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qwertsypage · 5 years ago

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Sometimes you do need Kubernetes! But how should you decide?

At RisingStack, we help companies to adopt cloud-native technologies, or if they have already done so, to get the most mileage out of them.

Recently, I've been invited to Google DevFest to deliver a presentation on our experiences working with Kubernetes.

Below I talk about an online learning and streaming platform where the decision to use Kubernetes has been contested both internally and externally since the beginning of its development.

The application and its underlying infrastructure were designed to meet the needs of the regulations of several countries:

The app should be able to run on-premises, so students’ data could never leave a given country. Also, the app had to be available as a SaaS product as well.

It can be deployed as a single-tenant system where a business customer only hosts one instance serving a handful of users, but some schools could have hundreds of users.

Or it can be deployed as a multi-tenant system where the client is e.g. a government and needs to serve thousands of schools and millions of users.

The application itself was developed by multiple, geographically scattered teams, thus a Microservices architecture was justified, but both the distributed system and the underlying infrastructure seemed to be an overkill when we considered the fact that during the product's initial entry, most of its customers needed small instances.

Was Kubernetes suited for the job, or was it an overkill? Did our client really need Kubernetes?

Let’s figure it out.

(Feel free to check out the video presentation, or the extended article version below!)

youtube

Let's talk a bit about Kubernetes itself!

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration engine that has a vast ecosystem. If you run into any kind of problem, there's probably a library somewhere on the internet that already solves it.

But Kubernetes also has a daunting learning curve, and initially, it's pretty complex to manage. Cloud ops / infrastructure engineering is a complex and big topic in and of itself.

Kubernetes does not really mask away the complexity from you, but plunges you into deep water as it merely gives you a unified control plane to handle all those moving parts that you need to care about in the cloud.

So, if you're just starting out right now, then it's better to start with small things and not with the whole package straight away! First, deploy a VM in the cloud. Use some PaaS or FaaS solutions to play around with one of your apps. It will help you gradually build up the knowledge you need on the journey.

So you want to decide if Kubernetes is for you.

First and foremost, Kubernetes is for you if you work with containers! (It kinda speaks for itself for a container orchestration system). But you should also have more than one service or instance.

Kubernetes makes sense when you have a huge microservice architecture, or you have dedicated instances per tenant having a lot of tenants as well.

Also, your services should be stateless, and your state should be stored in databases outside of the cluster. Another selling point of Kubernetes is the fine gradient control over the network.

And, maybe the most common argument for using Kubernetes is that it provides easy scalability.

Okay, and now let's take a look at the flip side of it.

Kubernetes is not for you if you don't need scalability!

If your services rely heavily on disks, then you should think twice if you want to move to Kubernetes or not. Basically, one disk can only be attached to a single node, so all the services need to reside on that one node. Therefore you lose node auto-scaling, which is one of the biggest selling points of Kubernetes.

For similar reasons, you probably shouldn't use k8s if you don't host your infrastructure in the public cloud. When you run your app on-premises, you need to buy the hardware beforehand and you cannot just conjure machines out of thin air. So basically, you also lose node auto-scaling, unless you're willing to go hybrid cloud and bleed over some of your excess load by spinning up some machines in the public cloud.

If you have a monolithic application that serves all your customers and you need some scaling here and there, then cloud service providers can handle it for you with autoscaling groups.

There is really no need to bring in Kubernetes for that.

Let's see our Kubernetes case-study!

Maybe it's a little bit more tangible if we talk about an actual use case, where we had to go through the decision making process.

Online Learning Platform is an application that you could imagine as if you took your classroom and moved it to the internet.

You can have conference calls. You can share files as handouts, you can have a whiteboard, and you can track the progress of your students.

This project started during the first wave of the lockdowns around March, so one thing that we needed to keep in mind is that time to market was essential.

In other words: we had to do everything very, very quickly!

This product targets mostly schools around Europe, but it is now used by corporations as well.

So, we're talking about millions of users from the point we go to the market.

The product needed to run on-premise, because one of the main targets were governments.

Initially, we were provided with a proposed infrastructure where each school would have its own VM, and all the services and all the databases would reside in those VMs.

Handling that many virtual machines, properly handling rollouts to those, and monitoring all of them sounded like a nightmare to begin with. Especially if we consider the fact that we only had a couple of weeks to go live.

After studying the requirements and the proposal, it was time to call the client to..

Discuss the proposed infrastructure.

So the conversation was something like this:

"Hi guys, we would prefer to go with Kubernetes because to handle stuff at that scale, we would need a unified control plane that Kubernetes gives us."

"Yeah, sure, go for it."

And we were happy, but we still had a couple of questions:

"Could we, by any chance, host it on the public cloud?"

"Well, no, unfortunately. We are negotiating with European local governments and they tend to be squeamish about sending their data to the US. "

Okay, anyways, we can figure something out...

"But do the services need filesystem access?"

"Yes, they do."

Okay, crap! But we still needed to talk to the developers so all was not lost.

Let's call the developers!

It turned out that what we were dealing with was an usual microservice-based architecture, which consisted of a lot of services talking over HTTP and messaging queues.

Each service had its own database, and most of them stored some files in Minio.

In case you don't know it, Minio is an object storage system that implements the S3 API.

Now that we knew the fine-grained architectural layout, we gathered a few more questions:

"Okay guys, can we move all the files to Minio?"

"Yeah, sure, easy peasy."

So, we were happy again, but there was still another problem, so we had to call the hosting providers:

"Hi guys, do you provide hosted Kubernetes?"

"Oh well, at this scale, we can manage to do that!"

So, we were happy again, but..

Just to make sure, we wanted to run the numbers!

Our target was to be able to run 60 000 schools on the platform in the beginning, so we had to see if our plans lined up with our limitations!

We shouldn't have more than 150 000 total pods!

10 (pod/tenant) times 6000 tenants is 60 000 Pods. We're good!

We shouldn't have more than 300 000 total containers!

It's one container per pod, so we're still good.

We shouldn't have more than 100 pods per node and no more than 5 000 nodes.

Well, what we have is 60 000 pods over 100 pod per node. That's already 6 000 nodes, and that's just the initial rollout, so we're already over our 5 000 nodes limit.

Okay, well... Crap!

But, is there a solution to this?

Sure, it's federation!

We could federate our Kubernetes clusters..

..and overcome these limitations.

We have worked with federated systems before, so Kubernetes surely provides something for that, riiight? Well yeah, it does... kind of.

It's the stable Federation v1 API, which is sadly deprecated.

Then we saw that Kubernetes Federation v2 is on the way!

It was still in alpha at the time when we were dealing with this issue, but the GitHub page said it was rapidly moving towards beta release. By taking a look at the releases page we realized that it had been overdue by half a year by then.

Since we only had a short period of time to pull this off, we really didn't want to live that much on the edge.

So what could we do? We could federate by hand! But what does that mean?

In other words: what could have been gained by using KubeFed?

Having a lot of services would have meant that we needed a federated Prometheus and Logging (be it Graylog or ELK) anyway. So the two remaining aspects of the system were rollout / tenant generation, and manual intervention.

Manual intervention is tricky. To make it easy, you need a unified control plane where you can eyeball and modify anything. We could have built a custom one that gathers all information from the clusters and proxies all requests to each of them. However, that would have meant a lot of work, which we just did not have the time for. And even if we had the time to do it, we would have needed to conduct a cost/benefit analysis on it.

The main factor in the decision if you need a unified control plane for everything is scale, or in other words, the number of different control planes to handle.

The original approach would have meant 6000 different planes. That’s just way too much to handle for a small team. But if we could bring it down to 20 or so, that could be bearable. In that case, all we need is an easy mind map that leads from services to their underlying clusters. The actual route would be something like:

Service -> Tenant (K8s Namespace) -> Cluster.

The Service -> Namespace mapping is provided by Kubernetes, so we needed to figure out the Namespace -> Cluster mapping.

This mapping is also necessary to reduce the cognitive overhead and time of digging around when an outage may happen, so it needs to be easy to remember, while having to provide a more or less uniform distribution of tenants across Clusters. The most straightforward way seemed to be to base it on Geography. I’m the most familiar with Poland’s and Hungary’s Geography, so let’s take them as an example.

Poland comprises 16 voivodeships, while Hungary comprises 19 counties as main administrative divisions. Each country’s capital stands out in population, so they have enough schools to get a cluster on their own. Thus it only makes sense to create clusters for each division plus the capital. That gives us 17 or 20 clusters.

So if we get back to our original 60 000 pods, and 100 pod / tenant limitation, we can see that 2 clusters are enough to host them all, but that leaves us no room for either scaling or later expansions. If we spread them across 17 clusters - in the case of Poland for example - that means we have around 3.500 pods / cluster and 350 nodes, which is still manageable.

This could be done in a similar fashion for any European country, but still needs some architecting when setting up the actual infrastructure. And when KubeFed becomes available (and somewhat battle tested) we can easily join these clusters into one single federated cluster.

Great, we have solved the problem of control planes for manual intervention. The only thing left was handling rollouts..

As I mentioned before, several developer teams had been working on the services themselves, and each of them already had their own Gitlab repos and CIs. They already built their own Docker images, so we simply needed a place to gather them all, and roll them out to Kubernetes. So we created a GitOps repo where we stored the helm charts and set up a GitLab CI to build the actual releases, then deploy them.

From here on, it takes a simple loop over the clusters to update the services when necessary.

The other thing we needed to solve was tenant generation.

It was easy as well, because we just needed to create a CLI tool which could be set up by providing the school's name, and its county or state.

That's going to designate its target cluster, and then push it to our Gitops repo, and that basically triggers the same rollout as new versions.

We were almost good to go, but there was still one problem: on-premises.

Although our hosting providers turned into some kind of public cloud (or something we can think of as public clouds), we were also targeting companies who want to educate their employees.

Huge corporations - like a Bank - are just as squeamish about sending their data out to the public internet as governments, if not more..

So we needed to figure out a way to host this on servers within vaults completely separated from the public internet.

In this case, we had two main modes of operation.

One is when a company just wanted a boxed product and they didn't really care about scaling it.

And the other one was where they expected it to be scaled, but they were prepared to handle this.

In the second case, it was kind of a bring your own database scenario, so you could set up the system in a way that we were going to connect to your database.

And in the other case, what we could do is to package everything — including databases — in one VM, in one Kubernetes cluster. But! I just wrote above that you probably shouldn't use disks and shouldn't have databases within your cluster, right?

However, in that case, we already had a working infrastructure.

Kubernetes provided us with infrastructure as code already, so it only made sense to use that as a packaging tool as well, and use Kubespray to just spray it to our target servers.

It wasn't a problem to have disks and DBs within our cluster because the target were companies that didn't want to scale it anyway.

So it's not about scaling. It is mostly about packaging!

Previously I told you, that you probably don't want to do this on-premises, and this is still right! If that's your main target, then you probably shouldn't go with Kubernetes.

However, as our main target was somewhat of a public cloud, it wouldn't have made sense to just recreate the whole thing - basically create a new product in a sense - for these kinds of servers.

So as it is kind of a spin-off, it made sense here as well as a packaging solution.

Basically, I've just given you a bullet point list to help you determine whether Kubernetes is for you or not, and then I just tore it apart and threw it into a basket.

And the reason for this is - as I also mentioned:

Cloud ops is difficult!

There aren't really one-size-fits-all solutions, so basing your decision on checklists you see on the internet is definitely not a good idea.

We've seen that a lot of times where companies adopt Kubernetes because it seems to fit, but when they actually start working with it, it turns out to be an overkill.

If you want to save yourself about a year or two of headache, it's a lot better to first ask an expert, and just spend a couple of hours or days going through your use cases, discussing those and save yourself that year of headache.

In case you're thinking about adopting Kubernetes, or getting the most out of it, don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected], or by using the contact form below!

Sometimes you do need Kubernetes! But how should you decide? published first on https://koresolpage.tumblr.com/

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technodragon · 5 years ago

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Can I Live Without Google Services Framework Without Gimping My Phone?

I decided to write a separate article for this question because it is a complex topic.

WARNING: If you will remove Google Play Services you must root your device first. I am not responsible for anything you do after reading this article, it is provided for informative purposes only. If you are going to remove Google Play Services then make sure you can flash the stock (or custom) ROM to unbrick it if something goes wrong, if you do that and back up data you want to keep then you have nothing to fear.

One question that people who are debloating their devices would ask is, Can I live without Google Services Framework?

The short answer is Yes, if I do not play games and do not mind using alternative software and making a few compromises. But, those compromises are not as drastic as you think and there is a middle ground that can be achieved by installing MicroG if you feel that the compromises are too drastic.

The long answer: Some software depends on Google Services Framework to function and will not work but only 5 to 10% of software that is supposed to be dependent on Google Services Framework will function without it. This software is also needed for Chromecast and using the latest versions of Google apps, you can not fully replace the phone app in a stock ROM with a non Google alternative due to the phone apps being tailored to specific installations of Android in most cases so you will have to downgrade the phone app which should not really affect the ability to make calls or use your device. You also will lose the ability to use Google Assistant, that app that speaks and accepts voice commands to do searches and perform a couple of functions you could do yourself. But, in the end, you can still have a fully functioning device and while some features are lost some features can also be gained using alternative software. The benefits to removing Google Services Framework are less data used on your cell phone plan which could in some cases allow switching to a phone plan with less data to save money, much higher battery life and some peace of mind for those who are concerned about privacy. The main downside is many games rely on Google Services Framework and related components for online functionality and some require it to function at all but for every app I have tested that is supposed to be dependent on Google Services Framework that did not work there were 10 that worked without any issues. The Google software seems to be the most impacted by removing Google Services Framework and related components, most of it stop working without it but there are alternatives for most of it.

I should also point out that there is an alternative to Google Services Framework called MicroG. MicroG is an open source implementation of Google APIs and can mostly replace Google Services Framework and in the majority of cases allow all apps that you use which actually need it to work but do not expect it to be a full replacement because there may be the occasional app that does not yet work with it. However, MicroG has proven in field testing and general use to be reliable and gives the user more control than Google Services Framework allows. Oh, and for those using a stock ROM or one that is odexed, don’t worry, there is a way to install it in a manner that will work, it just will involve some extra steps.

Software That Restores Lost Functionality After Removing Google Services Framework:

MicroG

-- Should run on most stock/odexed Android installations with a few extra installation steps, runs on deodexed Android installations.

-- Replaces Google Media Services/Google Play Services

-- Less than 5% of software that requires Google Services Framework will not work

-- Google apps seem to work without any issues

-- This is a middle ground. Google will not get all of your data but will get a portion of it. Less data will be used but not as little as the amount if neither Google Play Services nor MicroG are installed. You can install and use location backends to supplement the GPS on your phone but they mostly still are sending data to somebody, just not sending it to Google.

QKSMS (F-Droid version is better for those who are concerned about privacy)

-- Able to perform the tasks the Messages app with Carrier Services is able to perform

-- Themeable

-- Able to send scheduled messages

Aurora Store

-- Replaces Play Store.

-- Allows easy anonymous logins using throwaway Google accounts.

-- Can spoof your device as another device easily which can allow accessing some software not available on your device (Note that you will have to experiment to find out which devices to select in spoofing, select the wrong device and software will not install or will fail to work until you select another device or disable spoofing)

-- Can perform almost all functions of Play Store flawlessly.

-- Can be set to automatically install and automatically update on rooted devices.

-- When browsing through a list of search results, tells you which apps contain ads and which are dependent on Google Services Framework (Note that most apps listed with this dependency will still work without Google Services Framework, in most cases this is only for ads and tracking but in the case of games it can affect online features)

-- If you scroll down the app’s page before installing, you can see what trackers are in the app before installing it (If Exodus has that information for the app, not available in every case)

-- The only downside is if you want to purchase paid apps you must purchase them through a web browser first and then download them using the same Google account through Aurora Store.

Android Back Ups to Google Accounts

I can use Syncthing for this purpose.

-- Can be used to back up user data (basically anything stored in /storage/emulated/0) and data on an SD micro card to another device.

-- May not be able to back up call logs, contacts and messages unless they are exported by an app.

Chromecast

There is various software that can replace Chromecast, I just lack a Chromecast device and TV to test it on so I can not try out the software to find the best options. Perhaps somebody else could offer some feedback in this area?

What About Games?

Without Google Play Services, many games may not work properly. Online features may not work,m this is usually not a big deal but you may miss out on some daily or online rewards in the games. Some games will refuse to work at all without an internet connection.

There are four solutions for getting your game on after removing Google Play Services.

You can accept that some games will not work and enjoy the games you can play. This is the most privacy friendly legal option.

You can install emulators to play games from older game systems. This is a legal grey area and may or may not be legal in your area but can provide a great experience. Just be sure to get a cell phone controller because, let’s face it, touch screen controls for games meant to be played with physical controls are inadequate. Fortunately, you can find a cheap controller for phones online. This is a privacy friendly option that can provide plenty of enjoyment but you would be stuck playing games from the past.

You can install MicroG. MicroG is a compromise, instead of Google getting all of your data they will just get a portion of your data. This is good for those who were aiming for a reduction in data transfers and improved battery life without losing much in the process. Most games that did not work before should work with MicroG.

You can purchase an Android game system. Yes, they often feel cheap, but they work rather well, usually have physical controls and in some cases allow mapping the physical controls to positions on the screen in different games. You can keep WIFI turned off on the game system without affecting your phone and keep your sensitive data separate from all the spyware in the games as a result. For games that require online play you can use the tethering feature on most Android phones to use your phone as a portable WIFI hot spot.

Apps That Lack Proper Replacements:

-- Google Assistant (There are apps that will allow long pressing the home button to be used for other things and search apps but I do not know of any good software that responds to voice commands and performs the same functions)

-- Phone App (It will work if you uninstall updates for it and only use versions that will function without Google Services Framework, in Android 9 version 37 will function without Google Services Framework.)

-- Factory Reset (Not an app but should be noted again, if something goes wrong with your phone then you must flash the stock (or custom) ROM onto your device. Removing any system apps can result in being unable to complete the initial setup after a factory reset so being able to restore your system to the state it was in when you purchased it (or installed that custom ROM) is essential.)

Google Maps Replacements

Here WeGo

-- Can use offline maps.

-- Intuitive.

-- Accurate enough, no issues with address navigation.

-- Address look ups from Google or Bing can be used with this app by tapping the android button in a web browser.

-- Not privacy friendly, has tracking code from Google and Facebook, seems to try to get around any software meant to block trackers or internet access.

-- Points of interest database is far from complete.

OSMAnd~ (F-Droid Version)

-- Privacy friendly, will not send your location data anywhere.

-- Can use offline maps.

-- Allows the user to add points of interest.

-- Can do an online search for points of interest.

-- Contains the ability to use various maps besides just road maps including contour lines, nautical maps, bike trails (where available), etc.

-- The online search button is below listed search results, the stored database of POIs is not complete.

-- Since the address format is different in OSMAnd~ you can not tap a button in the web browser to send the address of a place to OSMAnd~ from Google Maps and Bing.

-- The address lookup can at times be inaccurate to the point of being 2 to 3 houses away from the desired address.

Or, just get a dedicated GPS unit, a dedicated GPS unit will be more accurate than a phone and contain as many POIs as Google Maps.

Apps That Can Partially Replace Google Assistant:

CircleLauncher

-- Can be set to launch instead of Google Assistant when you hold the home button or swipe from points on the screen.

-- Instead of asking Google Assistant to do things you select the apps that are available and select the app to use.

-- Can make multi tasking and launching desired apps easy and effective, easier to use than Google Assistant for that purpose once apps are selected.

-- Themeable, many options for look and feel.

-- Sorry, does not respond to voice commands.

Home Bot

-- Launches a single app you select when you hold the home button, good if you want one app available at any time without selecting from a menu.

-- Sorry, does not respond to voice commands.

Simple Search

-- When launched with Home Bot or CircleLauncher, can perform web searches using the search engine of your choice.

-- Sorry, does not respond to voice commands.

In conclusion, yes, your Android device can operate without Google Services Framework. It can perform most of the functions it can perform with Google Services Framework installed. But, you would have to accept that compatibility with apps (that can run on your device) is reduced to closer to 90% of what it was and make some compromises in a few areas. Your device will not be gimped and will not be about as functional as a flip phone, you can still have a decent digital life without it. Using alternative software to restore features, you would end up with a device that has different features and 90 to 95% compatibility compared to its former state, not a device that has less features. Well, that is, unless you ant to play games on your device or use voice commands, these areas of functionality are gimped. Of course, there would be a slight learning curve to using the alternatives to what would not work without Google Play Services. The only question that remains is whether or not the trade off is worth it for you for having higher battery life, more available data in your cell phone service (or the ability to switch to cheaper service with less data to save money) and better privacy but each individual has different needs and only you can answer this question.

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faizrashis1995 · 6 years ago

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Adopting Kubernetes? These guidelines make the transition easier

When it comes to container orchestration, Kubernetes is close to the kind of market domination once experienced by Microsoft Windows. But Kubernetes is far from a ready-to-go, do-it-all container orchestration tool. Before any business can adopt Kubernetes, IT professionals must consider many issues. At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, some of Red Hat's top Kubernetes experts—including Josh Berkus, Kubernetes community lead; Brian Gracely, OpenShift director of product strategy; and Joe Beda, Heptio CTO and one of Kubernetes’s creators—shared insights and set expectations.

The initial step, of course, is to understand the advantages. To grok Kubernetes, said Beda, "first you have to understand why everyone got so excited about Docker and containers.” Docker, and the technologies it is built upon, allowed people to test a server program on a laptop. Then you could port it to the production environment with few changes and a high degree of predictability.

With Kubernetes, Beda said, you can improve automation, efficiency, and workflow. Doing so “can change the way people start thinking about deploying, building, and operating software," he said.

Worth the effort

The reasons to use Kubernetes are straightforward. It goes like this:

Kubernetes makes it easier to run and manage containers;

which makes it easier to build new applications;

which enables you to run them on a hybrid cloud; and

transforms the way you run your business.

But to do that, you must get your developers and operations staff on board with Kubernetes. Make certain each team can deploy faster and easier to Kubernetes than to their old environments, the experts said.

Specifically, that means not asking "your developers to do packaging," said Berkus. "You don't ask your programmers to be Kubernetes managers. Instead, you have to let programmers be programmers."

As the IT staff starts using a Kubernetes-based environment, "make sure their tools are familiar, easy to use, integrate with their workflow, and support teamwork," noted Berkus. Integrating tools like Ansible, GitHub, and Eclipse Che into your new Kubernetes-based structure. Only by doing this can you get developer buy-in, which is a key part of your Kubernetes deployment plan, he added.

One element that leads to success is to recognize that Linux is fundamental to modern containers, particularly for managing resources. True, there are Docker-compatible Windows containers, but they are not used much outside of a few Windows shops. For most practical purposes, "Linux is in every single container, and the Linux OS host spans every container," Beda pointed out.

In short, if you plan to use Kubernetes to manage your containers, your system administrators and DevOps need to know Linux like the back of their hands, said the experts. Kubernetes is Linux-based. No Linux, no Kubernetes.

Not quite out of the box

Adopting Kubernetes requires planning. Your first choice is whether to use a do-it-yourself approach or a commercial distribution. While Linux has a long DIY tradition, in this case, the conference panelists said, even Kubernetes geeks use commercial distributions.

That’s because the Kubernetes “box" includes the API server, default controller, default scheduler, the Kubelet node agent, and the Kubectl command-line-based client. Sounds more like tools and parts rather than a ready-to-run program, doesn't it? That's exactly right. It’s best to think of Kubernetes as a stack definition, not an application.

Twenty years ago, Linux was the same way. The OS was a collection of components and tools, and turning it into a usable system required experts.

To gain a deep understanding, the conference panelists recommended Kelsey Hightower's "Kubernetes: The Hard Way." This well-regarded resource, the panelists agreed, is not for people who want an automated approach to bringing up a Kubernetes cluster. “It's optimized for learning, so it takes the long road to ensure you understand every task required to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster," Gracely said.

If you don't want to become an expert and just want to get Kubernetes up and running, three other hands-on approaches are recommended: Kubeadm, Kubespray, and Kops.

Kubeadm makes it (relatively) easy to bootstrap a minimum-viable Kubernetes cluster. The resulting cluster is useful for learning Kubernetes, but it's not really meant for creating a production system. Kubespray, on the other hand, uses the Ansible DevOps program to create a small production Kubernetes cluster on most popular clouds. Finally, Kops creates and manages production-grade Kubernetes clusters on Amazon Web Services; it's currently being ported to other clouds.

Expect to update regularly

No matter which approach you take, you need to deal with Kubernetes' high-velocity development. Or, as the Red Hat conference panelists put it, "The good part: You get all the new stuff, right away. The bad part: You get all the new stuff, right away."

You see, there's a new Kubernetes release every three months. Let me repeat that: There's a new version every three months. Oh, and there are no long-term support editions. There's only patch support for nine months. Not to mention that alpha and beta features can break compatibility.

Scary, isn't it?

Quick iterations may be fine for development and for learning Kubernetes, but it's clearly not an operations-friendly approach. For production, you really need a distribution. Picking the right Kubernetes blend for your company is essential.

Red Hat, of course, recommends its own OpenShift. While that is a good choice, there are many other options.

First, look at the cloud-specific Kubernetes distributions. These include Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Google Kubernetes Engine. Note that if you use these, it may be harder to use Kubernetes as the foundation for a hybrid cloud.

Among the popular vendor-specific Kubernetes distros, which can be used on any cloud, are Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes; Docker Enterprise 3.0 with Docker Kubernetes Service; Mirantis Cloud Platform; Pivotal Container Service; Rancher 2.0; and SUSE Container as a Service. Each comes with its own take on Kubernetes. For example, SUSE's offering works over any existing cloud-specific Kubernetes, and PKS works hand in glove with VMware services.

Kubernetes is not a miracle worker. It's just a piece of your platform. That said, when deployed correctly, "Kubernetes will simplify complexity while enabling your company to automate your operations and application deployment on a hybrid cloud," Gracely said.

Once you have the right Kubernetes mix in place, though, your company can deploy applications faster, manage your workflow more efficiently, and run a more efficient IT shop.[Source]-https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/adopting-kubernetes-these-guidelines-make-the-transition-easier-1906.html

Basic & Advanced Kubernetes Certification using cloud computing, AWS, Docker etc. in Mumbai. Advanced Containers Domain is used for 25 hours Kubernetes Training.

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readersforum · 6 years ago

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Rippling raises $45M at $270M to be the biz app identity layer

New Post has been published on http://www.readersforum.tk/rippling-raises-45m-at-270m-to-be-the-biz-app-identity-layer/

Rippling raises $45M at $270M to be the biz app identity layer

Parker Conrad’s last startup, Zenefits, drowned in busy work. Now with Rippling, he wants to boil that ocean. Instead of trying to nail one thing then expand, “very counter to conventional wisdom, we took on something that’s a lot broader and more ambitious.” That meant spending two years with 40 engineers working in stealth to build integrations with nearly every popular business tool to combine HR, IT and single-sign on services. The result is that when you hire an employee, Rippling onboards them to all those services in a single click. Goodbye, busy work. Hello, gateway to the enterprise app ecosystem.

The past few years have seen a Cambrian explosion of startups building specialty software for office productivity and collaboration. But that’s left customers struggling to get their teams set up on all these fragmented tools. As such, Rippling had a very good first year on the market with rapidly growing revenue. So when Rippling went out to raise money, Conrad was signing term sheets in just over a week.

Forty-five million dollars. “I know that rounds are bigger these days, but still, for a Series A, that’s pretty substantial,” Conrad tells me with a wide grin over coffee at San Francisco’s Four Barrel. “We want to keep doubling down on the engineering, investing and putting more money into R&D, so we have real product advantages and technology advantages over other players in our space, even though a lot of them have been around a lot longer than we have.” The Information‘s Zoe Bernard had reported Rippling was raising at least $30 million.

Rippling’s round was led by Kleiner Perkins and its enterprise guru Mamoon Hamid. As Conrad tells me, “Many of the metrics you use to evaluate SaaS companies were invented by Mamoon. He really knows his stuff. He’s also just a really great person.” Kleiner was his dream partner for Rippling. “I remember when I was in high school, Kleiner Perkins was the only VC firm I’d ever heard of. When I was a little kid, I thought ‘Oh that’d be cool some day.’ ” The round was joined by Initialized Capital, Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ) and Y Combinator.

A source confirms the round was a stunning $270 million valuation. Hamid was also skeptical about Rippling trying to integrate with everyone before launch. But, he says, “What was a concern a few years ago is now something we like about the company.” After getting pitched so many piecemeal enterprise solutions, it suddenly clicked for Hamid why customers would want “one stop for everything. You need an independent party to be that glue layer.”

Zenefits’ Parker Conrad returns with Rippling to kill HR & IT busywork

Typically, enterprise software is an unglued mess. Apps don’t talk to each other, so when you hire a new employee, you have to manually add them, their role, their team, their manager, their permissions and more to every single tool your team uses. There are HR systems that control payroll and benefits, IT systems that determine what equipment you’re issued, productivity and collaboration apps like Slack and Dropbox and department-specific tools like Salesforce or GitHub. Conrad believes manually updating these with each hire, fire or promotion is the source of almost all administrative work at a company.

The willingness to slog through office chores rather than strategically nullify them is why Zenefits grew so fast, then suddenly hit a wall. What can be begrudgingly brute-forced at 50 employees becomes impossible to manage at 500 employees. That’s why, he says, “We don’t want to have anything that’s not software end to end in the product.” If it requires a client to call Rippling’s operations team for help, it could be built better. That maniacal focus actually allowed Conrad to temporarily hold Rippling’s only role responding to user complaints, which he also credits with propelling rapid iteration. The CEO wants to remain in that mindset, so he still lists his job title on LinkedIn as “Customer Support.”

Conrad seems to have convinced investors that though he was pushed out of his $4.5 billion-valuation HR startup Zenefits, he was more responsible for its rise than its fall. Conrad had built a script that allowed Zenefits staffers to stay logged in to the study portion of their insurance exam. Conrad insists it played no part in helping them study for or pass the certification test. Still, regulators got involved, leading to his departure and a combined $1 million SEC fine for him and Zenefits. The desire to speed things up was another symptom of busy work draining the company’s time.

There were also culture issues, with Zenefits once having to tell employees not to have sex in the office stairwells. A more measured pace and a deeper commitment to diversity are a few other ways Rippling hopes to avoid the culture troubles of Conrad’s last venture.

Rippling only truly began hiring more than engineers when it came out of stealth a year ago. Now the startup has established two lucrative business models. First, it earns reseller fees from other enterprise tool makers when people buy them through the Rippling gateway. Any developer with a well-established brand becomes an integrated Rippling partner. It’s not going to try to out-build Zoom or Mailchimp. “As Rippling is successful, what I think it can do is bring a lot of customers to these other businesses. If you can bring down the marginal cost of adding an N+1 business system, there’s a lot less hesitation about adding products.” Customers want more utility, just without the headache.

Meanwhile, Rippling develops its own in-house versions of undifferentiated parts of the HR and IT stacks, like PTO management or commuter benefits. Customers aren’t loyal to a brand in these areas yet, so it’s easy for Rippling to swoop in. And it can charge a similar rate, but beat competitors on convenience because its homegrown systems integrate directly with Rippling’s source of truth on employee details. Upstarts in the single-sign on space like Okta and LastPass claim to be identity layers, but are really just password managers. And their early growth has spurred SaaS companies to build API endpoints on which Rippling’s version RPass can piggyback.

For a while I thought Slack would emerge as the enterprise identity provider because chat is such a ubiquitous need that it could be the start of a cross-app profile. But HR and IT are an even more foundational layer, and Slack doesn’t feel like a natural place to gather employee details like Rippling is. “For slack, communication and collaboration in general are a big enough opportunity to not let identity get in the way of the core business there,” says Hamid.

Now with Rippling’s business revving up and plenty of cash to fuel the engine, Conrad tells me his biggest concern is hiring the right people. “The really challenging thing in a company is when the headcount grows too quickly. I’m making sure we don’t do things like more than double headcount in a 12-month period,” he tells me. While Zenefits was a mad blitz for scale, Conrad has tried to bias Rippling toward action without being so impulsive that the company makes mistakes. “It’s never easy, but we’re not yet at the scale where things become really scary. We have a little bit more time to hit milestones. We’re growing at a healthy clip, but nothing that’s straining things in any way and we see that because we track our NPS very closely,” he says of trying to run a business at a more livable pace while being an active dad, too.

Luckily, Zenefits taught him how to avoid many of the pitfalls of entrepreneurship. Conrad concludes that he’s happy to have gone from “playing video games on impossible mode versus medium mode.”

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toomanysinks · 6 years ago

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Rippling raises $45M at $270M to be the biz app identity layer

Parker Conrad’s last startup Zenefits drowned in busy work. Now with Rippling, he wants to boil that ocean. Instead of trying to nail one thing then expand, “very counter to conventional wisdom, we took on something that’s a lot broader and more ambitious.” That meant spending 2 years with 40 engineers working in stealth to build integrations with nearly every popular business tool to combine HR, IT, and single-sign on services. The result is that when you hire an employee, Rippling onboards them to all those services in a single click. Goodbye, busy work. Hello, gateway to the enterprise app ecosystem.

$45 million. “I know that rounds are bigger these days but still, for a Series A that’s pretty substantial” Conrad tells me with a wide grin over coffee at San Francisco’s Four Barrel. “We We want to keep doubling down on the engineering, investing and putting more money into R&D, so we have a real product advantages and technology advantages over other players in our space even though a lot of them have been around a lot longer than we have.” The Information‘s Zoe Bernard had reported Rippling was raising at least $30 million.

Rippling’s round was led by Kleiner Perkins and its enterprise guru Mamoon Hamid. Conrad tells me “Many of the metrics you use to evaluate SAAS companies were invented by Mamoon. He really knows his stuff. He’s also just a really great person.” Kleiner was his dream partner for Rippling. “I remember when I was in high school, Kleiner Perkins was the only VC firm I’d ever heard of. When I was a little kid, I thought ‘Oh that’d be cool some day.'” The round was joined by Initialized Capital, Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ), and Y Combinator.

A source confirms the round was a stunning $270 million valuation. Hamid was also skeptical about Rippling trying to integrate with everyone before launch. But he says “What was a concern a few years ago is now something we like about the company.” After getting pitched so many piecemeal enterprise solutions, it suddenly clicked for Hamid why customers would want “one stop for everything. You need an independent party to be that glue layer.”

Zenefits’ Parker Conrad returns with Rippling to kill HR & IT busywork

Typically, enterprise software is an unglued mess. Apps don’t talk to each other, so when you hire a new employee, you have to manually add them, their role, their team, their manager, their permissions and more to every single tool your team uses. There’s HR systems that control payroll and benefits, IT systems that determine what equipment you’re issued, productivity and collaboration apps like Slack and Dropbox, and department-specific tools like Salesforce or Github. Conrad believes manually updating these with each hire, fire, or promotion is the source of almost all administrative work at a company.

The willingness to slog through office chores rather than strategically nullify them is why Zenefits grew so fast, then suddenly hit a wall. What can be begrudgingly brute forced at 50 employees becomes impossible to manage at 500 employees. That’s why “We don’t want to have anything that’s not software end to end in the product.” If it requires a client to call Rippling’s operations team for help, it could be built better. That maniacal focus actually allowed Conrad to temporarily hold Rippling’s only role responding to user complaints, which he also credits with propelling rapid iteration. The CEO wants to remain in that mindset, so he still lists his job title on LinkedIn as “Customer Support”.

Conrad seems to have convinced investors that though he was pushed out of his $4.5 billion valuation HR startup Zenefits, he was more responsible for its rise than its fall. Conrad had built a script that made it easier for Zenefits’ staffers to get certifications to sell insurance, leading to a scandal and his departure. The desire to speed things up was another symptom of busy work draining the company’s time. A more measured pace and a deeper commitment to diversity are a few other ways Rippling hopes to avoid the culture troubles of Conrad’s last venture.

Meanwhile, Rippling develops its own in-house versions of undifferentiated parts of the HR and IT stacks like PTO management or commuter benefits. Customers aren’t loyal to a brand in these areas yet, so it’s easy for Rippling to swoop in. And it can charge a similar rate, but beat competitors on convenience because its homegrown systems integrate directly with Rippling’s source of truth on employee details. Upstarts in the single-sign on space like Okta and LastPass claim to be identity layers, but are really just password managers. And their early growth has spurred SAAS companies to build API endpoints that Rippling’s version RPass can piggyback on.

For a while I thought Slack would emerge as the enterprise identity provider since chat is such a ubiquitous need that it could be the start of a cross-app profile. But HR and IT are an even more foundational layer, and Slack doesn’t feel like a natural place to gather employee details like Rippling is. “For slack, communication and collaboration in general are a big enough oppotunity to not let identity get in the way of the core business there” says Hamid.

Now with Rippling’s business revving up and plenty of cash to fuel the engine, Conrad tells me his biggest concern is hiring the right people. “The really challenging thing in a company is when the headcount grows too quickly. I’m making sure we don’t do things like more than double headcount in a 12 month period” he tells me. While Zenefits was a mad blitz for scale, Conrad has tried to bias Rippling towards action without being so impulsive that the company makes mistakes. “It’s never easy, but we’re not yet at the scale where things become really scary. We have a little bit more time to hit milestones. We’re growing at a healthy clip but nothing that’s straining things in any way and we see that because we track our NPS very closely” he says of trying to run a business at a more liveable pace while being an active dad too.

Luckily, Zenfits taught him how to avoid many of the pitfalls of entrepreneurship. Conrad concludes that he’s happy to have gone from “playing video games on impossible mode vs medium mode.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/03/rippling-45-million/

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sheminecrafts · 7 years ago

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Seven reasons not to trust Facebook to play cupid

This week Facebook has launched a major new product play, slotting an algorithmic dating service inside its walled garden as if that’s perfectly normal behavior for an ageing social network.

Insert your [dad dancing GIF of choice] right here.

Facebook getting into dating looks very much like a mid-life crisis — as a veteran social network desperately seeks a new strategy to stay relevant in an age when app users have largely moved on from social network ‘lifecasting’ to more bounded forms of sharing, via private messaging and/or friend groups inside dedicated messaging and sharing apps.

The erstwhile Facebook status update has long been usurped by the Snapchat (and now Instagram) Story as the social currency of choice for younger app users. Of course Facebook owns the latter product too, and has mercilessly cloned Stories. But it hardly wants its flagship service to just fade away into the background like the old fart it actually is in Internet age terms.

Not if it can reinvigorate the product with a new purpose — and so we arrive at online dating.

Facebook — or should that be ‘Datebook’ now?! — is starting its dating experiment in Colombia, as its beta market. But the company clearly has ambitious designs on becoming a major global force in the increasingly popular online dating arena — to challenge dedicated longtime players like eHarmony and OkCupid, as well as the newer breed of more specialized dating startups, such as female-led app, Bumble.

Zuckerberg is not trying to compete with online dating behemoth Tinder, though. Which Facebook dismisses as a mere ‘hook up’ app — a sub category it claims it wants nothing to do with.

Rather it’s hoping to build something more along the lines of ‘get together with friends of your friends who’re also into soap carving/competitive dog grooming/extreme ironing’ than, for e.g., the raw spank in the face shock of ‘Bang with Friends‘. (The latter being the experimental startup which tried, some six years ago, to combine Facebook and sex — before eventually exiting to a Singapore-based dating app player, Paktor, never to be heard of again. Or, well, not until Facebook decided to get into the dating game and reminded us all how we lol’d about it.)

Mark Zuckerberg’s company doesn’t want to get into anything smutty, though. Oh no, no, NO! No sex please, we’re Facebook!

Facebook Dating has been carefully positioned to avoid sounding like a sex app. It’s being flogged as a tasteful take on the online dating game, with — for instance — the app explicitly architected not to push existing friends together via suggestive matching (though you’ll just have to hope you don’t end up being algorithmically paired with any exes, which judging by Facebook’s penchant for showing users ‘photo memories’ of past stuff with exes may not pan out so well… ). And no ability to swap photo messages with mutual matches in case, well, something pornographic were to pass through.

Facebook is famously no fan of nudes. Unsurprisingly, then, nor is its buttoned up dating app. Only ‘good, old-fashioned wholesome’ text-based chat-up lines (related to ‘good clean pieces of Facebook content’) here please.

If you feel moved to text an up-front marriage proposal — feeling 100% confident in Facebook’s data scientists’ prowess in reading the social media tea leaves and plucking your future life partner out of the mix — its algorithms will probably smile on that though.

The company’s line is that dating will help fulfil its new mission of encouraging ‘time well spent’ — by helping people forge more meaningful (new) relationships thanks to the power of its network (and the data it sucks out of it).

This mission is certainly an upgrade on Facebook’s earlier and baser interest in just trying to connect every human on planet Earth to every other human on planet Earth in some kind of mass data-swinging orgy — regardless of the ethical and/or moral consequences (as Boz memorably penned it), as if it was trying to channel the horror-loving spirit of Pasolini’s Salò. Or, well, a human centipede.

But that was then. These days, in its mid teens, Facebook wants to be seen as grown up and a bit worth. So its take on dating looks a lot more ‘marriage material’ than ‘casual encounters’. Though, well, products don’t always pan out how their makers intend. So it might need to screw its courage to the sticking place and hope things don’t go south.

From the user perspective, there’s a whole other side here too though. Because given how much baggage inevitably comes with Facebook nowadays, the really burning question is whether any sensible person should be letting Mark Zuckerberg fire cupid’s arrows on their behalf?

He famously couldn’t tell malicious Kremlin propaganda from business as usual social networking like latte photos and baby pics — so what makes you think he’s going to be attuned to the subtle nuances of human chemistry?!

Here are just a few reasons why we think you should stay as far away from Facebook’s dalliance with dating as you possibly can…

It’s yet another cynical data grab Facebook’s ad-targeting business model relies on continuous people tracking to function — which means it needs your data to exist. Simply put: Your privacy is Facebook’s lifeblood. Dating is therefore just a convenient veneer to slap atop another major data grab as Facebook tries to find less icky ways to worm its way back and/or deeper into people’s lives. Connecting singles to nurture ‘meaningful relationships’ is the marketing gloss being slicked over its latest invitation to ask people to forget how much private information they’re handing it. Worse still, dating means Facebook is asking people to share even more intimate and personal information than they might otherwise willingly divulge — again with a company whose business model relies upon tracking everything everyone does, on or offline, within its walled garden or outside it on the wider web, and whether they’re Facebook a user or not. This also comes at a time when users of Facebook’s eponymous social network have been showing signs of Facebook fatigue, and even changing how they use the service after a string of major privacy scandals. So Facebook doing dating also looks intended to function as a fresh distraction — to try to draw attention away from its detractors and prevent any more scales falling away from users’ eyes. The company wants to paper over growing scepticism about ad-targeting business models with algorithmic heart-shaped promises. Yet the real underlying passion here is still Facebook’s burning desire to keep minting money off of your private bits and bytes.

Facebook’s history of privacy hostility shows it simply can’t be trusted Facebook also has a very long history of being outright hostile to privacy — including deliberately switching settings to make previously private settings public by default (regulatory intervention has been required to push back against that ratchet) — so its claim, with Dating, to be siloing data in a totally separate bucket, and also that information shared for this service won’t be used to further flesh out user profiles or to target people with ads elsewhere across its empire should be treated with extreme scepticism. Facebook also said WhatsApp users’ data would not be mingled and conjoined with Facebook user data — and, er, look what ended up happening there…!! ————————————————————————————————–>

WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting — here’s how to opt out

And then there’s Facebook record of letting app developers liberally rip user data out of its platform — including (for years and years) ‘friend data’. Which almost sounded cosy. But Facebook’s friends data API meant that an individual Facebook user could have their data sucked out without even agreeing to a particular app’s ToS themselves. Which is part of the reason why users’ personal information has ended up all over the place — and in all sorts of unusual places. (Facebook not enforcing its own policies, and implementing features that could be systematically abused to suck out user data are among some of the many other reasons.) The long and short history of Facebook and privacy is that information given to it for one purpose has ended up being used for all sorts of other things — things we likely don’t even know the half of. Even Facebook itself doesn’t know which is why it’s engaged in a major historical app audit right now. Yet this very same company now wants you to tell it intimate details about your romantic and sexual preferences? Uhhhh, hold that thought, truly.

Facebook already owns the majority of online attention — why pay the company any more mind? Especially as dating singles already have amazingly diverse app choice… In the West there’s pretty much no escape from Facebook Inc. Not if you want to be able to use the social sharing tools your friends are using. Network effects are hugely powerful for that reason, and Facebook owns not just one popular and dominant social network but a whole clutch of them — given it also bought Instagram and WhatsApp (plus some others it bought and just closed, shutting down those alternative options). But online dating, as it currently is, offers a welcome respite from Facebook. It’s arguably also no accident that the Facebook-less zone is so very richly served with startups and services catering to all sorts of types and tastes. There are dating apps for black singles; matchmaking services for Muslims; several for Jewish people; plenty of Christian dating apps; at least one dating service to match ex-pat Asians; another for Chinese-Americans; queer dating apps for women; gay dating apps for men (and of course gay hook up apps too), to name just a few; there’s dating apps that offer games to generate matches; apps that rely on serendipity and location to rub strangers together via missed connections; apps that let you try live video chats with potential matches; and of course no shortage of algorithmic matching dating apps. No singles are lonely for dating apps to try, that’s for sure. So why on earth should humanity cede this very rich, fertile and creative ‘stranger interaction’ space, which caters to singles of all stripes and fancies, to a social network behemoth — just so Facebook can expand its existing monopoly on people’s attention? Why shrink the luxury of choice to give Facebook’s business extra uplift? If Facebook Dating became popular it would inexorably pull attention away from alternatives — perhaps driving consolidation among a myriad of smaller dating players, forcing some to band together to try to achieve greater scale and survive the arrival of the 800lb Facebook gorilla. Some services might feel they have to become a bit less specialized, pushed by market forces to go after a more generic (and thus larger) pool of singles. Others might find they just can’t get enough niche users anymore to self-sustain. The loss of the rich choice in dating apps singles currently enjoy would be a crying shame indeed. Which is as good a reason as any to snub Facebook’s overtures here.

Algorithmic dating is both empty promise and cynical attempt to humanize Facebook surveillance Facebook typically counters the charge that because it tracks people to target them with ads its in the surveillance business by claiming people tracking benefits humanity because it can serve you “relevant ads”. Of course that’s a paper thin argument since all display advertising is something no one has chosen to see and therefore is necessarily a distraction from whatever a person was actually engaged with. It’s also an argument that’s come under increasing strain in recent times, given all the major scandals attached to Facebook’s ad platform, whether that’s to do with socially divisive Facebook ads, or malicious political propaganda spread via Facebook, or targeted Facebook ads that discriminate against protected groups, or Facebook ads that are actually just spreading scams. Safe to say, the list of problems attached to its ad targeting enterprise is long and keeps growing. But Facebook’s follow on claim now, with Dating and the data it intends to hold on people for this matchmaking purpose, is it has the algorithmic expertise to turn a creepy habit of tracking everything everyone does into a formula for locating love. So now it’s not just got “relevant” ads to sell you; it’s claiming Facebook surveillance is the special sauce to find your Significant Other! Frankly, this is beyond insidious. (It is also literally a Black Mirror episode — and that’s supposed to be dysfunctional sci-fi.) Facebook is moving into dating because it needs a new way to package and sell its unpleasant practice of people surveillance. It’s hoping to move beyond its attempt at normalizing its business line (i.e. that surveillance is necessary to show ads that people might be marginally more likely to click on) — which has become increasingly problematic as its ad platform has been shown to be causing all sorts of knock-on societal problems — by implying that by letting Facebook creep on you 24/7 it could secure your future happiness because its algorithms are working to track down your perfect other half — among all those 1s and 0s it’s continuously manhandling. Of course this is total bunkum. There’s no algorithmic formula to determine what makes one person click with another (or not). If there was humans would have figured it out long, long ago — and monetized it mercilessly. (And run into all sorts of horrible ethical problems along the way.) Thing is, people aren’t math. Humans cannot be made to neatly sum to the total of their collective parts and interests. Which is why life is a lot more interesting than the stuff you see on Facebook. And also why there’s a near infinite number of dating apps out there, catering to all sorts of people and predilections. Sadly Facebook can’t see that. Or rather it can’t admit it. And so we get nonsense notions of ‘expert’ algorithmic matchmaking and ‘data science’ as the underpinning justification for yet another dating app launch. Sorry but that’s all just marketing. The idea that Facebook’s data scientists are going to turn out to be bullseye hitting cupids is as preposterous as it is ridiculous. Like any matchmaking service there will be combinations thrown up that work and plenty more than do not. But if the price of a random result is ceaseless surveillance the service has a disproportionate cost attached to it — making it both an unfair and an unattractive exchange for the user. And once again people are being encouraged to give up far more than they’re getting in return. If you believe that finding ‘the one’ will be easier if you focus on people with similar interests to you or who are in the same friend group there’s no shortage of existing ‘life avenues’ you can pursue without having to resort to Facebook Dating. (Try joining a club. Or going to your friends’ parties. Or indeed taking your pick from the scores of existing dating apps that already offer interest-based matching.) Equally you could just take a hike up a mountain and meet your future wife at the top (as one couple I know did). Safe to say, there’s no formula to love. And thankfully so. Don’t believe anyone trying to sell you a dating service with the claim their nerdtastic data scientists will hook you up good and proper. Facebook’s chance of working any ‘love magic’ will be as good/poor as the next app-based matchmaking service. Which is to say it will be random. There’s certainly no formula to be distilled beyond connecting ‘available to date’ singles — which dating apps and websites have been doing very well for years and years and years. No Facebook dates necessary. The company has little more to offer the world of online dating than, say, OkCupid, which has scale and already combines the location and stated interests of its users in an attempt to throw up possible clicks. The only extra bit is Facebook’s quasi-bundling of Events into dating, as a potential avenue to try and date in a marginally more informal setting than agreeing to go on an actual date. Though, really, it just sounds like it might be more awkward to organize and pull off. Facebook’s generic approach to dating is also going to offer much less for certain singles who benefit from a more specialized and tailored service (such as a female-focused player like Bumble which has created a service to cater to women’s needs; or, indeed, any of the aforementioned community focused offerings cited above which help people meet other likeminded singles). Facebook appears to believe that size matters in dating. And seems to want to be a generic giant in a market that’s already richly catering to all sorts of different communities. For many singles that catch-all approach is going to earn it a very hard left swipe.

Dating takes resource and focus away from problems Facebook should actually be fixing Facebook’s founder made ‘fixing Facebook’ his personal priority this year. Which underlines quite how many issues the company has smashing through its plate. We’re not talking little bug fixes. Facebook has a huge bunch of existentially awful hellholes burning through its platform and punching various human rights in the process. This is not at all trivial. Some really terrible stuff has been going on with its platforms acting as the conduit. Earlier this year, for instance, the UN blasted Facebook saying its platform had became a “beast” in Myanmar — weaponized and used to accelerate ethnic violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Facebook has admitted it did not have enough local resource to stop its software being used to amplify ethnic hate and violence in the market. Massacres of Rohingya refuges have been described by human rights organizations as a genocide. And it’s not an isolated instance. In the Philippines the country has recently been plunged into a major human rights crisis — and the government there, which used Facebook to help get elected, has also been using Facebook to savage its critics at the same time as carrying out thousands of urban killings in a bloody so-called ‘war on drugs’. In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging app has been identified as a contributing factor in multiple instances of mob violence and killings — as people have been whipped up by lies spread like lightning via the app. Set against such awful problems — where Facebook’s products are at very least not helping — we now see the company ploughing resource into expanding into a new business area, and expending engineering resource to build a whole new interface and messaging system (the latter to ensure Facebook Dating users can only swap texts, and can’t send photos or videos because that might be a dick pic risk). So it’s a genuine crying shame that Facebook did not pay so much close attention to goings on in Myanmar — where local organizations have long been calling for intelligent limits to be built in to its products to help stop abusive misuse. Yet Facebook only added the option to report conversations in its Messenger app this May. So the sight of the company expending major effort to launch a dating product at the same time as it stands accused of failing to do enough to prevent its products from being conduits for human rights abuses in multiple markets is ethically uncomfortable, to say the least. Prospective users of Facebook Dating might therefore feel a bit queasy to think that their passing fancies have been prioritized by Zuckerberg & co over and above adding stronger safeguards and guardrails to the various platforms they operate to try to safeguard humans from actual death in other corners of the globe.

By getting involved with dating, Facebook is mixing separate social streams Talking of feeling queasy, with Facebook Dating the company is attempting to pull off a tricky balancing act of convincing existing users (many of whom will already be married and/or in a long term relationship) that it’s somehow totally normal to just bolt on a dating layer to something that’s supposed to be a generic social network. All of a sudden a space that’s always been sold — and traded — as a platonic place for people to forge ‘friendships’ is suddenly having sexual opportunity injected into it. Sure, the company is trying to keep these differently oriented desires entirely separate, by making the Dating component an opt-in feature that lurks within Facebook (and where (it says) any activity is siloed and kept off of mainstream Facebook (at least that’s the claim)). But the very existence of Facebook Dating means anyone in a relationship who is already on Facebook is now, on one level, involved with a dating app company. Facebook users may also feel they’re being dangled the opportunity to sign up to online dating on the sly — with the company then committed itself to being the secret-keeping go-between ferrying any flirtatious messages they care to send in a way that would be difficult for their spouse to know about, whether they’re on Facebook or not. How comfortable is Facebook going to be with being a potential aid to adultery? I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that pans out. As noted above, Facebook execs have — in the past — suggested the company is in the business of ‘connecting people, period’. So there’s perhaps a certain twisted logic working away as an undercurrent and driving its impulse to push for ever more human connections. But the company could be at risk of applying its famous “it’s complicated” relationship status to itself with the dating launch — and then raining complicated consequences down upon its users as a result. (As, well, it so often seems to do in the name of expanding its own business.) So instead of ‘don’t mix the streams’, with dating we’re seeing Facebook trying to get away with running entirely opposite types of social interactions in close parallel. What could possibly go wrong?! Or rather what’s to stop someone in the ‘separate’ Facebook dating pool trying to Facebook-stalk a single they come across there who doesn’t responded to their overtures? (Given Facebook dating users are badged with their real Facebook names there could easily be user attempts to ‘cross over’.) And if sentiments from one siloed service spill over into mainstream Facebook things could get very messy indeed — and users could end up being doubly repelled by its service rather than additionally compelled. The risk is Facebook ends up fouling not feathering its own nest by trying to combine dating and social networking. (This less polite phrase also springs to mind.)

Who are you hoping to date anyway?! Outside emerging markets Facebook’s growth has stalled. Even social networking’s later stage middle age boom looks tapped out. At the same time today’s teens are not at all hot for Facebook. The youngest web users are more interested in visually engaging social apps. And the company will have its work cut out trying to lure this trend-sensitive youth crowd. Facebook dating will probably sound like a bad joke — or a dad joke — to these kids. Going up the age range a bit, the under ~35s are hardly enamoured with Facebook either. They may still have a profile but also hardly think Facebook is cool. Some will have reduced their usage or even taken a mini break. The days of this age-group using Facebook to flirt with old college classmates are as long gone as sending a joke Facebook poke. Some are deleting their Facebook account entirely — and not looking back. Is this prime dating age-group suddenly likely to fall en masse for Facebook’s love match experiment? It seems doubtful. And it certainly looks like no accident Facebook is debuting Dating outside the US. Emerging markets, which often have young, app-loving populations, probably represent its best chance at bagging the critical mass of singles absolutely required to make any dating product even vaguely interesting. But in its marketing shots for the service Facebook seems to be hoping to attract singles in the late twenties age-range — dating app users who are probably among the ficklest, trickiest people for Facebook to lure with a late-stage, catch-all and, er, cringey proposition. After that, who’s left? Those over 35s who are still actively on Facebook are either going to be married — and thus busy sharing their wedding/baby pics — and not in the market for dating anyway; or if they are single they may be less inclined towards getting involved with online dating vs younger users who are now well accustomed to dating apps. So again, for Facebook, it looks like diminishing returns up here. And of course a dating app is only as interesting and attractive as the people on it. Which might be the most challenging hurdle for Facebook to make a mark on this well-served playing field — given its eponymous network is now neither young nor cool, hip nor happening, and seems to be having more of an identity crisis with each passing year. Perhaps Facebook could carve out a dating niche for itself among middle-age divorcees — by offering to digitally hand-hold them and help get them back into the dating game. (Although there’s zero suggestion that’s what it’s hoping to do with the service it debuted this week.) If Zuckerberg really wants to bag the younger singles he seems most interested in — at least judging by Facebook Dating’s marketing — he might have been better off adding a dating stream to Instagram. I mean, InstaLovegram almost sounds like it could be a thing.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2xF7Beh via IFTTT

#IFTTT #iraidajzsmmwtv

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technicalsolutions88 · 7 years ago

Link

This week Facebook has launched a major new product play, slotting an algorithmic dating service inside its walled garden as if that’s perfectly normal behavior for an ageing social network.

Insert your [dad dancing GIF of choice] right here.

Not if it can reinvigorate the product with a new purpose — and so we arrive at online dating.

Zuckerberg is not trying to compete with online dating behemoth Tinder, though. Which Facebook dismisses as a mere ‘hook up’ app — a sub category it claims it wants nothing to do with.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company doesn’t want to get into anything smutty, though. Oh no, no, NO! No sex please, we’re Facebook!

Here are just a few reasons why we think you should stay as far away from Facebook’s dalliance with dating as you possibly can…

WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting — here’s how to opt out

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2xF7Beh Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

0 notes

theinvinciblenoob · 7 years ago

Link

This week Facebook has launched a major new product play, slotting an algorithmic dating service inside its walled garden as if that’s perfectly normal behavior for an ageing social network.

Insert your [dad dancing GIF of choice] right here.

Not if it can reinvigorate the product with a new purpose — and so we arrive at online dating.

Zuckerberg is not trying to compete with online dating behemoth Tinder, though. Which Facebook dismisses as a mere ‘hook up’ app — a sub category it claims it wants nothing to do with.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company doesn’t want to get into anything smutty, though. Oh no, no, NO! No sex please, we’re Facebook!

Here are just a few reasons why we think you should stay as far away from Facebook’s dalliance with dating as you possibly can…

WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting — here’s how to opt out

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

0 notes

fmservers · 7 years ago

Text

Seven reasons not to trust Facebook to play cupid

This week Facebook has launched a major new product play, slotting an algorithmic dating service inside its walled garden as if that’s perfectly normal behavior for an ageing social network.

Insert your [dad dancing GIF of choice] right here.

Not if it can reinvigorate the product with a new purpose — and so we arrive at online dating.

Zuckerberg is not trying to compete with online dating behemoth Tinder, though. Which Facebook dismisses as a mere ‘hook up’ app — a sub category it claims it wants nothing to do with.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company doesn’t want to get into anything smutty, though. Oh no, no, NO! No sex please, we’re Facebook!

Here are just a few reasons why we think you should stay as far away from Facebook’s dalliance with dating as you possibly can…

WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting — here’s how to opt out

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

0 notes

thegloober · 7 years ago

Text

Seven reasons not to trust Facebook to play cupid

This week Facebook has launched a major new product play, slotting an algorithmic dating service inside its walled garden as if that’s perfectly normal behavior for an ageing social network.

Insert your [dad dancing GIF of choice] right here.

Not if it can reinvigorate the product with a new purpose — and so we arrive at online dating.

Zuckerberg is not trying to compete with online dating behemoth Tinder, though. Which Facebook dismisses as a mere ‘hook up’ app — a sub category it claims it wants nothing to do with.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company doesn’t want to get into anything smutty, though. Oh no, no, NO! No sex please, we’re Facebook!

Here are just a few reasons why we think you should stay as far away from Facebook’s dalliance with dating as you possibly can…

Source: https://bloghyped.com/seven-reasons-not-to-trust-facebook-to-play-cupid/

0 notes

dorothydelgadillo · 7 years ago

Text

"Automating the Bottom of the Funnel Ft. Juan Parra of Accelo" (Inbound Success Ep. 52)

How can you use marketing automation to deliver better leads to your sales reps AND boost trial-to-customer close rates for a SaaS business?

Juan Parra

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Accelo Head of Marketing Juan Parra talks about how his team used HubSpot to automate the bottom of the sales funnel and dramatically increase the number of free trial users who converted to paying customers on the Accelo platform.

Listen to the podcast to get details on Juan's email workflow and insights you can use to automate the bottom of your own funnel.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. This week my guest is Juan Parra who is the Head of Marketing at Accelo. Welcome, Juan.

Juan: Hi everybody. My name is Juan Para. I'm the Head of Marketing at Accelo and I'm very excited to be here.

Juan and Kathleen recording this episode

About Accelo

Juan: If you haven't heard about Accelo, we're a service operations automation platform. That's a very fancy way of saying that we put all of the operational tools that you're using today in your AUT, in your law firm, it doesn't matter what type of service business it is, we put them under one roof. We were talking about your claim database, that's CRM, we're talking about sales, project management, customer service, retainer management, time tracking.

Literally all of the components you're using today to do the operational part of your business, we put under one roof so you can have data first hand, in front of you and have a full view of what's happening.

But more importantly, the main thing we look to help with is getting you organized and putting as much of your company on rails, so you can get back to doing the work you love. The reason we say that is because nobody gets into the business of becoming a creative agency to be handling invoices and billing. We do it because we're creative people and we like to do entertaining and creative stuff.

After a while, it feels like you're doing more busy work and more admin work than the actual creative work that you wanted to do, and that's where Accelo comes in to actually help you organize, put everything in one place and help you be more profitable and ultimately grow your business.

Kathleen: That's awesome, because I have worked in many a creative agency and one of the biggest pain points we've always had is what we use to call "tool proliferation" where we're jumping between all these software programs.

Whenever you're in any business where you're essentially selling your time, every minute you spend on that is a minute that is losing you money, basically.

Juan: Absolutely. One of the things that we like to say is, if you're an agency, you're inventory is time, and time is literally the most perishable inventory on earth. There's no way to get it back. Every minute that you lose is a minute that you're not billing for, it's a minute that you are literally losing money as an agency on your day-to-day work.

Where Accelo comes in is let's get rid of, on average, you spending 5-7 minutes on 20 emails when half of those, or maybe more than that, can be automated because you're just notifying a client that "We moved on to the next step" or "We're almost ready to ship." Stuff like that.

Technology exists to be able to solve that for you, and that's where we come in. That's where we can help you become more productive and ultimately make more profits.

Kathleen: I'm curious. I'm familiar with Accelo because obviously I work in a marketing agency, and there it's a platform that's really tailor made in many respects for agencies, but you've mentioned some other industries.

I think you mentioned law firms. Are there other service industries that you serve, or is it really any business that is selling time is a good fit for you?

Juan: Any business that is selling time is a very good fit for us. The reason why we have an affinity towards digital agencies and digital marketing companies is because we were an agency ourselves. Like many agencies out there, we started building our own in-house platform to start fixing things.

At one point we realized, there is an avenue and there is a space for this to grow. More than a product back then, we set ourselves to say "Why is it that there's no technology being created for us? There are great task management tools, there are great CRMs for sale, there great tools for a lot of different things that we did individually, but for us as a business, as an agency, there's nothing that exists out there, unless I have a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars to spend on a bunch of API integrations between a lot of platforms, or I can by SAP, or Oracle. I would never do that kind of thing."

That's where we came in, and that's why we developed a platform for agencies.

We have a lot of clients around the world that are, for example in the IT consulting arena, or managed service providers. We also work with a lot of business consulting as a whole.

One trend that's very exciting for us that we've seen is that, normally it's not correlated to excitements it is on the accounting role. The accounting role is moving to this cloud global space that through technology they're now being able to service ... for example we have clients that are in New Zealand, but they serve clients in Australia, UK, and South Africa, and they can do that thanks to cloud software like Accelo that can help you have everything - it doesn't matter where in the world you are - you can have everything in one place.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. I feel like there are so many industries that that applies to. Even within the marketing agency world where we're becoming very much virtual companies.

When you want to have the best talent, your talent is all over. You hire them wherever they are. So, certainly something that I think could be applicable pretty broadly.

Rebranding Accelo

Kathleen: You are Head of Marketing for Accelo and you've been there for some time. It's interesting that the company is making this shift from being an agency to being a SaaS company. I'd love it if you could talk a little bit more about your thoughts for how you're going to market the company, and what you're seeing work really well for Accelo.

Side note, as we get into that, there's a huge thunderstorm brewing here where I'm recording from, so if you hear big booms in the background, it's not that we're under attack, it's that there's a thunderstorm and we're just gonna roll with it, 'cause that's how we roll here.

Juan: Absolutely. To address the question and to talk a little bit about the transition, when we first moved from the agency that we were into a SaaS platform years ago, our other name was Affinity Live and that was back when the cloud wasn't called the cloud yet, and Microsoft was doing a pitch on calling the cloud Live and they had everything Live, and Xbox live, and everything live, right?

We made a gamble and added ... the product itself we called it Affinity then we added the word Live next to it so if it did pan out in that sense, we'd be well positioned for it. Now, years later we know that that was not true.

A little over three and a half years ago we rebranded into Accelo. This was a little bit after I came into the company to start doing the marketing aspect of things. Going through the rebrand was a very exciting process for us, because it's a very different ballpark when you're doing branding for other companies, than when you're doing it for yourself.

There are so many intricacies to the process. "How do we come up with a company name that represents us?"

We had these values that we always think about like acceleration, how do we accelerate your business? That's where the beginning of the word Accelo comes from, right? Then how do we make it short enough that it's easily readable and people can understand it very quickly.

From there we got the name ... how do we make it look like what it is? We work a bit in the product management arena, so our logo has five bars that represent the different parts of our products and they have different colors based on that.

They also represent a Gantt chart and how a Gantt chart can move back and forwards.

Lastly, it's also shaped like an arrow to help you move forward.

These are all sentiments that we applied into the brand as a SaaS platform to really move us where we want to be, not just today but years from now as a brand.

We did that and I think that so far it's been working really great. We have had tremendous success in the last couple years in terms of growth, and this is only the beginning for us, so we're very excited for what's to come.

Kathleen: I love hearing those kinds of stories about rebranding because I think as a consumer you only see the end product of it, right? You see the name, you see the logo, most people don't even really give it much thought.

It's funny, before I went into marketing I use to work as a consultant - this is super random - in the water utility space. I did public sector projects dealing with how you bring in private management of a water utility. One of the challenges we always had is that people don't understand why they need to pay for water because they think "Oh, it's raining, water comes out the tap."

But they never think about what happens in between the rain falling and the water coming out the tap.

It's very similar with branding because they just see "There's a name and a logo."

It's fascinating to me to hear the process you went through, the thought process to get to it and the thoughtfulness that went into not just how you named it and what it meant and how it reflected on your core values, but also the actual structure of the logo itself.

Thank you for sharing.

Juan: There's so many stories that go alongside that logo and so many intricacies that I know people never noticed, but us as a brand and me as a marketer did pay attention to it. One example I always use is, if you look at our logo, the A on it, it's a lower case "a", and in the bottom of the A, that little circle that all lower case As have, we made ... it's not a full circle, we made a little indent on the top right side so it feels like the A is almost smiling.

Check out the smiling "a"! ^^

It gives that different look to the word itself.

I can show you later on at another time, the logo before and after we made that little minuscule change and you'll instantly see "Yeah. That makes sense. It actually looks good."

Kathleen: Maybe we can put it in the show notes so people could see it.

Juan: Yeah, absolutely. Those three things that, as marketers, we have to pay attention and make sure that we're always on the right track and doing what is going to take us to a growth path, if that makes sense.

Kathleen: Yeah. You started with a rebranding, which it was funny you used the word "fun" to describe it, and I think it can be fun but I also think rebranding can be terrifying.

You're changing the most fundamental aspects of the company. The name, the logo, all of it. It's almost like starting over.

Having gone through that process and now that that's behind you and you're looking forward, you've had some time to engage in marketing since you've done the rebranding. I'd love to hear what's working well for you, and what are you gonna double down on and what do you see yourself doing more of going forward?

Accelo's Marketing Strategy

Juan: Part of the rebrand, and this is something that we haven't talked about yet, was that as a platform, as a SaaS company, as a software company ... software companies tend to get put into categories.

You have all the different price matching softwares under one category, and all CRMs, and so on and so forth. For our type of software, there wasn't a category where we could fit in. We can fit into a lot of them because of the different parts of our product, but not one that encompassed the entire thing.

As part of the rebrand we were also thinking "We need to come up with a category that makes sense." That's how we came up with service operations automations, or servops, which is what we've been doubling down in terms of evangelizing it and bringing other people to this category to develop software in this category. It's a category meant to service service businesses and agencies, and agencies obviously in front because of our nature, but all types of service businesses.

The idea is "Let's start talking about this. Let's put our foot forward saying we need to develop software that is built with a very specific group in mind that has not been addressed."

When we talk about time tracking, time tracking software is fascinating to me because time tracking is one of those rare softwares that have already done that in some sense.

You have time trackers that are specific to law firms because the law says we need to be tracking up to the millisecond. Then there are other timers built for agencies that don't necessarily need to have those type of features, and so on and so forth.

Let's keep doing that, but on a much larger scale, right?

When it came to the brand, it was almost like two brand exercises at the same time, and how do they go together? But also how do they differentiate themselves, right?

We don't want servops by no means to be a thing that's just about Accelo. There's an ecosystem around it that should encompass a bunch of other companies, and that's where we're doubling down.

When it comes down to the brand itself and have we done what has worked, I think the most important thing that we've done for Accelo as a brand is humanizing it as much as possible, and making Accelo a brand that's about the user and not about the product.

The way that we do that is not only in how we handle ourselves on a day-to-day basis like having our community being part of our roadmap planning, or having a large community that comes in to test at the beta level with any feature but also at the alpha level, so we can understand how are we doing developing things right or how are we developing them wrong?

That's on the internal side. On the external side, like I had mentioned earlier, we have one purpose and that's getting you back to the work you love.

When we enter into any discussion, whether it's through our content which one of our top blogs in this past couple weeks was meditation for project managers, right? That was a fun article for us to write because we do do a little bit of that in the office ourselves. Yeah, it sounds very much like a San Francisco, Kumbaya type of thing, but it actually helps us out on a daily basis. It also helps us reset our minds and helps us get into a work mode where we can actually be productive.

Thinking about those things and not just saying "We're Accelo. We have project management, customer service, and sales and that's it," that's what's really helped us grow the brand and bring back that affinity which I love to say because it use to be our old brand and there's definitely a lot of it in us, towards our clients, towards the people that we service, towards the people that live on a day-to-day basis with the struggles.

Automation can make it easy for you to do that, and because we understand that that's why we've developed time tracking tools within our product to be able to get rid of ultimately having people every Friday having to fill out time sheets. That's just one of the ways that we do it.

Kathleen: First of all, I'm a meditator so it's not just a San Francisco thing. I'm deep in the East coast.

What I love about what you described with that meditation example, is that what you've done is make the content more about the holistic needs of your audience, as opposed to their needs only as regards your product.

I've interviewed a lot of different marketers for this podcast and some of the more compelling stories, I've heard ... I think the first one here talked about this was Stephanie Casstevens, who at the time was working for another company, but funny enough now works at IMPACT.

When I interviewed her she was not working with me, and she talked about a case study of a really successful campaign where they were not able to see success until they stopped talking about what they were selling and talked about other things that their audience felt as pain points that had nothing to do with their product. It was the only way they could start a conversation and build a relationship.

It sounds like that's the direction that you're heading in.

Juan: Absolutely. I can tell you that years ago in our sales process, we also found exactly that. We use to have a sales process that was all about showing the product and demoing the product and saying "this is how this works, and this is how that works."

When we changed it to having discovery in the beginning and saying "What's the problem that you're trying to solve?" - just asking that question, most people often come to us and say "The problem that I'm trying to solve is I need a better project management tool." And then we need to re-ask the same question: what is it that you're actually trying to solve?

"Oh, we're disorganized."

Alright let's talk about that a little bit. Why are you disorganized? Is it that you're dealing with a hundred different spreadsheets? Is it that you're working on a task management platform and you're trying to tie in data from another place?

Getting into the actual root of the cause, and having that conversation has led us to a sales process where then it becomes a matter of, "alright, can you do all those things and solve the actual problem that we've now identified?"

Yes you can. Alright, then let's go into negotiation, validation, negotiation process, and ever since we did that, the company has just skyrocketed in terms of sales, in terms of marketing - across the board - just overall growth because of that thoughtfulness towards the clients and the people that we service.

Kathleen: I love what you just said, because I strongly believe, and I've been told by some of the mentors that I respect the most that very often the first answer you get - particularly when you're doing persona research, or audience research - the first answer you get is not the real answer.

Unless you are willing to slow down and ask why, and continue drilling, you don't really get to the right answer.

I think too many marketers don't do that. They just get these answers. They take them at face value and run with them, and unfortunately that leads us to spend a lot of time and effort creating content, creating marketing, that doesn't really resonate.

Juan: Absolutely, and one fascinating thing is we've even seen our sales cycles reduce in time, because that first phone call takes longer, but then the rest of the process, it's actually quite shorter. Then we're going straight into the things that matter to you, and how are you gonna solve them?

What are those "aha moments," KPIs, OKRs, however you want to call them that are actually gonna make an impact today in your business, and then how is it that automation is gonna make an impact today, and six months from now and a year from now, and what does that roadmap look like, right?

Having that conversation then has most definitely turned into having, bringing, onboarding a lot of really, really good clients into Accelo.

Kathleen: It's that old concept of you've gotta slow down to speed up, right?

Juan: Yeah, absolutely.

Automating the Bottom of the Funnel

Kathleen: So, one of the interesting things that you shared with me, that I wanna make sure we talk about, is that you've had a lot of success with what I would term, automating the bottom of the funnel. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Juan: So, I guess to begin with, at Accelo, sales and marketing have always been one entity instead of being two siloed entities. We've always operated, one, together, and second, side-by-side.

Because we were just built that way naturally, we found ourselves using sales updates and our marketing process and then marketing tactics in our sales process, and at some point we realized that we could benefit each other. The way that we do that is, for example, when a client starts a trial at Accelo.com - let's add that app in there - the system recognizes that lead coming in. There is a system in place to see what type of lead that person is, and who the is the right person to work with that lead.

Once that's identified, then there is an entire marketing campaign strategy around that lead to serve them with the content that's necessary for, that we've identified is going to help them through this process.

We, at a very basic level, start with an email sequence that then helps the user book demos with our AEs automatically without even having to jump into a phone call. Through the use of technology, people click on a link and there the calendar of the AE shows up and they can just book a meeting right then and there.

There are two things that we found with that. One is, the AEs love it because they come into the office and their day's already pre-filled with demos they need to make and sales that they need to work.

More importantly, it has helped us reframe that initial conversation.

The moment that the user clicks on that link and books a time in the calendar, that's a meeting that was set up by the user, not by Accelo.

When the conversation actually starts, the user actually feels responsible for that conversation happening, and that sets us as a brand and as a company in a much better place to explain what Accelo is, how it can help you, and ultimately for a much smoother sales process.

Kathleen: So this is all getting kicked off by an interested potential customer who comes to your website and clicks "book a demo," and that's what triggers this process?

Juan: So, they start a trial. We don't have a "book a demo" button, we have a 14 day trial they can start.

They get in, and they start playing with it. While they're playing with it, automatically, in the background, we use HubSpot for most of our workflow automation, plus other plugins.

While the person is playing with it, they get a welcome email from our CEO, bringing them in, asking them, "hey, what is-" even from that first email we start humanizing the process by saying that our CEO is asking them, "how can I help you. What is it that you're actually trying to solve? Let's start that conversation."

Within a couple minutes, they receive an email from the pertinent AE directly, saying, "Hey I'm here to help you out. Let me know how I can assist you. If you're interested in getting into the weeds and having a more in-depth conversation, click here and book a demo."

That all happens automatically. The AE doesn't necessarily do anything on his behalf, other than seeing that it pops up in his Accelo profile, and then from there he can work that lead, do the research, so on and so forth.

Kathleen: So the AE's are your Account Executives? Is that right?

Juan: Account Executives, sorry, yes.

Kathleen: Okay. What is the frequency of the touch points you're having in this automated sequence?

Juan: So we have email, and the first email from the AE on day one.

From there, depending on how much interaction has been happening, the next email will happen within the next two or three days. The longest period that it will hold will be three days. After day three an email will go out.

Then, after that, we have a cadence that we have, kind of like master for ourselves, it's anywhere between two or three days throughout a 14 day period.

It's definitely a cadence that we have tested and works very well for us, but I also mentor a couple other companies, and while they've implemented this, they've seen that a much different cadence for their audience works better.

When it comes to cadence, it's always in my mind, you start with something basic every two days or every three days, and then from there you start tweaking to see how people respond.

Kathleen: Okay, so cadence depends on audience. It depends on testing. You need to play around with it and see what's right for you.

You mentioned 14 days. Is that the duration of the free trial?

Juan: That is the duration of the free trial.

I think more importantly than the cadence is the content that these emails have, I think it's important for us to realize that not every email we send to our users should be trying to drive a demo. That's something that I see on my inbox every single day; a person that has been trying to get in touch with me and, for some reason I've either not been able to reply or I've put it on my- need to do this a little bit later. I all the sudden have three other emails with the same call to action, "let's book a demo! Let's book a demo! Let's do a call! Let's do a call!"

As part of our cadence, we understand that that's not necessarily the best process for people.

If by email three, that person hasn't booked a demo, most likely that person is not interested in booking a demo, but that doesn't mean that person is not interested in your platform, so let's get them tools to play more in the platform.

At some point, if we know that they spent x amount of time using our software, they're gonna have questions, and most likely they're gonna end up booking a demo at some point. It's about framing those calls to action through that cadence.

The reason why I bring this up is because by the end of the 14 day process where we realize, "alright, clearly this person does not want to have a conversation for x or y reason"- to us, that doesn't necessarily mean that the sale is dead, or that that lead is dead. So, a week after that 14 day process happens, we send yet another email asking them, "Hey, here's a brief survey. Three questions on why did you decide to leave, or why did you decide to not continue with the process or not talk to our team?"

What's fascinating is that people who have not replied, only opened one or two emails - that's the one email that they always end up replying.

They give us a very straight reason, then that for us then informs our sales process. It also informs the content that we were putting in those emails before. It informs the conversations that are happening. It informs the onboarding process.

I can't tell you how many things the response to that particular email has impacted in our sales funnel, in our marketing funnel, and in our product development itself. How do we showcase the best parts of Accelo at the most pertinent time, and so on so forth.

That's why even if that person never buys, that doesn't mean that that person doesn't send data that's relevant to you, and if you can access that then that's gonna make you a better marketer, a better salesperson, and a better company as a whole.

Kathleen: It's interesting you say that that's the email that everyone responds to, because I feel like it's the equivalent of the sales breakup email. I used to be in a sales role at IMPACT, and man, breakup emails are incredibly effective!

I guess for anyone listening, if you don't know what a breakup email is, that's basically when you've tried three, four, however many times and you're not getting a response. You write and say, "This is the last time I'm gonna email you," or "I guess you're not interested," or whatever your message is.

Juan: We do have a breakup email on the 14 day plan. That's the last email where we say, "I know you're not interested, but, by any chance if you still are, click here and you can extend your trial."

That's kind of like the last call to action within that breakup email, and the email that goes out a week later, that's actually an email that comes again from the CEO, so the two emails that are coming from the CEO is the welcome and the "why didn't you want us?" basically.

They always get a good amount of response.

Kathleen: Now, when you send your breakup email, what percentage of recipients opt to extend their trial?

Juan: We're seeing that about ten to fifteen percent of people opt to extend their trial.

What's even more fascinating is that out of those ten to fifteen people that end up extending the trial, a very high number then end up converting or going through an in-depth sales process.

It's a very low number that extends the trial and then nothing happens.

The key here is, it doesn't matter how you do it, invoke action. Invoke action whether it's through booking a demo, through doing more stuff in your platform, through extending the trial. The moment that you invoke at least one action, that's the moment that then you can actually kick off a good sales process.

Kathleen: Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that the people that extend the trials convert at a higher rate, because I know at least myself, I'm busy, my inbox is flooded, and so I will sign up for trials and then forget or run out of time.

You get that last email with the offer to extend, and it's like, "Oh, thank goodness! Time has flown by and I didn't realize my trial was ending." Anybody who's gonna bother to extend at that point, usually I would think would have pretty good intent.

When did you put this automation sequence in place? How long has it been running?

Juan: So we've had this automation sequence for about two years.

In those two years we've run a little bit over three hundred experiments on the emails themselves, whether it's through the subject line, the cadence, the signature, what to put underneath the signature.

One, we've seen obviously a growth in response rates with that sort of experimentation, but we've also seen that people, if you start an email with a suggestion of what to do next, and then put the actual call to action, people are more reactive to that and end up saying, "alright, let me try it, and by the way, I might as well try it with you on the phone so you can tell me if I'm doing things right or wrong."

So, those are the sort of things that have helped that automation really work and really drive more demos and increase our sales.

Kathleen: Have you been able to collect any data - before and after data - as far as how putting this automation sequence in place has impacted your, I guess it's really your trial to customer close rates?

Juan: So, when we first implemented this, what we wanted to improve was our trial to demo rates. What we see was, we almost doubled the amount of demo rates. That's how big the difference was.

The one thing that we can attribute it to is that by no means did it have anything to do with the content that the sales guys were necessarily sending. The quantity of leads that we were bringing in, it was just too much for the sales team that we had back then. It is still today.

For them to manage each one of those sales individually with the amount of care, with the right timing, with all the different factors that come into making an email successful - that's where bridging the gap between marketing and sales becomes important.

I've seen sales teams now that have a team that's dedicated to just doing this, but for small and medium businesses, or start-ups like us that are very much going, but are not quite that big, then we can do that.

We send marketing emails on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, so we're testing. That's our bread and butter, so why not use the same tools that we're using for marketing to help the sales team out?

We did that and it's just been success after success.

Kathleen: Hopefully if you scale and you do really get quite large, what I think is so smart is that you've put a system in place that will completely grow with you. That automation, it can really help you save time, and I would think, my guess at least is that it would make understanding when you need to hire additional AE's a much simpler equation. We call them "BOFU requests" - bottom of the funnel requests- and as you see that number increase, it becomes fairly simple to calculate: this is the number that any given AE can handle, so feed that number with our existing AE's, we've gotta hire another one.

Juan: So, we have on our weekly reporting, we have that and we measure what's the health of each one of the pipelines, obviously, but more, how much is being touched and how much is not being touched for x, y, and z reason, and then based on that we make hiring decisions, not just for the sales team, but also for the marketing team, because as the team grows, it needs more nooks and crannies and the workflow needs to be adapted, and the workflow needs to change, and that requires time, it requires effort, and it requires man power.

It has not only helped us learn what should our hiring numbers be on the sale side, but also on the marketing side.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's great. Well, what I like about this is that it's a fairly straightforward solution that any company can implement. I mean, you obviously need some kind of marketing automation platform. It sounds like you're using HubSpot for this.

Juan: Correct. When we started, we didn't start out with HubSpot. We actually started with another platform called AutoPilot. They're very, very good at doing email workflows, and making visuals so it's easy for you to use. That's another tool that I highly recommend. Autopilot, we started with it, and it was amazing. Like that, there's plenty of other platforms out there that can help you make simple workflows, that can then lead you into this type of process.

The question is, when looking at any tool is, how are you going to be able to connect the data, right? That's where our automation makes it all simple, and easy. When you have an automated platform like Excel, for example, or like HubSpot, all the data's already there so you can tell HubSpot, "Hey. Don't send this email when the sales already interacted with this person."

Those are the little things that are very, very important and that you need to get right. If you send two emails on the same day to one lead, that lead most likely is gonna be dead within a day or two. They're not gonna respond. They're like, "You guys don't have your stuff together." That impacts the reputation of the business obviously.

There's definitely a good amount of tweaking that needs to be done. By no means is this hard. By no means is this overly complicated. It's actually a very simple workflow that can help you grow your sales.

Kathleen: Yeah. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes we as marketers make, is to have a bunch of different workflows running in the background or email automation sequences or whatever you want to call them. To not have a system for tracking and controlling how much email a given recipient is getting within a certain amount of time.

Juan: I absolutely loved that you used the word "system."

I do speaking engagements now. It feels like it's almost weekly. What I tell the audience is, "When you're looking at this organization, where you have a bunch of different tools not speaking to each other, when you have teams not necessarily speaking to each other, what you need to put in place is a system."

That system can be as simple as sitting down and saying, "How does a customer lifecycle actually work and where do all the different nooks and crannies come in? Where everything fits in." Then based on that, start creating workflows for that.

Going in deep in an actual workflow of a project and what are the different things that need to tie into a project? Normally people think, "Well I need a PM, I need the people that are going to be doing the work and that." It's actually more than that. You need a lot of admin work, for example, time tracking.

How do you know that a project is on budget at any given moment? Most companies call their CFO and say, "Hey can you run the numbers?" And a week later they get the numbers but the problem is, that project is already over budget, and most likely they're gonna lose money.

That's why putting systems in place can help us fix that, can help us not go out of budget or not run out of time if you're running on retainers and stuff like that.

Kathleen: I couldn't agree more.

Juan: Yeah.

Kathleen: It's easy to get it all mixed up when you've got a million different platforms you're working off of. That is also the business case for somebody to get Accelo - so that they have fewer platforms.

Juan: Absolutely. I ask people, "If you opened your computer right now, how many tabs do you have open in your browser?" I can tell you that, on average, people say 10 out of the top of their head. Most likely it's probably gonna be 15 or 16.

Then I ask them, "Out of those 10 tabs that you have open, how many of those tabs are actually going towards the work that you're doing? How many are going to the tracking process? The operational part of things?" People think about it for a second and say, "I guess, like six of those tabs are just all the tools that I'm using." Then three or four are for the work that they're actually doing.

We can fix that just by decluttering your browser and your working environment. That, by itself, can help you be more efficient. If you're more efficient, you can work more billable hours in the same amount of time.

It's not like I'm saying, "Now because you're more efficient you can work 10 hours a day." Within the same, let's say eight hours of a day, you used to be four hours of actual work and then four hours doing the rest. Well, if I can give you one more hour, that's one more billable hour that you can make money out of.

Kathleen: It's funny, when you said, "How many tabs do you have open?" I immediately looked at my browser. Then I had to laugh 'cause I was like, "Well, I guess the first question should be how many browser windows do you have open?" Because I have two screens and I know some people who have three. It's like, I have X number or tabs times X number of browsers.

It's crazy, it's nuts. No wonder we have trouble focusing and getting stuff done!

Juan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Kathleen: I want to make sure I ask you my favorite two questions before we wrap up today.

Kathleen's Two Questions

Kathleen: The first one is, you work with a lot of creative agencies and a lot of other different companies and you're speaking at a lot of conferences. I'm sure you're seeing some great examples of marketing. Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well today?

Juan: I think individual, I think both in different scenarios, but individual is ... To me takes the prize. The reason for that is because the adaptability, the pace that they're able to do the experimentation, and the adjustments for any type of campaign, any type of advertising process to actually work and be efficient.

As companies as we grow, because of how the nature of how businesses are, things tend to start slow down a little bit. One example for us, as a brand, while we have by no means slowed down we have always taken the pride of being ahead of the game when it comes to keywords that we're bidding for. Things as simple as that. We normally see the competition coming right after us. That gap is becoming smaller and smaller. That's something, that us as a business need to build in.

That's where automation internally ... The main reason why we are able to stay ahead is, we've already been running on automation for the last couple years. That's how we're being able to beat the competition. Now that the competition's taking automation into all different places, that gap is becoming shorter. That in itself makes us have to combat different things at different times.

As individuals we can focus, we can work faster, we can experiment more, and ultimately be more efficient.

Kathleen: Any specific individual marketers out there who you think are really crushing it these days? Anyone come to mind?

Juan: I have a lot. I have ... It's hard to come up with one individual name.

Kathleen: Is this like asking you to pick your favorite child?

Juan: No, for me it's like asking me to pick my favorite friend. Then I'm gonna get a bunch of emails of friends say, "Hey!"-

Kathleen: How about name three?

Juan: Top of my head I can't come up with names.

Kathleen: All right, all right, I'll give you a pass on this one.

The other question I have is with digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you personally stay educated and up to date? Are there particular sources of information or places where you go when you want to learn?

Juan: Me personally, I have the advantage that I'm at conferences all the time. I'm able to sneak into presentations all the time and see what's being talked about.

Definitely finding good conferences. By conferences I don't mean huge 10,000 HubSpot INBOUND conferences, but conferences like the Digital Summit series that's very specific about the topics that are being talked about in a day and a half conference.

IMPACT live, that talks about very specific topics, when it comes to digital marketing. Those then become really, really, helpful in my learning process.

I'm also an avid reader. I read at least two books every week, week and a half. By books I don't mean 500 page books. I've actually taken a lot of affinity towards reading the Harvard Business Review, and little books that they sell at airports.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Juan: That's a combination of essays. They now have a full marketing series on product marketing, digital marketing, on strategic marketing, on content. I love those because they give me very fast, and very good insights and tricks and tips that I can start putting in practice fast.

The last thing is, like I mentioned a little bit earlier, I do a good amount of mentorship with other businesses, other start-ups that are growing. It is fascinating to hear them out with the crazy ideas they come up with because, most likely, the people who start the start-ups are not marketers. They're just business people that are trying to grow their business.

To me, that type of individual can be just as good or better than traditional marketers. They're forced to think out of the box because they don't have a tool kit to start off of.

I feed off of that energy. Obviously I have my marketing background and my marketing experience that I use first and foremost. That's what gets me started, but then how do I become different? Is by fueling myself with all these conversations with start-ups, with people who are not necessarily marketers but are put in positions that need to work and create campaigns, and so on and so forth.

I tell them, "Hey, you have this landing page. Do you want to experiment like this or like that?" I try, as much as I can, to not tell them exactly what to do but let them figure it out themselves. Then it's amazing to see the work they come up with. Then based on that, then I'm like, "Hmmm, I hadn't thought about that. I can absolutely use that."

Kathleen: Sometimes I think, as marketers, we're our own worst enemies because we are used to following certain playbooks. I totally agree. I have few start-ups that I work with too. It sometimes takes somebody who's not in it everyday to bring that fresh thinking. That's such a great thing to get exposed to.

Juan: Absolutely.

Kathleen: Plus it's just fun helping little companies grow. I don't know, I spent 11 years as a business owner so I love working with start-ups. It's just ... It's exciting.

Juan: Me too, me too, it's the one thing ... I mean, I wake up every morning thinking about Accelo and then, after I'm done with Accelo, the first thing I think is, "All these guys that I'm helping, or girls that I'm helping, develop themselves to being entrepreneurs or that are already entrepreneurs but are trying to solve this new market to attack. And so on and so forth."

I think that, one, it's exciting. Second, it also brings new challenges and different challenges to my day-to-day work. As an ecosystem for myself, I think, one, it works very well and second, it just keeps me refreshed all the time.

Kathleen: Yeah. I couldn't agree more.

How to Get in Touch with Juan

Kathleen: Well, so much good stuff today. If somebody wants to reach out and ask you a question or learn more about what you've talked about. What's the best way for them to find you online?

Juan: Yeah, absolutely. You can find me on twitter at JCParra, P-A-double R-A. You can find me on LinkedIn as Juan Carlos Parra. You can also send me an email. My email is [email protected].

Kathleen: Oh I love to hear you roll your Rs. I lived for a time in Spain. I speak a little Spanish but I always love hearing that accent.

Juan: Yeah. You know what's funny? I'm from Puerto Rico and I grew up in Puerto Rico and right now I'm saying Puerto Rico instead of Puerto Rico, right?

Kathleen: Puerto Rico.

Juan: A bunch of times, it just happens automatically, I might not roll one R but then roll on the second word or something like that. I stumble myself through rolling the Rs myself.

Kathleen: I love the sound of it.

Juan: I try as much as I can to not do that so ...

Kathleen: No don't try that. Keep in on.

I'm gonna put links to the different contact points you mentioned in the show notes so if anybody does want to reach you check the show notes out. Those will be in there and hopefully I will have a before and after of the Accelo logo to share as well.

Juan: Yeah. I'll get you that.

Kathleen: Yes!

If you are listening and you found some value here, I would really appreciate it if you would consider giving the podcast a review. On iTunes or Stitcher or the platform of your choice. That helps a lot. Helps us get found by more folks. Builds the community. If you have a minute and you've been listening and you like it, please, please leave a review.

If you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me at work mommywork because I would love to interview them.

That's it for this week. Thanks Juan.

Juan: Thank you.

Want to stay updated when the podcast is released?

Drop us your name and email address below and we’ll send you the show notes every Monday!

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/automating-bottom-funnel-juan-parra-accelo

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personalinjurylawyer93555 · 8 years ago

Text

Follow Up: Predictions from the Google Analytics Summit 2018

It’s Google Analytics Summit week and we’re feeling the usual jitters and excitement! The Google Analytics Summit is an annual event where the Google Analytics team (among others) announce new products, release brand new features, and share their forward-looking vision for their products. These changes can range from small fixes to bold innovations that will literally change the way we do business.

As a Google Analytics Certified Partner, we get to send a few employees each year to get inspired by case studies, keynotes, and network with the smartest folks in the industry. We send them off with lists of questions and wish them luck, like kids with overflowing backpacks on their first days of school. We swap stories from years past, give food recommendations, and anxiously await the tweets and announcements throughout the week.

A Look Backwards

Google has been making announcements like this for years, though before they had their own Summit, they would announce at other summits – like eMetrics. To help put whatever gets announced this week into perspective, and as a reminder of how long we’ve been blogging about Google Analytics, take a look at some photos from 2007 and some announcements from back in 2008, which include GA staples like custom reports, segments, the API, as well as a new interface and integrations.

In 2012, we wrote about the official Google Analytics Summit and a host of new announcements, features that today we couldn’t imagine GA without – like Universal Analytics, Custom Dimensions, User IDs, Data-Driven Attribution and more!

Looking Towards the Future

For something a little more recent, I sat down with the Alex Moore, the Director of our Analytics & Insight department, to discuss some rather, uh, bold predictions he made four years ago, with his 2013 post: GA Summit 2018 – 14 Announcements from the Future.

In his seminal post, the bespectacled Google Glass enthusiast had just returned from the Google Analytics Summit (still held at Mountain View), filled with optimism and amazed by the whizzbang toys that Google was pursuing at the time. If nothing else, his light-hearted predictions can serve as a reminder of how fast technology changes. Oh, and perhaps that the internet never forgets.

You ready to do this, Alex?

Alex: “I guess… How’s this going to work?”

I’ll give you a prediction, you respond. Simple as that!

Alex: “Oh boy. Let’s do it.”

First up – 1. Google Glass 3D / Tag Manager Integration

Original prediction

Alex: “Off to a great start! I was an early fan boy of Google Glass and saw vast potential in the product. While we are seeing a resurgence in Google Glass popularity, this time as a tool for industrial and manufacturing applications, I doubt we’ll see a built-in GTM integration any time soon.”

I’ll let him off easy on this one, but I will include this fabulous picture from our About Us page.

2. Google Tag Manager introduces its 1,000th integrated 3rd-party tag

Original prediction

Alex: “We’re well on our way with this one! When’s the last time you’ve checked? Google Tag Manager currently supports almost 80 third-party tags, and are actively encouraging more vendors every day. We may not hit 1,000 but I’m optimistic that this number will only continue to grow as more vendors realize the benefits.”

I’ll add to this Google’s list of benefits for would-be Tag Vendors, which also doubles as a list of reasons to be using supported tags in GTM.

Google Tag Manager users will be able to add your tag easily.

Google Tag Manager users will be exposed to your tag and brand.

Your clients will be able to add or modify your tags on their site within minutes, not months.

3. Beginning in 2019, Tag Manager will begin holding its own conference, called the GTM Summit

Original prediction

Alex: “I’m still holding out hope for this one! We’ve seen Google Tag Manager play an increasing role in past Summits, and we’ve enjoyed the opportunity to give our feedback directly to the product team. We’ve seen Google Tag Manager become even more versatile and better for enterprises.

Plus, Google has also signaled its support of GTM by giving it a prominent role in the Google Marketing Next conference. There’s still a chance!”

I’ll throw in my two cents and say that I’ll re-offer my gift basket to the Google Tag Manager team if they can make this happen.

4. Google will hash non-branded organic keywords, and provide a branded/non-branded ratio inside Google Analytics

Original prediction

Alex: “Kinda?? We don’t have this exact feature (YET!) but now we can approximate it with the built-in Search Console reports.”

5. Google Analytics is merging with Webmaster Tools

Original prediction

Alex: “I was pretty close! While we haven’t seen Webmaster Tools (ahem, Search Console) disappear completely, many of the benefits that I described in the original post became available with the integration between the two tools.”

6. Sampling in Google Analytics reports is gone forever

Original prediction

Alex: “As we know, sampling is still present inside of the standard Google Analytics interface. While Google’s core technology has become even more amazing in the past four years, we’ve also seen Google Analytics adoption explode as well. One of the changes of the past four years is a more educated user base. Hopefully the Google Analytics users today have a better understanding of why and when sampling takes place, which can lead to more intelligent data collection and reporting.

Oh, and by the way, Google plans to demonstrate its quantum processor by the end of 2017. Fingers crossed.”

7. Data in standard reports is fresher than ever

Original prediction

Alex: “Data freshness has improved to the point where intraday reports are available sooner and for more customers. Google Analytics 360 customers have certainly seen the most dramatic gains in this category, with faster intraday data processing guaranteed by the Service Level Agreement. We also now have intra-day reports available in the Google BigQuery export from Google Analytics.

Insights generated within Google Analytics based on predicted data is not yet available, but I PREDICT it’s something we’ll see soon.”

(Jon groans.)

8. All AdWords reports will be available inside Google Analytics, and vice versa

Original prediction

Alex: “We’ve certainly seen these reports improve over the years. For a long time, advertisers reported in AdWords and analysts reported in Analytics, which meant we lacked a common language. Sharing between the two platforms has alleviated that (although there will probably always be confusion with clicks vs sessions). Google Analytics still misses a lot of important AdWords tools, most notably labels, which advertisers live and die with inside of AdWords.

We now get Google AdWords data in BigQuery, which we didn’t have even two years ago, so we’re working toward this dream. I applaud anytime Google teams can work across products to deliver better solutions for those of us on the ground using the tools!”

9. Cross-user tracking is now built in to Google Analytics

Original prediction

Alex: “I love this idea. While Google’s focus has been on cross-device analysis, like with the User ID Reports, perhaps the next great built-in Analytics report will focus on how users share content with one another!”

10. Google.com algorithmic changes now appear as automatic annotations inside Google Analytics

Original prediction

Alex: “This is a pipe dream… I’m still waiting on the Timeline Annotation API (cough, cough!)”

11. Chromealytics launches worldwide

Original prediction

Alex: “Hey, I’m in favor of anything that speeds up the web! And actually, Google now hosts jQuery and other common libraries in an effort to leverage caching across websites, so I wasn’t too far off!”

12. Bots are completely removed from Analytics reports

Original prediction

Alex: “We did it! We actually now have a checkbox that removes known bots and spiders. Anecdotally, I feel like Google has done a better of job at filtering out the worst bot offenders. Of course, we always recommend best practices around filters, etc.

In a similarly serious post posted on some April 1st a few years ago, I even helped to outline an ambitious plan to combat bots in Google Analytics.”

I’ll add that, due to that post’s popularity in the Google’s SERPs and the traffic numbers we were getting even 8 months later, I had to follow up Alex’s post with a more sensible guide here: Notes on Filtering Spam and Bots from Google Analytics

13. Google Driverless cars are now a built-in segment in Analytics reports

Original prediction

Alex: “I’m not sure why I ever thought a “massive increase in car-based internet usage and web browsing” was a good idea. Keep your eyes on the road!”

(Photo: Eric Risberg AP)

14. Views are being renamed “Profiles”

Original prediction

Alex: “I’m kind of used to them being Views now (*shivers*).”

Wrapping Up

Well there you have it. Thanks, Alex, for this trip down memory lane! We’ll be sure to check back in next year to see how close you actually came.

http://ift.tt/2x2JYeP

#Follow Up: Predictions from the Google Analytics Summit 2018

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seo53703 · 8 years ago

Text

Follow Up: Predictions from the Google Analytics Summit 2018

A Look Backwards

Looking Towards the Future

You ready to do this, Alex?

Alex: “I guess… How’s this going to work?”

I’ll give you a prediction, you respond. Simple as that!

Alex: “Oh boy. Let’s do it.”

First up – 1. Google Glass 3D / Tag Manager Integration

Original prediction

I’ll let him off easy on this one, but I will include this fabulous picture from our About Us page.

2. Google Tag Manager introduces its 1,000th integrated 3rd-party tag

Original prediction

I’ll add to this Google’s list of benefits for would-be Tag Vendors, which also doubles as a list of reasons to be using supported tags in GTM.

Google Tag Manager users will be able to add your tag easily.

Google Tag Manager users will be exposed to your tag and brand.

Your clients will be able to add or modify your tags on their site within minutes, not months.

3. Beginning in 2019, Tag Manager will begin holding its own conference, called the GTM Summit

Original prediction

Plus, Google has also signaled its support of GTM by giving it a prominent role in the Google Marketing Next conference. There’s still a chance!”

I’ll throw in my two cents and say that I’ll re-offer my gift basket to the Google Tag Manager team if they can make this happen.

4. Google will hash non-branded organic keywords, and provide a branded/non-branded ratio inside Google Analytics

Original prediction

Alex: “Kinda?? We don’t have this exact feature (YET!) but now we can approximate it with the built-in Search Console reports.”

5. Google Analytics is merging with Webmaster Tools

Original prediction

6. Sampling in Google Analytics reports is gone forever

Original prediction

Oh, and by the way, Google plans to demonstrate its quantum processor by the end of 2017. Fingers crossed.”

7. Data in standard reports is fresher than ever

Original prediction

Insights generated within Google Analytics based on predicted data is not yet available, but I PREDICT it’s something we’ll see soon.”

(Jon groans.)

8. All AdWords reports will be available inside Google Analytics, and vice versa

Original prediction

9. Cross-user tracking is now built in to Google Analytics

Original prediction

10. Google.com algorithmic changes now appear as automatic annotations inside Google Analytics

Original prediction

Alex: “This is a pipe dream… I’m still waiting on the Timeline Annotation API (cough, cough!)”

11. Chromealytics launches worldwide

Original prediction

12. Bots are completely removed from Analytics reports

Original prediction

In a similarly serious post posted on some April 1st a few years ago, I even helped to outline an ambitious plan to combat bots in Google Analytics.”

13. Google Driverless cars are now a built-in segment in Analytics reports

Original prediction

Alex: “I’m not sure why I ever thought a “massive increase in car-based internet usage and web browsing” was a good idea. Keep your eyes on the road!”

(Photo: Eric Risberg AP)

14. Views are being renamed “Profiles”

Original prediction

Alex: “I’m kind of used to them being Views now (*shivers*).”

Wrapping Up

Well there you have it. Thanks, Alex, for this trip down memory lane! We’ll be sure to check back in next year to see how close you actually came.

http://ift.tt/2x2JYeP

#Follow Up: Predictions from the Google Analytics Summit 2018

0 notes

mortlend40507 · 8 years ago

Text

Follow Up: Predictions from the Google Analytics Summit 2018

A Look Backwards

Looking Towards the Future

You ready to do this, Alex?

Alex: “I guess… How’s this going to work?”

I’ll give you a prediction, you respond. Simple as that!

Alex: “Oh boy. Let’s do it.”

First up – 1. Google Glass 3D / Tag Manager Integration

Original prediction

I’ll let him off easy on this one, but I will include this fabulous picture from our About Us page.

2. Google Tag Manager introduces its 1,000th integrated 3rd-party tag

Original prediction

I’ll add to this Google’s list of benefits for would-be Tag Vendors, which also doubles as a list of reasons to be using supported tags in GTM.

Google Tag Manager users will be able to add your tag easily.

Google Tag Manager users will be exposed to your tag and brand.

Your clients will be able to add or modify your tags on their site within minutes, not months.

3. Beginning in 2019, Tag Manager will begin holding its own conference, called the GTM Summit

Original prediction

Plus, Google has also signaled its support of GTM by giving it a prominent role in the Google Marketing Next conference. There’s still a chance!”

I’ll throw in my two cents and say that I’ll re-offer my gift basket to the Google Tag Manager team if they can make this happen.

4. Google will hash non-branded organic keywords, and provide a branded/non-branded ratio inside Google Analytics

Original prediction

Alex: “Kinda?? We don’t have this exact feature (YET!) but now we can approximate it with the built-in Search Console reports.”

5. Google Analytics is merging with Webmaster Tools

Original prediction

6. Sampling in Google Analytics reports is gone forever

Original prediction

Oh, and by the way, Google plans to demonstrate its quantum processor by the end of 2017. Fingers crossed.”

7. Data in standard reports is fresher than ever

Original prediction

Insights generated within Google Analytics based on predicted data is not yet available, but I PREDICT it’s something we’ll see soon.”

(Jon groans.)

8. All AdWords reports will be available inside Google Analytics, and vice versa

Original prediction

9. Cross-user tracking is now built in to Google Analytics

Original prediction

10. Google.com algorithmic changes now appear as automatic annotations inside Google Analytics

Original prediction

Alex: “This is a pipe dream… I’m still waiting on the Timeline Annotation API (cough, cough!)”

11. Chromealytics launches worldwide

Original prediction

12. Bots are completely removed from Analytics reports

Original prediction

In a similarly serious post posted on some April 1st a few years ago, I even helped to outline an ambitious plan to combat bots in Google Analytics.”

13. Google Driverless cars are now a built-in segment in Analytics reports

Original prediction

Alex: “I’m not sure why I ever thought a “massive increase in car-based internet usage and web browsing” was a good idea. Keep your eyes on the road!”

(Photo: Eric Risberg AP)

14. Views are being renamed “Profiles”

Original prediction

Alex: “I’m kind of used to them being Views now (*shivers*).”

Wrapping Up

Well there you have it. Thanks, Alex, for this trip down memory lane! We’ll be sure to check back in next year to see how close you actually came.

http://ift.tt/2x2JYeP

#Follow Up: Predictions from the Google Analytics Summit 2018

0 notes