March 2013
4 posts
9 tags
Testing, testing … Crystal Ball
A part of gathering all the data and crunching it is also to be able to make assumptions on future trends. So here’s and idea how we could visualize those predictions. Given the past four weeks, how should next week’s pageviews look like - hour by hour.
You’d be able to quickly answer questions such as: What’s the number of pageviews, exposures you’ll be able to serve, as well as...
6 tags
From our Innovation Corner: Take the Tour
We’re flirting with the idea of creating tour guides for our apps. Here’s an example how it could look like for our Campaign Reporting app. Take it right away or pick it up at some other point when you have time.
You forget things, right? Everyone does. The viewable-active-visible-durational-collegial-clustered-megaflips. ..per second? Huh.. How’s that important, again?
We do try to...
6 tags
From our Innovation Corner: Placement Monitoring
View all your placements at a glance, drag them around, pinch and spread to get deeper insights using your mobile, tablet or computer.
This view emphasises only the most significant about your placements. Viewing it as rows in a table can draw your focus away from what’s important - just because you can see and sort placements by number of clicks doesn’t necessarily make it the only way you...
8 tags
Design for Appraisal: Introducing the Burt...
When it comes to advertising, we at Burt abide a simple but time proven and effective philosophy: if consumers like what they see in an ad, it will work. If they don’t, it most likely won’t.
Most adtech companies base their business on the notion that powerful algorithms can deliver — say it with me now – the right ad, to the right person, in the right place, at the right...
February 2013
2 posts
7 tags
Just Released for Pubs Only: Network Monitoring
Media owners we work with often own several sites. While they usually want to optimize every site as separate entity there is also a need to have an overview over entire business they own. In other words our starting point solving this problem was to provide media owners with an overview of different sites and easy comparisons between them without digging too deep into details.
[[MORE]]We...
6 tags
More news at the Burt.hub - the Audience Disovery...
We know all there is to know about your demographics. It’s been a part of our major apps for a long time. You want to know who saw your advertisers’ campaign? We got you covered. What’s the age distribution for people visiting this webpage or a certain category? Not a problem. You have all the information already there, but it isn’t very accessible and it requires a lot of...
January 2013
1 post
6 tags
Just Released in the Burt.hub: Awesome Time Series...
We just introduced a brand new app to our Burt.hub family and we thought we’d share some thoughts and deliver some background to this sweet new analytics ride. We always strive to make our apps simple, fun and beautiful. And relevant. Relevant - that’s a huge part of it. And it’s a lot harder that it seems. We collect these vast oceans of data and then we filter and process and...
December 2012
4 posts
1 tag
2013: another year when "mobile" will REALLY break...
New years’ resolutions, summaries, trend predictions and yearly round ups are just as much a part of December as are Christmas decorations. Every year there is a lot of talk on how mobile, or tablet for that matter, will completely revolutionize the marketing playground and in this upcoming year this REALLY will break through. Of course the mobile platforms and hugely increased amount of users and...
5 tags
Viewable Impressions #FTW
As of yesterday all the apps in the Burt.hub got some minor touch-ups and fixes. From a purely technical standpoint, nothing has even remotely changed and all our apps will continue to deliver the ease of use and stellar results you’ve come to expect from us here at Burt.
As you cruise through our apps the one thing you might notice is that we stopped using the term In-Screen and opted instead to...
4 tags
It Pays Off to Take a Burt Survey
We conducted a costumer survey the other day and with high awareness that most of our clients have pretty busy schedules we kind of didn’t expect miracles but to our big surprise and joy the results were pretty neat.[[MORE]]
Not only did we get a great response but the users are quite happy with using our apps. As promised in our call for help we randomly chose two respondents that will...
8 tags
WatchDisplay Ads: How to Bring the Sexy Back
A couple of weeks ago in Olso, INMA held an AdOps conference. Gustav von Sydow, Burt Founder and CEO, was invited together with Ted Persson, Founder and CCO at Great Works, to give a kick-ass inspirational talk to provoke thought and a creative conversation. The audience of media techy AdOps guys got to hear a talk about why the agency folks don’t care...
October 2012
6 posts
3 tags
Cassandra - a 2 act play on DB durability
We’ve been using Cassandra more and more lately. It’s pretty good write-wise, but it isn’t a very verbose Database and it’s bothering me. Here’s a transcript of a little conversation we had over SSH, nodetool and DataStax OpsCenter recently. No data was harmed in the recording of this incident. [[MORE]]
Act I
Cassandra: Cassandra Butterflies-cluster, node 101 speaking, how may I help you? Me:...
6 tags
Is Native Advertising Really New?
As appeared in Digiday on October 22nd
If you’ve read any of the trades recently, you’ve heard the buzz about native advertising and its promise of improved engagement.
Discussions, fueled largely in part by Facebook’s introduction of sponsored stories and Twitter’s promoted tweets, have pushed the case for native’s importance beyond the usual advertising technology circles into broader...
5 tags
ExchangeWire: A False Allure of a Premium Panacea...
Yet another great read by our VP of Product Development, Carl Nelvig. This time he takes on the ongoing discussion about misconceptions of the premium.
“Let’s face it. We’re an industry that loves a good buzzword. We latch on to certain terms as if our careers – our very lives – depended on it. A couple of industry visionaries get to talking about some trend and we seize on it like it’s...
5 tags
The 2012 Bully Awards
On yet another occasion there has been proven that Swedish soil has something special for breeding successful start-ups! The 2012 Bully Awards* announced last week place no less than 9 startups on the list of 30 winners. And it sure feels great to be one of them. They’ve given us a Yearling badge, in their own terms defining that we are a classic start-ups. A classic - we like the sound of...
4 tags
Master Thesis Report: Browser Fingerprinting
We have done our Master’s Thesis project about Browser Fingerprinting as an alternative to cookie-based identification methods. Now, I know what you’re thinking; tracking Internet users without them knowing is evil. Well it might be, at least if you’re not transparent about what you collect and why you want to track your users. Another crucial feature which needs be provided not...
2 tags
Learning to Build Distributed Systems the Hard Way
Here’s the slides and a link to the video from Theo’s presentation at DeNormalised London.
The awesome people at SkillsMatter also recorded the talk and have put the video online.
September 2012
6 posts
4 tags
Emacs - The White Box
“G*d damn it, you’re a programmer. Start using an editor you can damn well program.”- Magnar Sveen
If you’re a true programmer you gotta love that quote - I sure do!
To start off with, we have to get it clear what Emacs is. According to the official website:
“Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor - and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs...
1 tag
Mergermarket: Burt to close series A round before...
As appeared in Mergermarket Proprietary Intelligence section on September 24th, 2012
Burt, a Swedish analytics platform for media companies, is in talks with strategic and financial investors to raise more than USD 7m before the year-end, founder and CEO Gustav Von Sydow said.
The company raised around USD 3m last year from angel investors and Swedish venture capital fund Industrifonden. The new...
7 tags
Burt Networking Party @ ATS London - The Golden...
After big success with the ATS Stockholm Networking Party earlier this year there was no doubt we’d support one in London as well. I guess we’re not much of “a roll-ups company” and we do like to hang out and talk, be it about the viewable impressions, RTB, value of the internet media or just about favourite beer brands. Actually at its best all of that at the same...
6 tags
London takeover by Theo & Carl: OMMA Display,...
After an outmost exciting trip to Germany, London is this week’s destination. We are really in the midst of the fall conferencing season and as it goes there are a whole lot of smart Burt guys taking over stages out there. We’ll be visiting OMMA Display, ATS London, DeNormalised and Ad:Tech London this week just to name a few.
[[MORE]]This week’s star is definitely Burt VP of Product...
10 tags
Burt (After) Summer Update
The summer is practically over (or rather way over up here in Sweden=) and inboxes are getting alive again, phones ringing and I guess I just wanted to say hi and welcome back! Of course I have my selfish reasons to write this too… We’ve been hard at work these last couple of months and well.. it’s starting to show! I thought I’d give you a sneak preview so you understand why I’m...
2 tags
Load testing RabbitMQ 2.8.6
At Burt we’re heavy into RabbitMQ. We use it as a series .. of tubes .. that we dump .. all our .. data .. on.. -ish. It’s been an integral part of our system for a long time and it’s served us well. Previous load tests had us worried though. We knew that if we overloaded the inputs we would sink the system. That was old RabbitMQ though.. 2.8 has flow control. Well. Lets see what...
August 2012
3 posts
6 tags
Back from JRubyConf EU and Eurucamp
The combined JRubyConf EU and Eurucamp conference is over and we’re home again in rainy Sweden. We had a blast, the location at lake Müggelsee was awesome, the weather amazing, and the conference was great. Read on to find the slides from our presentations.
[[MORE]]
Gotcha! Ruby things that will come back to bite you, by David
Gotcha! Ruby things that will come back to bite you. from...
7 tags
Off to Germany for JRubyConf EU & Eurucamp!
This weekend, for the first time, JRubyConf will be held in Europe, and we’re excited that not only one, but two, of our Burtlings will be there to speak!
JRubyConf EU will be held as part of the annual Eurucamp, where there’s also one more Burtling speaking. This year, Eurucamp will be taking place at a lake just outside of Berlin, and we’re all looking forward both to the...
4 tags
Job: Business Development Director, Enterprise...
If you are a high-performing team player that thrive on operational excellence, this job is certainly for you! We know, it sounds like a total cliché, but please, bear with us….
At Burt your task will be to develop deep and long lasting relationships with blue-chip online advertisers and publishers, helping them grow and improve their online business.
We’re looking for talented business...
July 2012
2 posts
6 tags
From Spain.js with Love: Data vs Logic. JSON vs... →
Fellow Burtling Jakob was representing with in style at the Spain.js summer javascript conference in Spain last week. We’re all proud he is now sitting next to us at the office and doing some “serious inception”. Unfortunately the talk was not video documented but he has written down some of his thoughts just after the presentation on his blog.
jakobmattsson:
Yesterday, at...
4 tags
Storing Stuff not Worth Storing (S3)
Relational databases. How’s that for a puke inducing concept? Foreign keys. On Delete Cascade. Brings back memories? This was all the rage a couple of decades ago. All the data was to be normalized and linked together, keeping the individual tables as small and general as possible. Database operations and schemas were thoroughly thought out beforehand and set in stone by a league of...
June 2012
1 post
3 tags
New Faces & New Forces at the Office
New markets, more clients, tremendous ideas and all the big ambitions we have, take great minds to take on! A flow of new energy and forces is therefore a very welcome process.
This last weeks we’ve therefore welcomed Robin and Joel to join our forces.
Joel is not really that new of a face since he’s been around the office for the last couple of months working on his Master thesis and...
May 2012
7 posts
5 tags
Agile Web Development with NoDB
When we started building version 2 of Rich (our site and campaign reporting app), one of our main goals was to make developing new features for it very agile.
The first version of Rich, which has been in production since late summer 2009 started off as a classic Rails app running MySQL and rendering views using ERB. It was fine for the first year, but as Burt grew immensely during 2010 so did the...
6 tags
Writing RESTful Web Services Using Node.js in...
A week ago I attended jsDay, an international JavaScript conference in Verona, Italy. Hats off to the very well-organized event - maybe not so strange since the organizers have been hosting a yearly php-conference for almost 10 years. There was also no lack of very interesting people - met quite a few! [[MORE]]
Having to constantly choose between the three tracks was quite painful since there...
7 tags
ExchangeWire: Carl Nelvig, VP R&D, Burt - Media...
A follow-up to the previous post on the complexity of media and creative parameters in display advertising has been published at the ExchangeWire website today. It is a highly relevant topic if we wish to raise the value of display advertising in order to monetize it better and make it deliver better results for branding purposes. We strongly beleive that the future of display advertising is...
6 tags
First Class Citizen Methods in Ruby
JavaScript and alike are very proud about their first class citizen methods/functions - but what are they? Does Ruby have them? If so, in what form? These are a few of the questions I will try to answer in this post.
If you ever traverse through some Rails projects you will most likely come across the use of Module#alias_method_chain. It basically places a function as a proxy in between the...
7 tags
ExchangeWire: Carl Nelvig, VP R&D, Burt - The Da...
Following up an interview with Gustav, another fellow Burtling is being featured at the ExchangeWire. This time it is Carl Nelvig, VP R&D, sharing his thoughts on the essential and unavoidable problem of display advertising: the (in)compatibility of creativeness and media.
[[MORE]]First and foremost highlighting the importance of distinguishing the two, if we want to move away from only...
6 tags
Jakob Goes Verona Style!
This time a fellow Burtling is traveling down to Verona to pass on some awesome engineering knowledge! jsDay — a conference fully dedicated to JavaScript will take place next week in Verona, Italy. It’s described as “the most needed conference”, since JavaScript is the most used programming language on Earth.
[[MORE]]Since much of what the coders write here at Burt is...
7 tags
ExchangeWire: Gustav Von Sydow, CEO & Co-Founder,...
Exchange Wire, leading online publication that tracks data driven display in online advertising, media buying trends and the advertising technology industry in Europe and Asia Pacific will be holding a premiering ATS Stockholm event at the end of this month.
Gustav von Sydow will be one of the speakers at this very first Nordic all day event on data-driven advertising.
[[MORE]]As part of it...
April 2012
7 posts
3 tags
Perpetual Hiring Mode!
Just got a friendly email reminder from Stefan pointing out we have a lot of jobs announcements left on the blog that have already been taken.
BUT we’d like to point out we’re always happy to meet amazing talents that find what we do interesting. So, you find some of previous openings challenging our just love what we do and see yourselves as a potential member of the Burt Team?
...
10 tags
Wrapp, Frank Meehan, raising bags of cash & mingle...
Start-Up Day 2012 in Stockholm energized and inspired! As the Tripbirds’ Ted Valentin said - something has happened in Startup Stockholm during the last months. It is great to see and be a part of such a vibrant start-up community in Stockholm and Sweden!
[[MORE]]A sold-out conference on a Saturday morning - the day better be good was our thought on the way to Debaser Medis! And it...
6 tags
The three golden rules for successful advertising...
It seems as if all really successful, large scale advertising formats have three things in common. These rules apply to everything from the beautiful pages of *Vogue Magazine* to the relevant sponsored links at *Google.com*:
1. The format is a native, natural part of the experience
2. The format is simple enough for anyone to understand
3. The format is consistent across properties and over...
7 tags
Inspire & get inspired at Start-Up Day 2012
Given our startup DNA, contributing at an event such as Start-Up Day Stockholm this coming Saturday is extra fun.
The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship has put together a program that should keep us going the whole day. Gustav will be taking the main stage at 11.10 talking about the Big business - the happiness and hardships of building an Enterprise 2.0 start-up.
We mostly decided to share...
5 tags
Talks at #scandev - check! Next: Startup-Day...
Pretty intense conference season here at Burt. This week on Swedish ground, Burtlings attended Scandinavian Developer Conference and are around for the Startup-Up Day 2012 in Stockholm on Saturday. Next week we’ll be at the IAB Sweden Conference and holding a seminar at the Norwegian Gulltaggen in Oslo.
[[MORE]]Erik, Theo, Jakob and Björn have presented at the Scandinavian Developer...
6 tags
Burt at Norway's Largest Marketing Event
We’ve been talking before about our Love for Norway and the affection seems to be mutual! Now we’re invited to speak at Gulltaggen – the largest Norwegian conference for digital marketing. The event is one of the finest Nordic marketing meet-ups, always attracting pretty impressive international speakers such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Clay Shirky. Apart from the inspiration and energy...
4 tags
Storing Stuff Not Worth Storing (Redis)
Once you pass about 1 000 requests per second you start realizing that storing all that data is gonna be a problem. At 5 000 requests you’ve pretty much stricken off all solutions having the letters SQL on their frontpage. At more than 10 000 requests, your only real option is Redis.
[[MORE]]
In-memory distributed caches are a great way of throwing away your data. In a good way. No,...
March 2012
9 posts
6 tags
World's Largest Watercolor Map
Stamen has done it again. Based on the OpenStreetMap they have created a fascinating look of hand drawn watercolor.
Be sure to visit their site (maps.stamen.com) and explore the world in a new way.
Gothenburg, Sweden
4 tags
Emacs - The Black Box
For many people, Emacs is a black box that few dare to open. Yes, Emacs is hard to learn, especially if you try to use it the “right way”. I guess this is what most people are so afraid of. A sad fact when you know how much it has to offer.
A few years ago, before I was an Emacs user, Richard Stallman was in town talking about free software. At some point during his talk, he just...
1 tag
Slides from David's MongoDB presentation →
Scaling MongoDB for real time analytics - a talk held at Software Passion Summit
4 tags
Slides from Theo's JRuby presentation →
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - presentation held at Software Passion Summit 2012
8 tags
BURT ❤ Norway
Besides the many trips between our offices in Stockholm and Gothenburg our second most visited city must be Oslo. We have signed some great deals there, adding more customers to the previously signed Nettavisen and Finn.no (read more about them in the official press release). But the best thing with Norway is all the people we’ve been meeting, and the enthusiastic conversations we’ve had on how...
5 tags
Storing stuff not worth storing (MongoDB)
Developing an analytics platform means dealing with enormous quantities of rapidly evolving data. In order to manage it we at Burt use a database called MongoDB. On paper MongoDB seems to be the ultimate solution: its fast, easy to cluster and shard, doesn’t use schemas and supports indexes and some atomic operations, but… Oh ‘BUT’… three simple letters. Three simple letters that...
6 tags
How to write a JRuby extension in pure Java
Yes I know — Java, ick. But sometimes it’s worth it. Even though JRuby is blazingly fast, sometimes as fast as Java, there are situations where it just makes more sense to roll up your sleeves and write some proper curly brackets.
Until very recently I wasn’t aware that JRuby had any form of extension API, I just thought that because the Java integration is as good as it is out of the box there...
