Posted on Sep 9th, 2011. by admin.
Browser fingerprinting
Master thesis work for two students – 30 hec
Download PDF description.
Objective
The thesis work objective is to develop a statistical model capable of identifying a unique web browser between repeated sessions without storing any information at the client side such as tracking cookies.
Background
One essential metric when analyzing the performance of advertising campaigns is reach, or how many unique persons that were exposed to the advertising campaign. For different types of media (TV, print, online, etc.) there are different models to predict the reach of the campaign, each with its own limitations.
For online advertising, a common method used is to count the number of unique web browser cookies and assume these correspond to the number of unique persons. One major limitation to this approach is cookie deletion, private browsing and other user behaviors where several cookies are placed in the same browser, counting it multiple times.
The objective of this thesis work is to eliminate this limitation.
Preconditions – Browser fingerprinting
Each web browser provides certain compatibility information upon request. Examples of this information can be which version of each plug-in that is installed, the screen resolution of the computer or which Internet service provider that owns the IP-address.
Given enough detailed data about each browser, it will be possible to uniquely identify a vast majority of the web browsers with high confidence, without using cookies.
Task / Objectives
- Identify and validate non-intrusive data that can be collected and used for this purpose
- Based on real collected data, develop a model which can be used in near real-time to determine the uniqueness of a browser. The model will include definitions of which changes in the collected data indicate a new browser and which ones that likely indicate the same browser.
- Document the results in a written report in English
References
Panopticlick is a research project aimed at studying what types of information your browser gives away when prompted.
They published this paper on browser uniqueness: http://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf
Details about the new ‘cookie law’ that was passed by EU and US during summer of 2011: http://bit.ly/nvqnLr
General information about ‘cookies’ used by all web sites: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/
Project Structure
The thesis work will be carried out at Burt AB, and should be started as soon as possible. The thesis is suitable for two students and consists of 30 hec credits.
Required knowledge / Competence
- High level programming, preferably Ruby and JavaScript
- Detailed technical knowledge of web browsers and Internet functionality
- Genuine interest in statistics, problem solving and online behavior
How to apply
Please send your resume / CV to: jobs@burtcorp.com
About Burt
We’re 24 people working around the clock to put a dent in the advertising industry by creating awesome tools for ad agencies, publishers and advertisers. Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had.
If you’re constantly full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out.
Posted on Aug 16th, 2011. by otto.
On August 7, one of our hosting providers data centers went dark. The outage was caused by a faulty transformer at the power supplier, together with a faulty backup generator at the center. (1).
The power cut caused a complete outage on all our servers in the affected data center, and consequently the website, webapp and the blog became unavailable. The data collection and crunching part of the system is designed to survive an event like this, and was operating normally during the incident, albeit at limited capacity. We immediately began to restore all services. But, since we were working at a limited capacity it took until August 11 until we had caught up with delivering up to date metrics to our customers (2).
Data centers will have outages again. Our job is to ensure these incidents have as little as possible impact, on you, the customer. A number of actions have been identified and is being put into action to make sure we will be able to deliver service in a better way next time an event at this scale occurs, including but not limited to the following:
* A previously identified single point of failure that was scheduled for delivery in the coming weeks has been upgraded in priority. This has been a know risk in our system and actions are already being taken to remove it.
* Server redundancy will be significantly improved. The website will not be affected by an outage on any single server or a single data center.
* The data crunching capacity will be increased so that in event like this we will provide up to date metrics at the same speed as usual, even if we lose a data center.
We would also like to take this opportunity to apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our customers and want to assure you that we are working very hard to take actions that these kind of outages does not happen again.
Fotnoter:
(1) The outage was caused by a power outage caused by faulty transformer at the power supplier, normally when a power outage occurs electricity is still delivered through the backup generators, however it was discovered that our hosting provider had a faulty backup generator which was unable to synchronize the electrical phase causing the whole data center to loose power.
(2) When the power returned it became clear that it would take a long time to restore all services. During the power outage a lot of our disks were corrupted and our hosting provider had to manually bring them online at the same time as their thousands of other customers. On top of that a software error in the backup software our hosting provider uses had corrupted our most recent backup. At this point we decided to wait until the disks came online instead of recovering from an older backup.
It took until the morning of August 10 until the most important disks were online again and a few more hours of recovery until our webapp was up and running. The blog took another 24 hours until the disk hosting it was back online.
On August 7, one of our hosting providers data centers went dark. The outage was caused by a faulty transformer at the power supplier, together with a faulty backup generator at the center. (1).
The power cut caused a complete outage on all our servers in the affected data center, and consequently the website, webapp and the blog became unavailable. The data collection and crunching part of the system is designed to survive an event like this, and was operating normally during the incident, albeit at limited capacity. We immediately began to restore all services. But, since we were working at a limited capacity it took until August 11 until we had caught up with delivering up to date metrics to our customers (2).
Data centers will have outages again. Our job is to ensure these incidents have as little as possible impact, on you, the customer. A number of actions have been identified and is being put into action to make sure we will be able to deliver service in a better way next time an event at this scale occurs, including but not limited to the following:
- A previously identified single point of failure that was scheduled for delivery in the coming weeks has been upgraded in priority. This has been a know risk in our system and actions are already being taken to remove it.
- Server redundancy will be significantly improved. The website will not be affected by an outage on any single server or a single data center.
- The data crunching capacity will be increased so that in event like this we will provide up to date metrics at the same speed as usual, even if we lose a data center.
We would also like to take this opportunity to apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our customers and want to assure you that we are working very hard to take actions that these kind of outages does not happen again.
(1) The outage was caused by a power outage caused by faulty transformer at the power supplier, normally when a power outage occurs electricity is still delivered through the backup generators, however it was discovered that our hosting provider had a faulty backup generator which was unable to synchronize the electrical phase causing the whole data center to loose power.
(2) When the power returned it became clear that it would take a long time to restore all services. During the power outage a lot of our disks were corrupted and our hosting provider had to manually bring them online at the same time as their thousands of other customers. On top of that a software error in the backup software our hosting provider uses had corrupted our most recent backup. At this point we decided to wait until the disks came online instead of recovering from an older backup. It took until the morning of August 10 until the most important disks were online again and a few more hours of recovery until our webapp was up and running. The blog took another 24 hours until the disk hosting it was back online.
Posted on Jun 30th, 2011. by gustav.
We’re extremely happy to announce that we recently closed a new round of funding. The round of 20MSEK (approx $3M) was led by Industrifonden, that built and recently sold multi-billion-dollar analytics company QlikTech. More on what this means for our customers, for you (speaking of which, we’re hiring!!!) and the world in general is the topic for an upcoming post. But it’s all exciting stuff we can promise you that much!
For those of you who cannot wait, here’s our politically correct press release 
-
BURT GETS SWEDISH INVESTMENT FOR GLOBAL EXPANSION
June 30, 2011 – Burt, the online advertising software developers, has received a SEK 14 million (€1.6 million) investment from Swedish investment company, Industrifonden. Burt founders, Gustav von Sydow and Gustav Martner, along with the investment firm Tornstaden will also contribute to a total share profile of SEK 20 million (€2.2 million). The funds will be used to directly prepare the company for international expansion and further develop Burt’s analysis platform, Rich.
Burt was established in Sweden in 2009 and in the past year has grown from a team of two to a team of 24 employees. The international expansion will see Burt opening offices in the UK and the USA as well as retaining its Swedish operations.
Burt was founded in 2009 by ad men and entrepreneurs Gustav von Sydow and Gustav Martner. The company’s award-winning products to make online advertising more entertaining, intelligent and profitable have gained attention at conferences such as Techcrunch50, DEMO, Cannes Lions and Web 2.0.
Burt is currently developing Rich, a tool to help leading brands, creative agencies and media agencies to measure, analyze and improve online advertising. With Rich, users can easily analyse the environments where ads are displayed, see how many other ads are on each page and which ads have been seen by users. The information generated by Rich is extremely valuable to both ad buyers – who can compare online with broadcast and print advertising – and media agencies, who gain greater control over their most important digital revenue source, a market worth over 50 billion US dollars.
Released in 2010, Rich has already analyzed over ten billion ads and has been used by SAS, Bonnier and Stampen, among others. In addition, pilot projects are under way in a number of other markets in collaboration with world-leading creative agencies.
Johan Englund, Investment Manager at Industrifonden, says:
“There are no powerful tools available today that are totally focused on analysing online ads. Without such insight, the industry is wasting ad spending, lower advertising revenue and giving a poorer user experience. Burt is the first company to give us these tools and offer real user insight into how online can really influence consumer habits.”
Gustav von Sydow, CEO of Burt, says:
“We are very pleased to have Industrifonden as an investor. Their financial strength, combined with having built QlikTech into a world leader in analysis, will give us the opportunity to accelerate our expansion and boost our capacity to handle our waiting list of customers.” He continues, “Agencies need to be quicker to respond to results. We can’t wash our hands of an online campaign the minute it goes live. The beauty of online is that changes can be made based on initial responses. Our tools have been specifically designed to facilitate this rapid and informed response.”
About Burt (www.burtcorp.com)
Burt makes software for the advertising industry. The company was founded in 2009 to address the glaring gap between what Internet technology can do and what agencies are actually doing with it. Burt’s products are the result of first-hand experiences in creating and producing award-winning campaigns for Google, Volkswagen, and Red Bull, amongst others, at the European offices of one of the world’s best agencies, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. Based on this hands-on experience, Burt is in a perfect position to create tools that make it cheaper and easier for agencies to squeeze out everything the Internet has to offer.
About Industrifonden (www.industrifonden.se)
Industrifonden invests in small and medium sized Swedish companies with international growth potential. The Fund has assets of more than SEK 3 billion, of which SEK 1.5 billion is invested in around 80 companies in technology, cleantech, life science and industry.
Posted on Jun 29th, 2011. by john.
If you are a high-performing team player that thrive on operational excellence, this job is certainly for you! At Burt you’ll develop deep and long lasting relationships with blue-chip online advertisers and publishers, helping them grow and improve their online business.
Burt is looking for talented business development managers to quickly identify new opportunities, effectively pitch our technology solutions in an ever changing competitive market and demonstrate results. An ideal candidate, is experienced in building relationships in large enterprises at senior and C-level, will focus on building meaningful long-term relations instead of ”selling”, have a knack for understanding complex eco-systems, and just maybe has Dale Carnegie’s famous book always on their nightstand.
This position is full time and the office is based in Stockholm (exceptional candidates may work remotely).
Responsibilities
- Reports to VP of Sales.
- Manage inbound sales leads and work with the sales department to prioritize sales.
- Develop, prepare and lead sales presentations.
- Develop a deep understanding of the customer’s business as well as technical needs.
- Maintaining, administrating and working with the internally used sales process.
Requirements
- Proven ability in closing and negotiating complex enterprise new business.
- World class presentational and writing skills.
- Entrepreneurial, problem-solving mindset.
- This position includes extensive traveling.
Preferred experience
- 2-5 years of online technology sales experience.
- Experience in building deep, long lasting relationships at C-level.
- BA/BS degree preferred.
Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re constantly full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out.
Read more about our company and what you can expect from working at Burt here. Read more about Burt here, here and here.
Is this you? Contact jobs@burtcorp.com, and send us an updated CV, cover letter and references.
(*) A EU citizenship or a EU working permit is required for this position.
Posted on Jun 29th, 2011. by john.
We’re recruiting a Key Account Manager for our ever growing portfolio of online publisher, advertiser and agency clients. It is a uniquely varied role, requiring management of customer relations, sales, account management, expertise support as well as educating customers. The Key Account Manager own the long-term relationship with our clients, and are motivated by providing business solutions and creative solutions to specific customer needs.
As an Account Manager you’re responsible for managing business objectives and maintaining an personal relationship of trust with the client. Ideal candidates are proactive, professional, able to handle an often fast-paced environment and committed to the customer to a level beyond what’s required, if necessary.
Responsibilities
- Reports to the VP of Sales.
- Meet, and exceed, revenue goals.
- Develop and own the client relationship primarily through on-site contact, phone, web meetings and email.
- Advocate clients needs within Burt.
- Understanding the needs of the clients and developing their understanding of Burt’s products.
Requirements
- Account management experience.
- BA/BS/MS degree required.
- Entrepreneurial focus.
- Ability to develop relationships at senior and C-level.
- Excellent communication skills.
- Strong team player.
Preferred experience
- 3+ years in account management for complex online technology solutions.
- Demonstrated track record of exceeding client and revenue expectations
Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re constantly full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out.
Read more about our company and what you can expect from working at Burt here. Read more about Burt here, here and here.
Is this you? Contact jobs@burtcorp.com, and send us an updated CV, cover letter and references.
(*) A EU citizenship or a EU working permit is required for this position.
Posted on Jun 29th, 2011. by john.
We are looking for developers who enjoy the megalomanic pleasure that comes with deploying code to a big server cluster. You will work with our platform team building the systems that collect, crunch and serve the data that is the bread and butter of Burt’s products. Experience and knowledge of distributed, fault tolerant, concurrent systems is key. You think that Netflix’ Chaos Monkey is the best idea ever.
This position is full-time and based in our main office in Gothenburg, Sweden(*).
Responsibilities
- Reports to the VP of Engineering.
- Design and implement data collection and processing systems
- Work with the applications team to create interfaces between application and platform
- Work with the operations team to provision infrastructure for the platform systems
Requirements
- Experience building large scale, high-availability distributed systems.
- Knowledge of working with and solving concurrency related issues.
- Excellent programming and problem solving skills.
- Experience with both relational and NoSQL databases.
- Excellent communicator.
Preferred experience
- BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent work experience.
- Deep knowledge of multiple programming languages.
- Proficient Ruby developer.
- Experience with MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ.
Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re constantly full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out.
Read more about our company and what you can expect from working at Burt here. Read more about Burt here, here and here.
Is this you? Contact jobs@burtcorp.com, and send us an updated CV, cover letter and references.
(*) A EU citizenship or a EU working permit is required for this position.
Posted on Jun 29th, 2011. by john.
A man walks into a bar, and asks the bartender for a drink of water. The bartender pulls out a gun, points it at the man, and cocks it. The man says “Thank you” and leaves. What happened?
Do you ask the questions no one else thought of asking? Are you able to quickly dissect a problem into new unforeseen solutions? Does your solution to the above problem include multiple dimensions, classical music and secret conspiracies?
Burt is a company working with revolutionary ways of measuring how and why online display advertising works (or doesn’t). We are currently looking for someone who will share our goal of making the Internet a better place by providing actionable insights to our customers: advertisers, agencies and publishers.
This work is carried out by you, together with us, by using analytical and statistical methods, a brief understanding of the human brain and pure creativity. Join us!
This position is full-time and based in our main office in Gothenburg, Sweden(*).
Responsibilities
- Reports to the R&D manager.
- Work together with Product, Sales, Marketing and Engineering teams to provide insights, identify problems and opportunities, solve problems and inform business decisions.
- Analyze and synthesize massive amounts of data and extract useful business insights.
- Build analytical dashboards and reports relevant in supporting the business decisions of other departments.
Requirements
- BA/BS/MS in Engineering Physics, Math, Statistics or related discipline.
- Very strong analytical skills.
- Track record of creative solutions to hard problems.
- Knowledge of programming, preferrably in R, Ruby or JavaScript.
- Ability to communicate in a clear and effective manner.
- Strong ability to sell your own ideas to other teams.
- Strong focus on finding high leverage solutions to complicated problems.
Preferred experience
- 2-5 years of working with relevant problem solving in a high pace environment.
- Work experience from brand advertising a plus.
- Work experience from data mining and statistical analysis a plus.
Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re constantly full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out.
Read more about our company and what you can expect from working at Burt here. Read more about Burt here, here and here.
Is this you? Contact jobs@burtcorp.com, and send us an updated CV, cover letter and references.
(*) A EU citizenship or a EU working permit is required for this position.
Posted on Jun 29th, 2011. by john.
Burt is looking for passionate sales engineers. An ideal candidate can’t really decide if business development or solving engineering problems is more fun. However, they have always found the most satisfaction from the joy of providing customers with what they want, and often a little bit more.
As a Sales Engineer, you’ll work directly with our sales team to help on-board new customers. You’ll interview customers to see how Burt’s products can be quickly and easily integrated with the systems they’re using. As a person, you’ve developed an ability to juggle a lot at once, without ever dropping a ball. You enjoy people and managing their, often quirky, expectations. And you’re constantly improving upon all these skills to deliver stellar results. In your career, you’ve often made friends on a personal level with customers you’ve met in the past.
One of the main challenges offered is an opportunity to help build one of the great technology companies of the future. Up to the challenge?
This position is full-time and based in our main office in Gothenburg, Sweden(*). For exceptional talent we may consider other locations. The position may require 50% traveling.
Responsibilities
- Reports to the VP of Delivery.
- Communicating with new customers for frictionless on-boarding.
- Researching customer system requirements.
- Writing code to integrate Burt’s products with the customers’ systems.
- Writing tech specs for the development team in order to constantly improve customer on-boarding time.
Requirements
- Experience in at least one programming language, preferably JavaScript and/or Ruby.
- Experience in building and maintaining customer relations.
- Excellent communication skills.
- Fluency in English and Swedish.
Preferred experience
- BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent work experience.
- Experience with publisher and/or advertiser platforms (Such as OAS, Doubleclick, OpenX, Polopoly, EPiServer).
- Knowledge of the ad serving daisy chain.
- Experience in project management.
- Experience in browser side JavaScript.
Working for a startup is fun and fast-paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re constantly full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out.
Read more about our company and what you can expect from working at Burt here. Read more about Burt here, here and here.
Is this you? Contact jobs@burtcorp.com, and send us an updated CV, cover letter and references.
(*) An EU citizenship or an EU working permit is required for this position.
Posted on May 18th, 2011. by john.
Burt is looking to extend it’s Operations team with a Operations/Scalability Engineer.
Just as us, you’re heavily influenced by the DevOps movement. Your primary tools for operations is your ability to code and automate your server setups. You have experience from running large scale, high availability, low latency systems, preferably in a cloud environment. You also have to ability to analyze scalability issues using your own programming skill set, system profilers and/or load testing tools. Once you’ve done that you’ll often dive right in there and improve the code yourself. You’ve got the ability to say “No.” to both customers and our CTO in a way that they’ll both love you instead of secretly hate you.
This position is full-time and based in our main office in Gothenburg, Sweden(*).
Responsibilities
- Reports to Head of operations.
- Work on the scalability, resilience, and efficiency of backend components in a cloud environment (currently AWS).
- Interface with other teams to improve system stability, availability and scalability.
- Optimize our infrastructure at both the software and hardware level.
- Focus on scaling horizontally rather than vertically.
Requirements
- Strong Linux knowledge.
- Experience in delivering business critcial services.
- Experience from debugging runtime problems and improve on system integrations.
- Knowledge of at least one programming language.
Preferred experience
- BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent work experience.
- Experience with configuration management systems for automated infrastructure such as chef, puppet or cfengine.
- Experience of operating complex systems with high requirements on performance and availability.
- Experience with a cloud-based infrastructure, preferably Amazon EC2.
- Experience with system profiling, load testing, horizontal scaling issues etc.
- Having worked with at least one database (Preferably Redis or MongoDB. Candidates with Oracle, MySQL or Postgres experience also have an advantage).
- Good knowledge of TCP/IP networking, firewalls, switches, etc.
- Experience with monitoring systems such as Nagios.
Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re constantly full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out.
Read more about our company and what you can expect from working at Burt here.
Is this you? Contact jobs@burtcorp.com, and send us an updated CV, cover letter and examples of your work (GitHub, StackOverflow, blog, etc).
(*) A EU citizenship or a EU working permit is required for this position.
Posted on Oct 25th, 2010. by gustav.
The months follow our presentation at Cannes Lions has been extremely busy for us. The ”agile advertising” meme has caught on well and we’ve seen solid growth in the number of agencies, advertisers and campaigns running on our platform. As some of you may know, growing has been lots of fun but not entirely without pain…
In august we realized that our conventional Hadoop solution for data analysis wasn’t going to cut it for what we wanted to do, and when Åke started as our first full time designer in august it became clear just how much room we had for improving our visual design and user experience. So we did what we’ve always said we wouldn’t - we rewrote most it from scratch.
Of all the things we’ve done since starting out – the Copybox prototype, Techcrunch50 madness, building the Rich alpha in weeks, spotlighted at DEMO, Meme Machine awards, Creativity and Contagious coverage, Cannes Lions micro hype, countless “most promising…” or “up and coming…” lists, crossing 10 billion impressions etc – building and releasing a massive update of Rich while growing like weed our proudest moment to date.
The code left untouched from the Rich we had at Cannes Lions is our tracking client and our raw data collection service. The rest – data storage, analytics engine, account API, payment management, metrics API, web app, ad testing kit – is pretty much brand new. The analytics engine is insanely fast: +100x compared to our previous Hadoop based solution – on 10% of the hardware. And we’re rolling it out for all accounts during the evening.
What’s new in this Rich release?
The platform has been updated to make it possible for us to release more features faster over the next year. It’s an investment for the future so to speak.
Our focus has been to make sure that the data is easier to understand, to explore and is more actionable. For now, we’ve kept the number of new features for the Free edition to a minimum.
We have also released new premium edition reports to all users. The Premium edition has been in use for a couple of advertisers and agencies over the last few months. The result has been several drastic changes in how they make and measure their campaigns.
Now, for a limited period, we’re releasing the Premium reports free of charge to all our users. After that you’ll be able to buy them on a campaign-by-campaign basis or as a subscription, which will come with some additional goodies…
The best way to learn more about Rich is to use it. If you already have campaigns running: login and let us know what you think! In case you haven’t started using Rich, now is the time.
We’re looking forward to roll out new features based on our new and improved platform. We hope you enjoy it as much as we’ve enjoyed making it!
