Gold!

Yaaaaay!

Zettics acquires Velocent

ZETTICS ACQUIRES VELOCENT TO PROVIDE THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE REAL-TIME 360 DEGREE VIEW OF A SUBSCRIBER’S EXPERIENCE AVAILABLE TODAY

Operators can now leverage a single analytics suite to deliver significant business improvement in network, customer care, marketing, and 3rd party monetization 

Concord, MA – 29 April 2014 – Zettics, the market leader in Actionable Subscriber Analytics for mobile operators, today announced it has acquired Velocent Systems. The combined entity will provide a subscriber-centric, real-time analytics suite that integrates data usage, network performance, and customer experience metrics into a single, unified view for the operator. Having these data sets in one solution will allow operators to realize unique business benefits that were previously unavailable in the market.

Commenting on the acquisition, Sterling Wilson, President and CEO of Zettics said, “Velocent is the market leader in network analysis and Customer Experience Assurance (CEA) for mobile data. Combining Velocent’s capabilities with Zettics’ deep expertise in analyzing data usage for marketing, care and monetization results in a world-class solution for operators.  Both companies have complementary technology, customers, and employees that together will deliver unprecedented business improvement to operators worldwide.”

Zettics technology will now derive an unparalleled amount of unique intelligence from a combination of a subscriber’s data usage and corresponding network performance. This includes behavioral metrics (engagement, interests, and segmentation) combined with experiential metrics (latency, throughput, and tonnage) across a variety of apps and services such as browsing, video, audio, and VoLTE. Zettics enables this business critical information to be accessed through an interactive UI, a low-latency API, or integrated via real-time alarms or extracts into operator systems. Multiple tier-1 operators across the world use Zettics and Velocent to improve their business today.

“Operators will finally have the tools they need to simultaneously understand their network performance, along with their subscribers’ experience, behavioral trends and consumption patterns. By effectively and efficiently monitoring both the data and evolving VoLTE networks, operators will be able to deliver a truly enhanced customer experience,” said Ian Herbert-Jones, Velocent’s CEO.

The transaction closed on April 25th, 2014. Zettics is headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts with offices, partners, and major operator customers across the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific. Sterling Wilson and Asa Kalavade will continue in their roles as President/CEO and CTO/SVP of Products, respectively. Ian Herbert-Jones, Velocent’s CEO, will assume the position of Zettics’ SVP of Business Development and Channel Management, and Velocent’s CTO, Stephen Douglas, will assume the position of VP Technology.

About Zettics
Zettics, the leader in Actionable Subscriber Analytics, delivers immediate insights that drive significant business improvement and subscriber value. These real-time insights deliver a 360° subscriber view of data usage, network performance and customer experience, enabling operators to extract greater value from their networks, products, and services, while fully complying with subscriber privacy policies. Operators that choose Zettics generate new revenues, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce costs.

Zettics’ patented technology powers a unified suite of subscriber-centric analytics solutions for network, marketing, care and data monetization business units. Operators are already using Zettics to reduce churn, improve customer care, monetize data with third parties, reduce and prioritize infrastructure investments, segment their users for advanced marketing, enrich their CRM systems, analyze pricing plans, enhance advertising offers, and more.

Zettics technology is deployed with leading operators in the world, processing trillions of records monthly. Zettics has offices worldwide and its investors include North Bridge Venture Partners, Voyager Capital, Steamboat Ventures, Emergence Capital, Excelestar Ventures, DRW Trading Group, and Jump Capital.

Hadoop Learnings

Hadoop Tutorial: Intro to HDFS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziqx2hJY8Hg

Sameer Farooqui gives a very clear overview of the Hadoop Distributed File System. 33:35 - 5*

Microsoft .NET SDK for Hadoop

http://hadoopsdk.codeplex.com/

Yay!  Microsoft really believes in Hadoop...  4*

Low latency OLAP with HBase

http://hstack.org/hbasecon-low-latency-olap-with-hbase/

Presentation on implementing OLAP-like functionality in HBase.  Not entirely convinced... 2*

Setting up a new MVC4 app on a fresh machine

For Windows Server 2008 R2, first set up Web Deploy:

1. Install IIS
2. Download and install the Web Platform Installer (WPI)
3. WPI: Install MVC4
4. WPI: Install Management Service
5. In the Services app, set the Web Management Service to start automatically but don't start it yet
6. (Re)start the IIS Manager
7. Select the server node and in the bottom part of the main pane will be an icon "Management Service".  Double-click that
8. Enable remote connections (setting up security as appropriate)
9. Install Web Deploy 3.5 using the download, not the WebPI (if you did this earlier, you may have to change it in "Add/Remove Programs" to ensure that all features are enabled and restart IIS
10. Create new website with an appropriate App Pool (.NET 4)
11. In Visual Studio on the remote machine, publish the app using Web Deploy and validate the connection
12. Accept the security certificate
13. Re-register ASP.NET with c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -i
14. Create a new MVC4 app in Visual Studio with Razor
15. Publish!

Lovely - you should now be able to run you app.  However... You will want these NuGet packages, which you can install from the Package Manager Console:

• Install-Package MvcHtml5Templates adds EditorTemplates for the new html5 input types including email, tel, and url
• Install-Package Bootstrap makes it work across all devices (I like http://getbootstrap.com/examples/sticky-footer-navbar/)

Adding characters to the end of a line in Visual Studio 2013

After too much pain, here is how you add characters to the end of selected lines in Visual Studio 2013 (in this case, the word "Fish":

Working standing up

The standing desk

With the aim to achieve better posture (and burn some more calories), I finally have my new Conset height-adjustable standing desk installed and working in my garden office, "The Shed".  It has an electric motor to move it from standing to sitting, but so far it has just remained in the standing position. Three days in, I am finding it to be a very good way to work.

The initial tiredness, need to sit down at the end of the day and slightly sore feet are now fading.  My gel mat from Specialist Mats has now arrived and is nice and comfortable for standing on all day!

A BBC article on the health benefits here.

If you are in the UK and want to get a similar set-up, talk to the very lovely Poul Neilsen at Nielsen Associates.  Total cost was under £800, including delivery.  Nielsen will even construct it for you - a good idea as I found the construction to be very fiddly.

The rig

In case you're interested, the rig consists of:

Hardware:

• Scan 3XS desktop
• OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 PCI-e SSD
• Dell U2711 27" main monitor (center)
• Dell U2410 24" secondary monitor (left)
• Hanns-G HW191 tertiary monitor (right)
• Samson Meteor mic
• Logitech Speakers
• Apple iPad
• Logitech M510 mouse
• Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 v1.0

Everyday software:

• Microsoft Windows 8.1
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 with Resharper 7
• Microsoft Office 2013
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Chrome
• Skype
• Google Hangouts

Obduction Kickstarter

I've just pledged to the Cyan Obduction Kickstarter at the $265 level :-)

Go do the same at http://kck.st/16d8IRE/