Alec Saunders SquawkBox

One of the hallmarks of agile development processes is the ability to crank out new features under very short timelines.  The practical impact is that as a software development organization, you can quickly respond to user feedback with updates designed to address their needs.

Our friends at Facebook use these processes, and push out new releases to their platform on a pretty consistent weekly schedule — usually Tuesdays at midnight.  At iotum, we're a little less structured than that, but every two to three weeks early in the week rather than later, we release new features to the web.  Today's release includes:

1. An interactive demo call.  When you jump on the call the narrator invites you to take actions such as raising and lowering your hand in response to things that are happening on the screen.  Behind the scenes our conference bridge is communicating with our web application and making stuff happen on screen for you.  I'm pretty proud of this — it's pure Voice 2.0, which is the marriage of voice and the web.  Go check it out…   it's cool, and there's a prize buried in the call if you listen to the whole thing. 
2. PIN Numbers.  Yup.  We've added PIN numbers to our PIN-less conference calling system.  While a lot of users found the way we used mobile phone number and caller-ID as an identifier (rather than a PIN) useful, enough tripped over it that we've added a traditional PIN number to each call as well.  Now you have your choice, PIN or PIN-less. 
3. A new "Add More Participants" button if you're the conference organizer.  After you've finished organizing the call, you easily add more participants.
4. A new instructions page, including dial-in options for international users. In recent weeks we've had an influx of users from Europe and the Middle East.   You may not be aware of this, but you can dial into FREE Conferece Call from Skype, or Gizmo, or Jajah.  You don't have to use a landline or a mobile phone.

As always, let us know what you think.  The reason we use agile development methodologies is to be able to respond to your requests.

Australian mobile analytics company Amethon announces today that they've established a US subsidiary in New York City.  According to Dean Collins, Amethon's NY based business development manager, Amethon can track mobile browser content and interactions whereas the traditional web based folks, like Comscore and Hitwise, can't track mobile browsers because they depend on Javascript.  Using Amethon's proprietary technology, now operators can get detailed mobile analytics.

Previous solutions included logfile analysis, or handset based metrics collection.  Both of these have scalability or bias issues.  Amethon's Mobile Analytics product family uses a proprietary ‘wireline capture’ technology which allows mobile web traffic to be analyzed without the need to 'tag' each page or analyse web server logs. The result is higher quality analytics, with less user disruption.

The system can also do mobile handset brand and model analysis, mobile handset screen resolution analysis and mobile operator and country analysis.

According to Dean, "if your readers are creating mobile websites they are going to get it straight away. They will love it because currently they are only able to get about 10-40% of the information available using Amethon Mobile Analytics by using log file analysis.  Log file analysis is a faulty method and something that hasn’t been done in the desktop browser space for over 5 years."