be the best choice for a given individual? Absolutely not. At Medialets we use all of these devices, and love each one for many reasons. The fact that these tests can even be performed across this many device/OS combinations is a testament to how far mobile technology has come in such a relatively short time. We are looking forward to seeing an even greater variety of advanced mobile devices and OS revisions enter the market and we’ll keep you posted as we test more devices in our lab. Subscribe to our feed, leave a comment below, or reach out to us directly if you have any questions.

Here we are a little over a week since the launch of the first Android-powered phone, the G1. As of Monday, Android Market has been open to developers to distribute their applications as they wish. We’ve made some more observations on how the Android Market is evolving, and we’re eager to share them with you. 

Highlights

(1) 167 Apps have been downloaded between between 667,000 and 2.9 Million times.

(2) Downloads are being driven by 41 apps, which account for between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads.

(3) Two applications, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather channel generated the most downloads (50,000 – 250,000).

(4) Although download ranges can be very large, growth on the low-end was still nearly 80% during the first week.

(5) 5 Categories account for 61% of all apps.

(6) The number of apps has nearly tripled since launch, led by the Games, Tools and Productivity categories.

Applications By Category

Android Market applications totaled 167 as of 10/29.  The top 5 Categories with the most apps accounted for 61% of all titles: Tools, Games, Lifestyle, Multimedia, and Productivity.

Title growth has nearly tripled since launch, as the chart below shows.  Three categories – Tools, Games and Productivity led the growth, representing just over 50% of the 105 apps added since last week.

Downloads

Android Market provides download data in ranges or “bins.”  While it’s better than having no information at all (e.g. Apple’s App Store) it gets a bit unwieldy within the top 2 bins, 10,000 – 50,000, and 50,000 – 250,000, where the top end is 5x larger than the bottom end, and the variance can be up to 200,000.  In the chart above, we’ve looked at the trend of total downloads from both ends of the ranges given, and growth seems pretty healthy on both ends.  Apps downloaded from the end of the Market’s first day until 10/29 grew at a rate anywhere between 80% on the low end to potentially 97% on the upside.

The table below gives detail on the distribution of downloads, which are driven by 41 apps in the two highest bins. Taking the low/high ranges into consideration, these 41 apps comprise anywhere between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads

Within these 41 apps, two of them, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather Channel generated the highest number of downloads (50,000 – 250,000).  The remaining 39 are in the 10,000 – 50,000 range – we displayed the “Top 5″ in the table below, which were determined by  the most recent average of user ratings.  

We’ll keep you posted as data continues to roll in.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear your comments and ideas as our ecosystem continues to evolve.  Reach out to us at connect at medialets dot com and add us on Twitter at @medialets.

Google’s Android Market has been officially live for 24 hours. Here are some early observations and comparisons with the iPhone App Store’s first 24 hours.

There are myriad similarities between iPhone and Android users:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users 

During the first 24 hours of Android Market, 62 apps were available to consumers, all free.  This is less than 10% of the number of apps we saw at the launch of Apple’s App Store. Although Apple allowed both free and paid applications to be distributed when the App Store launched, paid downloads for Android will not be available until Q1 2009.

Observation #1 – The average application has 7,800+ downloads.

Android Market is providing some detail on downloads per application –  in contrast to Apple’s embargo of this information after the first 15 hours of launching their App Store.  Rather than displaying exact figures, Android phones show download ranges for a given application, with the smallest range we observed being 100-500 and the largest 10,000-50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads/app, just north of the middle of the 5,000 – 10,000 range.

Observation #2  - Nine apps made it to the 10,000 – 50,000 downloads range.

If we use ratings and number of reviews to differentiate, unlike the iPhone platform, games are not in the top three.  Of the nine apps in this range, only three are games.  ShopSavvy is at the top of the list factoring in ratings and number of reviews, followed by The Weather Channel, and Shazam, an app that helps people identify a song they are listening to.  During the early hours of the iPhone App Store, while Apple was still publishing download data, only two apps broke the 10,000 download mark – Remote and AIM.  Remote, the leading app, was downloaded ~16,000 times. Although the ranges for the top Android apps are similar, it is still too early  to assert with confidence that a trajectory similar to Apple’s App Store is occurring.  Other factors over time need to be considered, including the total number of apps in the market.

Observation #3 – 24 hours into the launch, it appears that either Android users are generally interested in the same types of application functionality as iPhone users, or possibly, that Android developers are generally interested in creating the same types of apps as iPhone developers.

We compared our observations of the iPhone App Store 24 hours after launch with Android Market, and found that once we normalized the names of categories between the two platforms, the categories have similar distributions of applications. We had to make some assumptions and groupings to make our best apples-to-androids comparison and noted those in the table below the chart.

As always, we love hearing from anyone who is interested in learning more about, or sharing their experiences about this new platform. Feel free to contact us at connect at www.medialets.com or follow us on twitter at @medialets.

It is our pleasure to announce our beta program for the Android platform!  

As the leading analytics provider for the iPhone, we, more than anyone else deeply understand how to help developers make the most of their audience. We’re passionate about user experience, understand both the needs of developers and the needs of advertisers, and bridge the gap between the market and marketers in a way that allows developers stay focused on writing great applications. The market has clearly shown that to consumers free is better (http://metrics.medialets.com/charts/apps-by-price) and through the insights our analytics provide to our ad platform, we make it easy and sustainable for developers to continue to innovate and give their apps away.

The world of mobile changed when Apple introduced the App Store. Historically, developers have had to contend with lengthy, often expensive negotiations and certification procedures with carriers to bring their applications to market, and more often than not, the challenges of working in that environment have limited the number and quality of developers willing to undertake the effort.  With the App Store, the process has been reduced to a simple submission and review cycle. Combining that with centralized discovery, distribution and payments for applications has led to a new model for mobile app developers that significantly opens up the possibility of building sustainable – even venture scale – businesses around mobile applications.  But the App Store is just the beginning. Google was quick to recognize the power of this distribution model and earlier this year announced their own App Marketplace, which like Apple’s App Store, bypasses carriers and lets developers market directly to consumers through the Marketplace.

We’ve built the leading solution for analytics on the iPhone and now we’re bringing it to Android because we believe in Android as a platform and our customers have asked us to support it. The opportunity for mobile developers just grew significantly today as the addressable base of users expanded to include the entire future Android subscriber base.

Why does this matter to the market?:

We believe that the emerging opportunity for mobile developers today is nothing less than the early opportunity for developers of desktop software. The key differences today are that users are more demanding, the platforms are more sophisticated and the market is significantly more competitive. Developers who factor our analytics into their applications have a dramatic, competitive advantage over other developers working without the deep insights our platform can provide. Nobody launches a significant Web property today without a solid analytics package, and neither should mobile application developers.

Our mission is to provide the best possible experience for three major groups: developers, their customers, and advertisers. The more that developers and advertisers know about the types of things users want out of mobile applications, the more effective an ad can be.

We work every day to help developers make the right decisions about where and how to spend their time and money. The better a developer understands their audience, the better an app they will write. Better applications mean stronger connections with customers and stronger connections lead to more opportunities to create maximum revenue potential for their application .

We’ve presented a single view for developers to monitor their applications across both the iPhone and Android platforms. This allows them to track relative performance in either and both markets, gives insights on where and how to spend marketing dollars and significantly simplifies the process of managing their release cycles. Combining our analytics with the update notifications provided by the App Store and App Marketplace gives our developers a key advantage over others in the market and enables them to get onto tighter, more focused release cycles to specifically meet the needs of their current and future users.

Android is the second platform in the new world of carrier-free mobile application distribution, and it also happens to support the development of highly engaging and useful applications. It’s not only valuable to consumers as a standalone offering, it also continues to raise the bar for every other mobile platform vendor to deliver more compelling offerings. Consumers, whether or not they buy an Android phone, will benefit from this competition.

Mobile operators not selling the iPhone today need strong, competitive offerings to convince consumers to buy something other than the iPhone. Much like we’ve seen historically on game consoles, many future mobile phone purchases will likely be influenced by the applications available for the platform. Android and the App Marketplace give carriers a potentially viable alternative to the explosive application market for the iPhone, and with the might of Google behind the platform, we may see development activity that equals or even surpasses that of iPhone developers.

We invite you to sign up for the beta at www.medialets.com/android and always, please reach out to us at any time at connect @ medialets dot com.  We look forward to hearing about the apps you’re building!