[attach id=235998 size="medium"]Trackerbird chief executive Keith Fenech said the start-up had seen an interesting spike in users who have integrated analytics into their software over the past three months. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier[/attach]
Trackerbird Software Analytics, the Microsoft Bizspark start-up established in 2010, has entered into a strategic partnership with leading US-based web survey company Survey Monkey, chief executive officer Keith Fenech told The Times Business yesterday.
Through this technology integration, Trackerbird and Survey Monkey will enable software companies to dispatch in-app surveys directly to the desktops of users running their products. The survey will be automatically delivered using Trackerbird’s Reach Out framework which allows software companies to push targeted messages to their end-users.
Trackerbird’s analytics service is designed to answer software developers’ or companies’ questions about where, when and how their software products are being used and how customers interact with product features. It aims to provide ‘actionable’ business intelligence and conversion analysis so that developers or firms can take business decisions based on facts and figures.
“A strategic partnership like this was part of our original business plan,” Fenech explained. “There are a handful of companies carrying out online surveys – Survey Monkey is now the global leader after acquiring their rivals, Zoomerang, in 2011. About four months ago, we approached Survey Monkey to discuss the idea of creating a new survey delivery channel by integrating their survey engine with our Reach Out delivery framework. We explained how software companies could use Trackerbird to distribute Survey Monkey’s surveys to their customers without relying on e-mail.”
Around 300 companies have signed up to the analytics service in the past year
Both Trackerbird and Survey Monkey now plan a marketing drive around the new Reach Out Survey service which is readily available for customers to use. Using the service, a product manager can build a survey and choose the target audience based on a set of criteria. Such filtering criteria may include geography, product version, language, running days since install, or software licence status. When an end-user matches these criteria, a survey window appears within the application as soon as they run the software, making in-app surveys more effective than e-mail surveys which could easily get lost in a flooded mailbox.
“Survey Monkey were interested in the idea so our development team started working on integrating both technologies. Both technologies can still run independently but customers who are subscribed to both services can benefit from this new integration. This is a significant step for Trackerbird,” Fenech added.
Trackerbird has more company news. Over the past year, it increased platform coverage alongside its initial .NET offering, extending its API to software developers using C++ and Python languages. The company is also testing a beta version that runs on the new Windows 8 and WinRT.
Last November, Trackerbird was selected among the top 20 European start-ups to participate in the Seed Camp accelerator programme. Trackerbird pitched its product to investors and potential partners at the three-day Paris event. Throughout the event, the team enjoyed the opportunity to network and discuss its business and marketing strategies with more than 20 mentors and business executives.
“The feedback was incredibly valuable,” Fenech said. “We made some very interesting connections and opened up new channels that will definitely help us going forward. The mentors helped us identify ways to refine our go-to-market strategy to better target enterprise customers to whom our product seems to be most suited.”
Earlier this year, the company launched Trackerbird Enterprise, a more scalable cloud service designed to support companies having millions of installations.
Fenech and chief technology officer Clifford Farrugia, who met seven years ago, lead a team of three full-timers and a handful of freelancers.
Around 300 companies have signed up to the analytics service in the past year, and a number of them have moved from freeware to a paid premium service. The team has been busy marketing internationally and is actively looking for resellers in various regions.
Trackerbird has managed to clinch sales with customers in the US, the UK, Spain and the Netherlands. Some Maltese organisations are also evaluating the software’s potential.
“We are very positive about the future,” Fenech added. “Over the past three months, we have seen an interesting spike in users who have integrated analytics into their software, and the premium Trackerbird version is not even a year old. At every opportunity we have had to demonstrate the product’s capabilities, the reaction is extremely encouraging. It seems companies are impressed by Trackerbird’s quality and reporting functionality.”