Start-up Maltese company launches new software analytics product

Maltese company Trackerbird has officially launched its new software analytics service for software developers and software companies.

Trackerbird Software Analytics is a cloud service providing actionable business intelligence for software developers and product managers, enabling them to anonymously track installations, feature usage trends, user behaviour, demographics, license conversions and runtime intelligence for their desktop applications.

Effectively it is similar in concept to Google Analytics but focused on desktop software. Just like web analytics help increase download conversions by tracking website visitors, Trackerbird takes over from the download stage to track usage patterns and conversion trends after the software has been installed.

“We had some very positive feedback so far, ranging from small start-ups which are now using our free edition as well as larger sized companies from around the globe,” Keith Fenech, the company’s chief executive officer, told i-Tech. “During the beta phase, Trackerbird was already deployed live into a number of commercial applications, some of these have now switched to our premium plans. We are also talking to potential business partners who could help sell the service in their region.”

Trackerbird is targeted at desktop apps running on Microsoft Windows (XP or later). Currently it supports any application written in .NET, but in the coming months support for other platforms will be added.

It offers a data export facility which allows users to export the reporting data into XML format so they can load it into third party business intelligence analytics tools for custom reporting.

All software usage metrics collected by Trackerbird are totally anonymous and no IP addresses are stored. This makes it essential in protecting user privacy. The API also supports various privacy levels so software developers can allow every client to choose what type of data is collected from their machine. “We have taken several steps to secure the framework,” reassured Mr Fenech. “Our proprietary protocol runs over proven web technologies and uses RSA encryption and message signing along with techniques to stop replay attacks and other malicious activity. Every end-user installation has two unique key pairs – one pair is generated on the client side and used by the server to verify the data the client sends, and another pair is generated by the server and is used by the client to verify that the message received from the server has not been modified in any way. Every software product that uses Trackerbird is given its own product ID and call-home URL and the server only accepts connections on this URL that originate from that particular software.”

Founded in 2010, the company is a Microsoft Bizspark startup and has ambitious plans on the international market.

“Apart from the usual paid marketing, we are currently in contact with a number of tech news sites and developer-related blogs who have shown interest in writing articles or reviews about the product. Being part of the Microsoft Bizspark network we are also making our service easily accessible to the Microsoft developer community. In the near future we will be launching an affiliate partnership program for sites and bloggers who want to link to us,” concluded the company’s CEO.

www.trackerbird.com