Unlocking the value of data Infinitely scalable read/write real-time data management A recent article post on the BBC could have been written about Opentracker and the technology we have spent the past year developing. The piece, entitled ‘Data wars: Unlocking the data gold mine’ was written by Mike Lynch and ran on 12 April, 2012. The premise of the article is that businesses and organizations wishing to stay ahead of the curve can do so by learning how to use technology in order to give meaning to the data they collect. Traditionally, data has been stored in databases and only later, if ever,

Total Engagement in a Nutshell Today we officially released Total Engagement. You can read the press release here. Q: What is Total Engagement? Give me the elevator pitch. A: Our Total Engagement release is comprised of two parts; i) We now support analytics for Mobile Apps – meaning that we collect and report app user events ii) we combine app usage measurement with traditional web reporting. As far as we know, we are the only company on the market who can display app user eventstreams and website visitor clickstreams in the same report on the same page. Q: What does that

Start your free, no-risk, 4 week trial! Track your visitors now Getting your app accepted in the apple app store Q: How do I get my app approved for the Apple App store. A: Easy, just follow the guidelines. Ok, so obviously it’s harder than it sounds. There are more than one hundred official reasons why your app may be rejected. On the other hand, it’s very similar to Google’s PageRank guidelines, which have been very transparent in the past: just follow the rules and everything will turn out fine. Follow the guidelines Submit your app for review Getting your

Start your free, no-risk, 4 week trial! Track your visitors now App Analytics – Usability & Definitions When we say that we have built Mobile App Tracking – that can raise some questions. Definitions are needed. Q: What is mobile app tracking? A: Mobile app tracking is combined data from native and web app usage on mobile devices. This means tracking and measurement of app usage. If you build, publish, advertise through or sell apps, you have users, it is important to know how these users make use of your app, and if they are loyal users, meaning retention. What this amounts

Start your free, no-risk, 4 week trial! Track your visitors now Opentracker at The Next Web – Mobile App Tracking From April 25-27, 2012, the annual Next Web Conference will take place a few hundred meters from our Amsterdam office. The next web has a packed agenda as usual. We’ll be there in person on Thursday 26 April the whole day. We’ve organized a Startup Table in the Business Area. Why a Startup Table? Because after many months of hard work, we’ve just launched a new service. Our new offering is called Mobile App Analytics. Our focus is realtime tracking

Upgrading from keystore/keytool to Tomcat Native APR with OpenSSL Today i had to upgrade a tomcat server that used a keystore file for SSL, to a native tomcat 6 with APR and OpenSSL. I thought this was easy until i realized i didn’t had the original private key anymore of when the certificate was created. The steps we took with Keytool to generate the the original certificate request, do not save the private key as a separate file.. After some digging around i found this nice java app called Portecle that does the trick: it opens your keystore and allows

Start your free, no-risk, 4 week trial! Track your visitors now Amazon Load balancing issues As we move a greater number of services towards the cloud (Amazon Web Services) we pioneer our way into an brand new universe of opportunity. We also come across technical issues for which no documentation exists on the internet (we know sounds a bit like Star Trek and Lucasfilm). So we are learning every day, which makes this process very enjoyable. To give an example, take amazon’s Load Balance service (ELB). We moved some of our script-serving traffic to an auto-scaling load balancer and watched

Start your free, no-risk, 4 week trial! Track your visitors now startup-accelerator-diary-1 The Rockstart Accelerator In Amsterdam is one of several world-class technology accelerators in The Netherlands. We entered ourselves into the competition earlier a few months ago, and came in the top percentile out of more than 500 companies, securing a place in the 100-day program. LeadBoxer is the product that we are developing within the Rockstart program, which utilises the Lean framework methodology. http://leadboxer.com is a new product, utilizing big data technology in order to make anonymous website traffic less anonymous, and function as an essential pre-sales tool. Currently being

Start your free, no-risk, 4 week trial! Track your visitors now Setting up a auto scaling, load-balanced, webserver with Amazon Step 1. Define your loadbalancer As of now, Amazon only supports 2 ports: the default web-traffic on port 80 and ssl secure https traffic on port 443. Unfortunatly you need to choose 1 of them,  but i hope they will change it in the future. You also need to select a availabilityzone, make sure your servers are in the same zone.. elb-create-lb LoadBalancerNameHere –headers –listener “lb-port=80,instance-port=8080,protocol=HTTP” –availability-zones YourPreferedZone Step 2. Define your LaunchConfiguration The  LaunchConfiguration stores the ami you want

Start your free, no-risk, 4 week trial! Track your visitors now Making an Amazon EC2 ami Welcome to our blog I wanted to share some of my thoughts regarding our goal to move Opentracker to Amazon Webservices. I started with creating my own EC2 ami’s based on a clean install of centos 5.3, and installed java and our default webserver wich is Apache Tomcat 6 the commands to make your own ami are pretty simple: copy your keys to the instance: scp -i id_rsa-your-key /path/to/keys/pk.pem /path/to/certificates/cert.pem root@public-ami-dns-name:/mnt go to /tmp dir cd /tmp create a volume for bundeling ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt