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Kampyle, the Israeli start up developing SaaS feedback analytics, offers an easy integration of fully-branded and customizable feedback forms for website owners. The feedback forms are displayed to the user either by clicking on a feedback button, or automatically pop up when the user is leaving the page. Until now, the data was only accessible from Kampyle’s Analytics Platform. Today the company has announced the integration of its feedback data into Google Web Analytics, effectively adding engagement and user data into the site’s traffic reports, in real time.

VC Cafe had the chance to speak with Kampyle’s CEO Ariel Finkelstein about the new product release and the company’s business model.

VC Cafe:Congratulations on the launch. What are the main benefits for the user in the integration of Kampyle and Google Analytics?

Ariel Finkelstein, Kampyle’s CEO: The main benefits of the Kampyle – Google Analytics integration is the ability to provide a comprehensive solution for website and ecommerce managers. Until now, website analytics solutions answered the ‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘Where’, and ‘When’ questions, but couldn’t answer ‘Why’ – ‘Why did you abandon your shopping cart after putting 5 items in it?’, OR ‘Why did you leave our website without downloading any information even though you spent 27 minutes on our website’ OR ‘Why didn’t you book your vacation on our website after making 17 visits for more than 93 minutes?’. As you can see, the ‘Why’ question is the critical link in understanding user behavior. Therefore, this integration is business critical for website and ecommerce managers. The Kampyle – Google Analytics integration enables seeing the comprehensive answers to all the user behavior questions in one interface.
Regarding Google Analytics, they are the market leaders with about half the market according to our estimates.
This integration is via the new GA open API, enabling Kampyle’s customer with one click to have all their GA data on their Kampyle account.

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VC Cafe: What are your most popular markets up till now? Can you point us to successful implementations by clients?

Ariel Finkelstein: There is no one popular market. We have thousands of customers in all market segments – e-commerce, software, hardware, telecom, travel, education, government, entertainment, etc.
One successful implementation is travel website HostelBookers.com. When HostelBookers.com relaunched their website, Kampyle integrated with Google Analytics “enabled us to immediately resolve issues based on instant customer feedback,” said Kerry Harding, User Experience Manager at HostelBookers.com (www.hostelbookers.com). “Kampyle helps us to ensure that we meet our customers’ needs, keep our priorities focused, our conversion rates high and our users happy and satisfied.”
A website that is probably familiar to many VC Café readers who travel to New York is B&H Photo Video (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/). Here’s what B&H’s Henry Posner, Corporate Communications Dir, had to say about us: “Kampyle combines the ease-of-use, feature-rich tool B&H Photo-Video needs. Customer feedback is vital to our continued success and Kampyle allows us to make it easy for our customers and easy for us. It’s a win-win combination.”

VC Cafe:Earlier this year, you mentioned that Kampyle will start charging for premium services in 2009. Is it still the case?

Ariel Finkelstein: Yes, we now charge for our premium services. As a privately held company, I am not at liberty to provide financial details, but we’re selling better than expected.
We continue to provide a free account for an unlimited time. The free account offers up to 50 feedback items per month, 1 feedback form and a basic application – aimed at the very small “Mom and Pop” sites.
The pricing will be as follows:

• Platinum  - $999 a month – 2000 feedback forms, advanced reporting
• Gold – $499 a month – 1000 feedback forms, advanced reporting
• Silver (recommended)  - $249 a month, advanced reporting, 500 feedback items, 5 feedback forms
• Bronze  - $99 a month , 100 feedback items, basic reporting

VC Cafe:What are the biggest challenges in front of Kampyle in 2009, and how do you plan to overcome them?

Ariel Finkelstein: The biggest challenge is correctly managing our growth in these challenging economic times. We’re fortunate to have customers who see the value of our solution on a daily basis. There are many corporate software solutions that fail to live up to their potential because of difficulties in integration or implementation. With Kampyle, we actually make feedback actionable. Before Kampyle, our customers were getting tens or even hundreds of daily feedbacks from their customers through forms, email, chat, etc., but it wasn’t centralized and accessible through one interface. Now, our customers can see the problems that their customers are having, and can measure and quantify them, which makes fixing them and improving website performance that much easier. We are growing very rapidly, we have over 17,000 customers on the Kampyle for Websites service and our company is growing together with the growth of customers.

***

Thank you and good luck with the new release.

Jonathan Saacks, a partner at Genesis, joined the company’s board as a result of the investment. Neebula was founded in 2009, and still doesn’t seem to have a website. One explanation for this unusual early stage investment at a time when most first round companies are struggling to raise funding is the founding team. Neebula was co-founded by CEO Yuval Cohen,  the former CEO of Marvell Israel and the CTO of Radlan, and CTO Ariel Gordon, former CTO of BMC Israel.

The company will provide solutions for the cloud environment, as reported by Globes.

TodaCell’s platform matches premium mobile ad campaigns with users, based on territory, carrier, timing, user response, pricing and other parameters. The company is currently present in Israel and Tokyo and plans to expand to the US next.

VC Cafe had a chance to get some comments from CEO Moshe Vaknin,  a serial entrepreneur in the media and online advertising business. Prior to TodaCell he founded CheckM8, an ad yield management start up. He also served as the president and COO of Adwise during the tech bubble.

VC Cafe: The online advertising market is arguably saturated. What innovation does Toda bring to the table?
Moshe Vaknin: The online advertising is saturated. Toda is focusing on mobile advertising only. Our uniqueness is focusing only on off portal (unlike Amobee). The current off portal solution offer by companies like Admob, they do not answer and address advertiser need: high performance. Admob and others focus on Quantity, Mass, not quality as Toda does. With strong targeting engines and automatic optimization we are able to achieve very high ROI to advertisers. Unlike others, who care only about CTR (click through rate), we measure the efficiency to advertisers. Not enough how many people click, but how many people actually bought the product? How many did the right search? Accuracy in the ad deliver process is our power

VC Cafe: How do you plan to achieve scale with advertisers and publishers?

Moshe Vaknin:We work directly with major advertisers and also with mobile agencies who are looking to the off portal market as the big market and the important during the next few years.

VC Cafe: Who do you consider as your closest competitors?

Moshe Vaknin: The closer competitor I believe is Smaato as they are focusing on optimization too. We focus heavily.

VC Cafe:What impact does the economic downturn pose on your business model?

Moshe Vaknin:The economic downturn slows down new advertisers who plan to increase their budget going into mobile. However, our business model which is 100% performance gives confidence to advertisers that their money is spent the right way

VC Cafe: What does Toda bring to brand advertisers?

Moshe Vaknin: Toda brings brand advertisers 100% Transparency. Advertiser knows exactly where its ad positioned on the mobile page, which publisher, which category, which device, when, how frequent, no surprises for advertiser so they can plan their media accurately which is very important for brand advertisers.

VC Cafe: Looking back 18 months ago. Would you do anything differently?
Moshe Vaknin: If we look 18 months back, we will do the same. From day one we believed that mobile advertising is going off portal and not controlled by carriers. The introduction of iPhone and other smart phones just make the mobile browsing so easily, and we believe it is a beginning of new revolution.

The Windows version not only opens Boxee to a much larger market, but also gets the media center software into the living room. Unlike Apple TV users, most media center PC users hook up their laptops to the TV. Given the right streaming experience, Boxee could eventually replace your cable box… I was part of the early alpha on Windows and it looked good back then – I’m sure that CEO Avner Ronen and his team will make PC users happy. Boxee is also available for Mac and Ubuntu operating systems.

Some other new Boxee features include:

Major League Baseball

Boxee partnered with MLB to offer MLB.TV Premium broadcasting of thousands of baseball games, live and on-demand in HD. This is part of a bigger bet that Boxee will be placing into sports and for expats like me this feature might be very popular.

Integration with Digg

Boxee serves up the popular videos voted on Digg, but user can’t vote through this interface yet.

Tumblr

Stream music and view slideshows from the people they are following on Tumblr

current_TV

Boxee started small with Current, the SF-based citizen journalism company backed by Al Gore. The current app includes four shows: The Rotten Tomatoes show, infoMania,Vanguard and SuperNews.

So what about Hulu?

After blocking its content on Boxee a few months ago, Hulu came up with Hulu Desktop, their own ‘Boxee’. While the premium content on Hulu is a big eye ball driver, CEO Avner Ronen told Techcrunch that plenty of other media providers are starting to stream their content on Boxee.

In addition, the Boxee API is off to a good start with 40 apps developed already, such as:

• Newsbox(ee) - Twitter and YouTube together at last – bring videos related to trending terms on Twitter onto Boxee
• l8r & boxqueue- bookmark videos with on the web, watch them later with Boxee
• DropBoxee & Decho – stream video, music and photos stored in the cloud
• UK’s Open University & Open Course Ware – courses, lectures and videos from UK’s Open University, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and Berkeley… who said TV has to turn your brain to mush?
• Facebook photos & I Can Has Cheezburger? - The world’s largest photo repository, and the funniest photoblog are now remote control friendly
• National Film Board of Canada – access to all the movies produced by the NFB

Hulu may have superior content, but Boxee is working on a superior platform. The battle on the media center experience on the PC is not over yet.

The results of the test are noteworthy: uTest community members found 317 bugs in a week long competition for $4000 cash prize. 20% of the bugs were classified as “show stoppers” or defects in need of immediate attention. The testers then ranked all five Twitter apps based on overall quality, usability, and feature set.

Some interesting stats from uTest’s official Bug Battle results page:

· Tweet Deck

o 77 bugs reported

o 13 percent classified as “showstoppers”

o 30 percent were Technical, 56 percent were Functional, and 14 percent were GUI

· Seesmic Desktop

o 80 bugs reported

o 20 percent classified as “showstoppers”

o 31 percent were Technical, 50 percent were Functional, and 19 percent  were GUI

· Twhirl

o 61 bugs reported

o 16 percent classified as “showstoppers” and 33 percent as “high severity”

o 44 percent were Technical, 38 percent were Functional, and 18 percent were GUI

Matt Johnston, uTest’s VP of Marketing commented on the findings:

“Twitter users skyrocketed from 1.6 to 32.1 million users this year. Since filtering tweets is of top concern, sophisticated Twitter desktop apps are also booming. With this Bug Battle, uTest has once again demonstrated how quickly the tester community can mobilize and provide global testing coverage for the most cutting-edge apps.”

The second part of the content consisted of a usability survey, ranking the overall quality, usability, and feature set of the Twitter desktop apps. You can see the detailed results in the full pdf report. Tweet Deck came on top in terms of quality, followed by Seesmic Desktop and finally Twhirl, who got a high rank for usability. Interestingly, the more experienced testers (with over 3 years of testing experience),  overwhelmingly favored Tweet Deck across all categories.

Most valuable features across apps:

· Easy access to Twitter actions such as Retweet (RT), Favorite, Reply, and Direct Message

· Filtering by groups, both multi-account and multi-column management

· Column or tab support for multiple searches, including trend searches

Most common complaints across apps:

· The location and grouping of the menu icons within the apps are not intuitive to the functionality to which they are related. (50 percent of respondents suggested adding a help menu or tool tips.)

· Applications consume too much memory (especially Tweet Deck) and compromise performance.

The winner of the uTest Bug Battle was Bernard Lelchuk of Israel, who reported the most valuable bugs and provided the best testing feedback, according to the uTest judges. uTest holds a Bug Battle each quarter, and is currently soliciting recommendations for future Bug Battle subjects on its blog: http://blog.utest.com.

Disclaimer: uTest is a VC Cafe Sponsor. You can find out more about uTest’s crowdsourcing QA solution by downloading this free white paper.