This week we’re adding four brilliant computer science grad students that will do their final theses on media fraud detection, and big data. Although we’ve already done our fair share of work in these areas, it’ll be very interesting to see what happens when ambitious genius’-in-the-making will question everything we’ve come up with so far

Though we seemed to have filled up the geek grad student quota this spring, we’re still looking for students interested in lean startups, customer development, agile business strategy etc. If that sounds like you – get in touch!

Btw – have you signed up for a Rich invite yet? We’re releasing another couple of hundred invites in the next couple of weeks, and even more upgrades on top of that.

The last couple of weeks have been a fantastic ride for all of us at Burt. Since releasing Rich for Free in mid december, we’ve had over a thousand requests for an account and we’re letting on more and more users every week. If you haven’t signed up for an invite – do it now!

We’re working on a major update that will be released in a couple of weeks, but yesterday we deployed a couple of tweaks that should make the whole experience of getting started a lot easier:

Product tour and welcome page
One thing we’ve seen is that the person creating the account knows alot about Rich and how it works, but when invited colleagues still want a quick overview after signing up. We therefore created a 30 second product tour that you can take right after logging in.

Product tour

Welcome dashboard

Test your ad
To make sure you’ve installed Rich ok, we’ve created a testing environment where you can upload or insert a link your ad, and test if Rich is implemented according to plan.

Updated help page and FAQ
We’ve also updated the help section and added an FAQ. You can check both out here.

Fraud detection
We’ve already seen our first attempts at impression fraud, and in accordance to IAB recommendations we’ve added filters to identify those, making sure that metrics are fair and square. If you see any suspicious activity, please e-mail support@burtcorp.com and we’ll take a look at it right away.

All this and tens of other tweaks are already deployed and you’ll see plenty of more updates in the weeks to come.

Thanks everyone for making the first month of Rich for Free a great one!

It’s the last pun based on the product’s name, promise

So last week we finally started seeding the free version of Rich to a wider audience, and ever since we’ve tried to keep up with the avalanche of traffic, emails, invite requests, tweets and press - Brand Republic, Creativity, AOTW, AdExchanger to name those at the top of my head. And we’re on track to have analyzed over 20 million exposures by this evening. Not a bad start.

A nice thing of doing B2B products is that we see a significant drop in activity during the weekends, so there’s at least a theoretical chance of being back on even par come monday morning.

Right now we’re working like mad to upgrade our server park to handle all the companies that want an account. We’ve underestimated short term demand by at least 10x, and want to be dead certain that nobody suffers from scaling issues.

Being popular definitely has it’s downsides. Maintaining stability while opening up more accounts will limit the amount of new features we’ll be able implement during the upcoming couple of weeks. But Rich is still pretty awesome, so there’s no rush We appreciate your continued feedback on what we should prioritize!

For those of you that has yet to request their invite, do it straight away and be sure to recommend Rich to all your friends, more feedback makes a better product in the end for all of us.

Thanks again everyone for making our launch of Rich for Free a great one!

/ gustav

The biggest difference from our previous Rich platform is that it’s cheaper for us to run, so we can now seed it to wider range of advertisers and agencies without going bankrupt. The feature set is a bit scaled back, but it’s still the most competent analytics tool for banners out there. The tracking code is super small and it runs on top of any ad server or ad network. Try it and see for yourself!

Another big thing happening today is that we’re moving into a new space. It’s huge. 5000 square feet. Our landlords are ad agency extraordinaire CP+B Europe, who moved on to an even bigger place down the road, and they’ve been gracious enough to have given us a good deal.

See the guy hanging?

That’s Fredrik, our new platform developer who started this monday and who’s one of the reasons we had to make the move. Fredrik is a super smart geek that will focus on crunching numbers for your Rich account.

So the last couple of weeks we’ve added both Fredrik and Daniel, but despite their general brilliance we’re still looking for a couple of fantastic people to fill out the void that is our new space. Apply now!

We’re looking for a talented Java developer with knowledge of building large scale, distributed systems and API development.

Burts platforms are built using Java, with portions written in Ruby and JRuby. We run them on Ubuntu, deployed on Amazon EC2. We use various technologies and knowledge of any of them is a big plus: Ruby, JRuby, SQL, Hadoop (Pig, Hive), Amazon AWS (EC2, S3, SDB), xNIX (Ubuntu, Bash-scripting)

You may have any or all of this general knowledge and traits:

• A general interest in programming.
• A knowledge of more than one programming language. You’re likely to have taken up a language for no other reason than “it seemed fun”.
• Experience from various programming paradigms, such as procedural, object oriented, functional or declarative.
• A great understanding of design patterns, why they exist, how they’re used and how they can be adapted in different situations – and discussing this with others.
• Having taught a programming or related course.
• Not quiet when people around you discuss programming problems, even if they’re strangers.
• When working with great people hours don’t matter, since spending time with interesting people is what you like best.
• Experience working with TDD, Agile, Scrum, and other development methodologies.

If only some apply to you, don’t let that scare you. We’re basically looking for someone who is awesome, and who enjoys working with other awesome people on challenging problems. We believe in the principle “work hard, play hard”. You should too.

Please send your résumé to jobs@burtcorp.com.

We’re looking for a talented Ruby on Rails developer with a passion for creating great web applications.

The frontends of Burt’s products are developed using Ruby on Rails. We use various other tools and platforms in our process and architecture and knowledge of any of these is a big plus: JRuby, Java, Cucumber, Rake, RSpec, Capistrano, Passenger/Apache, MySQL, Amazon Web Services, Ubuntu.

You may have any or all of this general knowledge and traits:

• A general interest in programming.
• A knowledge of more than one programming language. You’re likely to have taken up a language for no other reason than “it seemed fun”.
• Experience from various programming paradigms, such as procedural, object oriented, functional or declarative.
• A great understanding of design patterns, why they exist, how they’re used and how they can be adapted in different situations – and discussing this with others.
• Having taught a programming or related course.
• Not quiet when people around you discuss programming problems, even if they’re strangers.
• When working with great people hours don’t matter, since spending time with interesting people is what you like best.
• Experience working with TDD, Agile, Scrum, and other development methodologies.

If only some apply to you, don’t let that scare you. We’re basically looking for someone who is awesome, and who enjoys working with other awesome people on challenging problems. We believe in the principle “work hard, play hard”. You should too.

Please send your résumé to jobs@burtcorp.com.

These are the positions we’re looking to fill right now:

Web Application developer
Platform developer

If you know you’re super awesome, but want to do something else at Burt, please send your résumé to jobs@burtcorp.com.

About Burt

We’re five people working around the clock to put a dent in the advertising industry by creating awesome tools for ad agencies. For whatever reason, our industry has been extremely focused on improving the ad distribution and production, but great tools for planning, concept development, campaign optimization and analysis are few and far in between. +100 billions of advertiser dollars are wasted every year because of this; publishers are struggling to make ends meet and not to mention the fact that users have to put up with +10 horrific ads per page, just to compensate for their lack of effect.

The reason we picked this space is simple: we’re creating the tools we always wished for in our daily work at premium agency Daddy, and later at even more premium agency CP+B.

Current products include a “Google Analytics for banners“, a “Photoshop for Copywriters” and a platform that optimizes every ad for every user to maximize impact. And yes: doing three products with a tight team is tough; but no: we’re not crazy.

Our products are dead-easy to use but the underlying technology is extremely complex. Basically, we’re doing the heavy lifting (the fun stuff) so that agencies can focus on insights, ideas, production and improving over time.

Burt has blue chip clients, patient investors, love and respect (spotlighted at Techcrunch50, DEMO, Cannes Lions, SIME and Plugg to name a few). We pay decent salaries, are generous with equity and will send you to that conference you always wanted to go to. Or buy that 30″ screen nobody else lets you have. We know you deserve it.

And we have lots of fun together. Also, we’ve had revenues from day one. However, revenues isn’t really a such a big issue in ad tech (people are used to paying here), the challenge is to create products that people want to use, and that’s why we need you.

So, here’s what we’re looking for:

Someone who’s nice and reasonable. Who can work insanely hard when needed (which is not always but often enough). We’re looking for someone smart with a broad range of interests, who loves learning new things – at this stage there is no such thing as a fixed role. Engineers tag along on sales calls and the CEO (me) commits stuff to Github. The upside is that you get to dive in wherever you find something interesting to do, the downside is that everyone else will be on your case.

The Burt development HQ is located in the beautiful downtown of Göteborg, Sweden, but we’ve got people working in Stockholm and London, UK.

Alright. So these are what we’re looking to fill right now:

Frontend developer
Platform developer

Send resumes, questions or whatever to jobs@burtcorp.com.

It’s great to see that amongst the nominees are some of our favourite startups and a few friends: Bambuser, Peerialism, Soundcloud, Spotify, Twingly and Videoplaza.

Let the best company win!

(quick rant on the hardships of building an ad tech business is coming up – ok to skip if you just want the state of Copybox haha)

Burt’s platform sofware is often mission critical to the campaigns we run, and need to be able to scale from hundereds to tens of thousands of requests per second, with zero performance loss in minutes. For real. Add that SLAs that require four nine uptimes are not uncommon, and you realize that we deal with different challenges than the average web startup. Ad tech requires massive scale from the first user, and bailing out using the fail whale just isn’t an option. The people talking about how building a web business these days is “easy”, “cheap” and “fast” certainly haven’t tried to build what we’re doing

One big challenge is that creating great advertising technology incorporates the most demanding parts from both B2C and B2B at once, meaning that we need to make products people actually want to use (like in B2C), but feedback cycles are often long and reliability is crucial (like in B2B). Not to mention that working capital can be a real bitch… little depending on your business model I guess (simple licensing deals for instance are not included), but in most cases getting the really attractive gross margins requires a big dip in working cap on your behalf. Not even Amazon or Akamai can save you here. It just costs plenty of money to build the ad exchanges, trading systems and demand side platforms that everyone (incl. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) are having wet dreams about controlling

In case anyone is keeping score, these are the main reasons why you see lots of ad tech startups raise tens of millions of dollars, still with nothing to show for it. But it’s also the reason we’ve seen a handful of multi billion dollar deal purchases in our market the last two year’s alone, so I guess that’s ok from an investor POV

But let’s get back to Copybox! Constrained resources or not, as it turns out, revolutionizing creative writing is a lot harder than we thought. Which is probably one of the reasons that the word processor has been untouched for 20 years. But we are making progress. Burt is probably in iteration 10 or so after Techcrunch50, one big change being that we’re now on the desktop.

Don’t worry “I’m a PC” fanboys, we’ve got it for you guys too. Also, we’ve started to rework the design with (not so little) help from Andreas and Jaan to push a less dark and gothic feel to something you might actually like to spend 8 hours a day looking at.

We’ve also realized that for the first full release of Copybox, creating dynamic content is not enough to deliver the kind of organic idea growing (trippy…) kind of experience that we’re aiming for. So we’re adding features that will be part of every writing tool – (good) outlining, remixed “undo/redo” functionality and a (working) set of language tools for grammar, spelling etc. And no in-document formatting, just structure. There are tons of super awesome design tools. Use them.

But first, we’ll release a version of desktop Copybox with dynamic content. ETA early next year. You probably won’t (but it’s not impossible) put a dent in the creative universe with that version of Copybox, but at least you’ll have tangible proof that someone is actually working on making your creative writing tool smarter, better, faster and stronger.

Booyah.

This post discusses that advertising money is spent where people spend their time. Reach a huge audience and sell your advertising spots expensively. The biggest events gets the most expensive advertising spots: CPM for the Superbowl is closing on $35, a 50% – 100% premium depending on how you measure.

So is not yet the case with the web. As Chris is saying in one paragraph, Google and Facebook are comparatively same sized, but Google brings down the house with +50x Facebooks revenues. The gap is even more clear if you start looking at the time spent on the site: Facebook users spend 3x as much time on the site as Google users do on Google. (alexa.com)

The key sentence in that paragraph is: “the Proctor and Gamble’s of the world will eventually find an effective way to shift the bulk of their ad spending online.”

It’s bound to happen. The medium is still so young. The Internet is today where the TV medium was in the 60’s.

If you look at online advertising today, the most obvious comparison is print media. Banners and Google ads are just print ads with medium reference (the link). In the 60’s TV advertising resembled Radio advertising – talking and not showing. Today TV advertising is more sophisticated: Entourage being my favorite with very sophisticated product placements: iPhone, Blackberry, BMW, Zoo York, etc. You don’t even think of it as advertising any more. Great ads even go viral online on youtube. Imagine that – people seeking out to watch your ads.

So it’s obvious – in order to rake in the big bucks online, advertising agencies need to understand their medium. And that’s what we’re working with at Burt, most recently by launching Rich, a tool to help Creatives understand which ads are successful and why. And we’re working on two other products promising to give creative agencies the tools to squeeze out everything our medium has to offer.

So while others are busy talking, we’re busy building.