Tag Archives: News

PubMatic releases AdPrice Index: Sensex for Online Ads

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Pune based online advertising optimization startup PubMatic has announced the availability of the PubMatic AdPrice Index – essentially a sort of an Sensex (or S&P 500 Index) for the online advertising world.

The AdPrice Index essentially reports on the average online advertising revenues earned by 3000 web publishers worldwide who are PubMatic’s customers. And it only counts the income earned through use of ad networks like Google’s Adsense, or Yahoo! Publisher Network. Specifically, it does not account for revenues earned through ad spots sold directly, or through other channels like TextLinkAds or Amazon’s Affiliate marketing program.

The index does give some breakup of the information – small niche websites earn more ($1.18 eCPM, i.e. earnings per 1000 pageviews) compared to large websites ($0.38 eCPM). However, variation across websites (based on the area, geography and other factors) is so large that I doubt that the actual numbers are directly useful to anybody. However, the main value I see is in the variation over time. PubMatic will release these numbers monthly, thus giving publishers a feel for the general state of the market – just like a stock market index for stocks.

I am sure PubMatic is also in a position to answer the question on most bloggers mind – “Is there an ad network for me that performs better than AdSense?” However, PubMatic is not releasing a breakup of earnings by ad network. Of course, they want you to not care about this question. Because, if PubMatic works as advertised, you wont need to answer that question – PubMatic will automatically only show the most lucrative ads and in fact, their claim is that by allowing PubMatic to broker the ads between different ad networks on a per impression basis, you will end up earning more than you could have earned through any single ad network.

Of course, this is not really guaranteed to work. The main problem is that information about earnings from individual ads is not directly available. Hence PubMatic has to guess. Here, it ends up using lots of complex mathematics (data-mining, machine learning, and I assume bayesian reasoning) to make those guesses. If all this guessing works in the case of your website, you will be richer (some websites report upto 90% increase in revenue), but it it does not, your revenues might actually drop a little bit. This can be especially true in the case of smaller websites in the early days of installing PubMatic – because its algorithms work better with more data. Smaller website + fewer days of operation = more chances of guessing wrong. The longer you keep PubMatic running, the better it should get. In theory.

See analysis of this news at TechCrunch and at Mashable.

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AirTight Networks offers Wireless Security as an online service

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Pune-based startup AirTight networks, which provides wireless security products, has announced that it is making wireless security available as an online service. The customer has to buy some wireless sensors (little plug-n-play hardware accessories) and attach them to appropriate machines in their company, respond to a few questions about their wireless setup and that’s it. Within a few days they begin to receive wireless security reports. There are no servers or software to buy, configure, or administer – because all the data analysis and report generation is hosted on AirTight’s servers over the internet.

The major benefits of this are ease of installation, ease of use, and most importantly the investment needed can be ramped up gradually. The simplest system costs just $2 per day as opposed to the upfront $20000 capital investment that would be required otherwise. In addition there is a free 30-day trial. This makes it easy for enterprises that are interested in wireless security but are worried about paying too much for something that they are unsure about.

The services provided are vulnerability assessment (“There are hackers outside your office on the North side!”), vulnerability remediation (“And I’ve blocked their wireless signals! Yippie!”), and regulatory compliance (“And here is a report you can show SOX auditors to prove that you’ll done all that’s humanly possible to protect customer data”). Each of these three is a separate offering that is priced independently.

Over at NetworkWorld, FarPoint Group’s Craig Mathias gushes breathlessly over this offering:

this was a smack-myself-in-the-forehead moment – why not provision IDS/IPS as a service, effectively leasing the infrastructure and offering the rest as a managed service? This is positively brilliant, and AirTight Networks has now done precisely this with their new SpectraGuard Online service, launched today.

[…]

I’ve seen a number of security-as-a-service offerings for small wireless LANs, but this is the first time I’ve seen such a service for large organizations. And I’m willing to bet this business model could become very popular indeed. As WLAN technology continues to change rapidly, and as one is never, ever “done” when it comes to security, AirTight has broken some important new ground here. The question, of course, is how this model might extend to other elements of network infrastructure. And it just might.

See the full press release for more details of this news. See PuneTech wiki’s AirTight page for a quick overview of AirTight.

Pubmatic and Komli to power all eBay.in ads

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eBay India), today announced an exclusive advertising relationship with Indian ad network Komli Media. Komli is now the exclusive seller of all of eBay India’s banner advertising inventory up to end March 2009.

In addition, eBay India will also use Komli’s Pubmatic ad optimization service to improve ad revenues. Pubmatic can estimate the revenues that a website can earn from any particular ad, and thus improve revenues by comparing ads from different ad networks (e.g. Google Adsense, Yaho! Publisher Network, or even Komli itself) and then only showing those ads that are likely to generate the most revenue. This service (which is available free of cost to any web publisher) will now get used on eBay India’s pages.

The Pubmatic service is developed in Komli’s engineering center in Pune.

Yahoo and CRL (EKA) to collaborate on cloud computing research

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(Link courtesy Amit Paranjape via e-mail)

Yahoo and CRL have just announced that they will collaborate on research into cloud computing. I believe this announcement is essentially about Yahoo’s use of Hadoop on CRL’s EKA supercomputer.

This Yahoo!/CRL announcement comes on the eve of the first ever Hadoop Summit. Apache Hadoop is a Free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers. It enables applications to easily scale out to thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. In Feb 2008, Yahoo announced that its Search Webmap application has been converted to a Hadoop application that runs on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo! Web search query.

CRL’s EKA supercomputer is a Hewlett-Packard based system with 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, EKA is the only supercomputer funded by the private sector that is available for use on commercial terms.

This announcement should also increase the interest in attending the presentation on EKA to be held here (i.e. in Pune) in a few days (Thursday, 27th March). The talk promises to be very interesting, especially given the background of speakers Dr. Lagu and Dr. Sherlekar (who used to be profs in IIT-B amongst other things). Details.

MyJobsInPune.com to expand to other cities

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MyJobsInPune.com launched last September and is already considered a major success.

Within seven months of going live, myjobsinpune.com has emerged as the leading website in Pune, as regards jobseeker traffic emanating from Pune. The site is attracting more than 5,000 visitors daily with 10000 new jobseekers registering every month. It has on average 3,000 clients advertising 4,000 jobs monthly from entry-level to mid-management level for leading players in IT/ITES, manufacturing, automobile, retail and BFSI sectors.

Source: IndiaPRWire

MyJobsInPune is owned by Irish company SaonGroup which chose Pune as the location for its maiden venture into India because:

Pune is a fascinating city with great economic potential. It has attracted numerous Fortune 500 enterprises as well as many top-tier professionals who aspire to develop their careers in Pune. It is for these reasons that Pune was selected as the first city for Saongroup to launch in and we plan to invest up to €10m in the initial phase of expansion across India from our HQ in Pune. We strongly believe that India presents a huge opportunity for sustained growth in different sectors and a rapid growth in online recruitment.

Source: Leslie Buckley Chairman, Saongroup.com

I just checked out MyJobsInPune’s home page and noticed that everyone from B.U. Bhandari Auto, to Goel Ganga Group have put up ads there. So it seems to have managed to rope in a quite eclectic mix of customers. On the other hand, I did not find ads from major software companies like Symantec, or Persistent, or even Infosys listed.

In any case, it is heartening to note that there are 1000s of web-savvy employers in Pune.

(Found this newsitem via AlooTechie.)

Pune IT salary hikes highest in country

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IT Salaries in Pune increased by 20% over the last 12 months, compared to 12% for Bangalore and the country average of 14%. Bangalore continues to have the highest salary levels in the country, and I think is 12% higher than Pune (can’t say for sure, since the article is a little unclear). This according to a report released by management consulting firm Zinnov.

‘Though compensation in Bangalore continues to be the highest in the country, the dramatic wage increase in Pune can be attributed to high salaries offered by multinationals (mostly from the US) setting up captive centres in Maharashtra’s boom city,’ Zinnov CEO Pari Natarajan told IANS.

Source: IndiaPRWire. See also pluggd.in’s coverage.