Ex-ComScore execs bring analytics platform out of beta

US-- A new website audience profiling tool developed by two former ComScore executives moved out of beta today to challenge for supremacy in the online analytics space.

The Crowd Science Demographics platform relies on website owners tagging pages of their site so that visitors can be randomly selected to take part in surveys.

Questions cover basic demographics through to information on product usage and attitudes, and these are tailored to the particular focus of site or a given section within it.

Crowd Science says its technology is set up to ensure only a small part of a site's overall traffic is intercepted, but with a general rule of thumb that a minimum of 50 responses are needed for statistically significant analysis.

John Martin, co-founder and CEO, said: “The level at which you know your customers can mean the difference between a company's success and failure. Crowd Science surveys are designed to identify the people who visit a website. Our reporting tools then provide web publishers with a clear understanding of who their customers are, what they want, and ultimately what they're likely to buy.”

Martin is a former software architect for online audience measurement firm ComScore, where he designed and built SiteRecruit – which is similarly used to intercept website visitors and recruit them for research projects. Paul Neto, Crowd Science's vice president of operations, has also worked at ComScore as a technology and operations team leader.

Neto and Martin are joined in the venture by chief technology officer John Wainwright, who was most recently co-founder and chief architect at content delivery company Kontiki. He is also the creator of MaxScript, a scripting language for the Autodesk modelling package 3dsmax.

Crowd Science is backed by Granite Ventures, whose portfolio also include Kontiki and consumer engagement firm Bunchball, which recently appointed former Yahoo insights chief Peter Daboll as CEO.

Author: Brian Tarran