Chartbeat is very cool, but I wonderful how useful it actually is.<p>Is the idea to modify content on the fly as it gains traction? I just don't really see how this service adds value (read: increases my revenue, pageviews, xxx), besides some nice live updating charts to look at.
Chartbeat was uber powerful for Mahalo. I'm not surprised that Jason Calacanis invested in it.<p>Mahalo lives-and-dies in grabbing headline traffic and monopolizing on both short and long-tail trends. Chartbeat shows exactly which pages are hitting. It's an easy to follow formula for updating pages on Mahalo. The system not only shows which pages are hot, but which pages are talked about on Twitter and shows very early trends from the SE's.<p>Jason would regularly encourage folks to use it before his investment. Seems like a good snag for him.
The market for these kinds of services is going to be great over the next years. If you want to make a startup, do it off those principles:<p>We have all this unstructured data and information - make sense of it, and give it to me in a useful instantly understandable format.
I think chartbeat on a cool factor is high but on a useful factor it's low and therefore I passed. What web analytics needs is to go beyond just showing the data (real-time or not) into helping you understand WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE in order to IMPROVE your website objectives.<p>To be more specific:
Tying in a/b testing with user flows and analytics like
- ranking pages by abandon rate so you can see where your loosing people
- tracking funnel processes like sign up and shopping cart to identify problem areas
- ranking links based on clicks to show what users really care about and what is just taking up space on a page
- enabling exit interviews and real-time chat with users to collect feedback
- and on top of identifying problems it would be really useful for it to present suggestions to help solve the problems.<p>Analytics are just a means to an end but for some reason analytics companies think analytics are the end. Big disconnect here as most of their customers don't have the sophistication to take the analytics and know how to improve their site from them. The analytics company that provides an idiots guide to fixing problem areas and optimizing your site will be a game changer.
This is an interesting announcement. Chartbeat may have $300k annual revenues (2500 * 10 * 12), 5 employees and a ton of competitors (GA, Clicky, and tons of other web analytics tools). And they raise $3m. Probably they have interesting plans ahead.
Khan Academy on Chartbeat<p><a href="http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=032eb5f1ea0b68a948634d6af8a6ee8e#" rel="nofollow">http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=0...</a>
"Real-time analytics" is a contradiction in terms, imo. Analytics isn't day trading. Who takes action in response to data in "real time"? What does that even mean? Even Jason Calacanis says "...the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views <i>a month</i>..." (my emphasis). There's a lot of novelty value in blinking stats, but I concur with the general sentiment here that we need better analytics that makes sense of the data, not "real time" analytics that just pumps it out faster.
I've been a fan of Chartbeat since day one, and I've been a consultant to the company for a year. I was thrilled to be invited as the first investor into the company, and the sky is limit for this startup.<p>ChartBeat is Google Analytics on crack. :-)
I've been using chartbeat for the past few weeks. It's absolutely awesome and I recommend it to anyone here. FYI, I have no affiliation with their team + don't even know the team there.