Once Hiptype’s plugin is added to an ebook, it provides insights like reader demographics, reading behavior (where people start or stop reading; what they skip), conversion patterns (who buys an ebook after reading a free sample); and sharing and highlighting behavior (which passages readers highlight or take notes on). Publishers then log into their Hiptype accounts to see a dashboard with visualizations of the data. Hiptype also helps publishers run Facebook campaigns and target readers with personalized recommendations.

Hiptype launches in beta this week and is working with a limited number of publishers, whom 26-year-old founder and CEO James Levy (cofounder is 19-year-old Sohail Prasad) would not name — though a sample book profile for 50 Shades of Grey suggests Random House might be one early client. Other publishers — as well as self-published authors — can request access on Hiptype’s website and will be invited to join in waves. The first book is free. After that, Hiptype will charge $19 per month per book for a basic package (including data from up to 1,000 readers and basic insights and trends) or $99 per month per book for a pro package (including data from up to 500,000 readers, detailed insights and trends, ad management and personalized backlist recommendations for readers).

One possible concern is privacy. “We don’t want to discourage the conversation about privacy,” Levy said, noting that while all of the data Hiptype collects is anonymous, users can opt out completely. The company is also looking for ways it can improve its service for readers. In beta, end users have requested that Hiptype make its data available to them. For example, Levy said, a teacher could track how students are interacting with the books they’ve been assigned to read.

It doesn’t work everywhere yet

Hiptype’s largest limitation is that it doesn’t work on every platform. The plugin only works on platforms that support HTML5 and allow Javascript to be embedded within a book. Apple, which supports EPUB3 and HTML5, is in. But e-ink devices, like Kindle and Nook e-readers, web-based readers like Kindle Cloud, and desktop e-reading platforms are out.

Apple is estimated to have about 10 percent of the ebook market, with Kindle at 55 to 60 percent and Nook around 25 percent. In the case of Kindle and Nook, we don’t know how much of their usage comes from devices versus mobile apps, but for now Hiptype is missing a large portion of the ebook market.

Levy says Hiptype works on most iOS and Android e-reading apps, but wouldn’t clarify what those are beyond “some of the most popular e-reader apps on the most popular operating systems.” He says Hiptype is in discussions with ebook retailers and it’s “paramount to our success that we have an open line of communication.”

When publishers do see the data on their books, “it can be a little bit depressing,” Levy said. Publishers testing Hiptype in beta, for instance, were surprised by “how low conversion rates are” — early data suggests that only three to four percent of people who download a free ebook sample go on to buy the book — and how few people who do buy a book finish reading it. “It can be a bit of a bummer,” Levy said. “But as soon as you start measuring, you can do tests and see what moves the needle. We’re already doing research on the data we’re collecting. As data hackers, we think there are underlying patterns here even if they’re not apparent at first.”

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The Berlin company’s Apptrace tool launches on Tuesday and as a result it’s showing off several stats as a way of strutting its stuff. The most interesting one is the revelation that around 400,000 App Store apps get no downloads, are invisible to users and have no ranking.

“The reality is there are only a couple of thousand apps that really make some kind of downloads,” Christian Henschel, Adeven CEO, told me. “This is based on Apple’s closed system — it’s tough to discover those kinds of apps. You don’t have proper search, so the only way to discover new apps is through the top listing.”

“If you’re not on those lists, it’s not sure that you’re being discovered by anyone else. The top 25 tend to be the same companies who spend millions of dollars to get to the top of those lists. If you’re an independent, small app publisher, then it’s really tough to be discovered.”

Apptrace finds itself in a busy market, with the likes of Keen.io, Count.ly and (to an extent) Flurry all trying to court developers with the sharpest insights.

But Apptrace takes a different angle. For a start, it’s a free resource that is initially providing something closer to AppData’s outside-view app rankings, only through a prettier interface and with a deeper segment view. Android analytics will come in the fourth quarter, but for now Apptrace collates iOS data from the 155 countries where the App Store is present.

And with a seven-figure Series A round from Target Partners in the bank since April, Adeven already has some key enhancements ready for the rest of this year. The big one will be the addition of in-app analytics: something that will take Apptrace squarely up against Keen.io et al, but Henschel says the combination of the internal and external perspective will be unique.

“We’re not only measuring success within the app, but also within the ecosystem,” he said. “We will also soon be launching a feature where you can compare apps against each other, which is something that’s not available at the moment.”

Apptrace also has a feature lined up for developers with an ad-funded model: at the moment, they need to integrate multiple SDKs into their apps to handle all the different ad brokers such as AdMob and InMobi, but Apptrace will soon come out with a unified SDK that can manage the analytics for all these disparate networks.

And as for making money out of all this?

“The main reason we founded Adeven is to bring transparency into this mobile ecosystem,” Henschel said. “We believe if we provide the transparency then a lot more app dollars will fly into this ecosystem and we will find ways to participate in these revenues. But first, we’re really focusing on getting app developers using our service.”

Which is where those attention-grabbing, suspicion-confirming stats come in. Did you know that the App Store has 1,899 flashlight apps? Madness.

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Investors include 500 Startups, Data Collective and SK Ventures.

The new cash will go towards doubling the head count which now stands at six, adding support for Android and JavaScript and building an open-source Rails-based analytics dashboard for Keen.io’s data visualization APIs,  according to company co-founder Kyle Wild.

As Derrick Harris wrote when Keen.IO won GigaOM’s Launchpad competition last month:

The thinking behind Keen.io is pretty simple: No one should have to build their own analytics infrastructure, especially not mobile developers. It’s a long, hard, complex process that’s only made more difficult in an era where developers want to track a lot more metrics than just page views. So Keen built an analytics infrastructure….

San Francisco-based Keen.io has set lofty goals for itself. One of its investors characterized its potential addressable market as: “One million developers, one billion connected devices, one trillion events per day.”

Voter Planet, an iOS app built using Keen.io technology by Campaign Junkie LLC,  lets voters find the candidates running for federal office in their district, according to The San Antonio Business Journal. It will:

create personalized rosters of candidates they’d like to follow, track the latest polls, read news articles about races they follow and take part in app-wide polls  [and] political campaigns can use the app’s advanced features to connect with constituents via social media and offer live-streamed campaign events, fund-raising efforts and polls.

Keen.io sometimes competes with Flurry and in some situations when it’s used for non-mobile applications. “We’re like Twilio in that people use us rather than reinventing the wheel in house — they use us for analytics whereas they use Twilio for telephony,” Wild said.

“Our real competitors are in-house teams and technologies. People use us to do really, really custom stuff. And sometimes those in-house teams build on things like Omniture and Vertica. [But] our market is really mobile,” he said. Omniture is a web analytics service now owned by Adobe Systems; Vertica is an analytical database that HP bought last year.

Here’s Keen.io’s video from the TechStars’ Cloud conference in April:

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“Carrier IQ provides information that allows Sprint, and other carriers that use it, to analyze our network performance and identify where we should be improving service.  We also use the data to understand device performance so we can figure out when issues are occurring. We collect enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to address any connection problems, but we do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool. The information collected is not sold and we don’t provide a direct feed of this data to anyone outside of Sprint.

“Sprint is well known for our serious commitment to respecting and protecting the privacy and security of each customer’s personally identifiable information and other customer data. A key element of this involves communicating with our customers about our information privacy practices. The Sprint privacy policy makes it clear we collect information that includes how a device is functioning and how it is being used. Carrier IQ is an integral part of the Sprint service.  Sprint uses Carrier IQ to help maintain our network performance.”

Sprint, like many of its operator brethren, is in the firing line as a new research from Android developer Trevor Eckhart discovered what he termed a “rootkit” buried in the guts of many Android phones. The Carrier IQ software tracks every keystroke in on the phones it is installed on, recording that information for Carrier IQ’s analytics purposes. It’s not clear if the information collected goes directly to the operators, handset makers or to Carrier IQ. But the applications cannot be disabled or uninstalled, and there’s no way opt out of its recording activities. (Kevin Tofel wrote earlier about how to detect Carrier IQ in your phone).

Verizon Wireless emphatically stated that it does not use Carrier IQ data and that the application is not installed in any of its smartphones. Other carriers and both Google and Nokia have made similar statements about not using Carrier IQ data, though it’s still unclear if the root app still resides in their customers’ devices. We’re still waiting to hear from the rest of the U.S. operators.

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Apsalar’s round is being funded by Thomvest Ventures, Battery Ventures, DN Capital and existing investors. Apsalar previously raised $800,000 in seed funding in late 2010 from 500 Startups, Mark Goines, Morado Venture Partners, Founder’s Co-op and Seraph Group. The company plans to use the money to expand its product portfolio and build up its sales and marketing efforts.

San Francisco-based Apsalar sells itself as an advanced mobile analytics tool that can not only help developers understand what users are doing in their apps, but also allows devs to target specific groups of users and deliver personalized content to them. Apsalar’s service includes a dashboard that allows developers to make quick cross-application comparisons and helps them build deeper engagement with users. The freemium service competes against companies like Flurry.

Apsalar co-founder and CEO Michael Oiknine — who previously sold Kefta, a SaaS provider of online behavioral targeting solutions, to Acxiom — said the company is addressing a pain point for developers and publishers, who are looking for better ways to target users and gain more value from them. The company also hired Anton Commissaris, a former founding member of Mint.com’s executive team, as Apsalar’s chief revenue officer.

As I wrote earlier, with mobile applications booming and expected to bring in $58 billion by 2014, there are a lot of ways to sell services to the developers and publishers building apps. Apsalar is wading into the analytics side of the market, but there’s also plenty of opportunities around app creation, maintenance, monetization, analytics, distribution and extension services.

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What are our mobile app minutes spent doing? Flurry, which monitors software on  iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and J2ME platforms, says we’re a growing community of gamers, with 47 percent of our app time spent playing. Social networking followed up with 32 percent, while news, entertainment and other activities each accounted for single digits.

The entertainment figure of only 7 percent seems low to me given that mobile video, a time-intensive activity, is popular: Some data suggests that iPad users watch 2.5 times more video than traditional web users, for example. While YouTube has a solid mobile web interface, many platforms kick users into a native YouTube application. Last July, YouTube said it was serving 100 million videos per day through both its mobile software and website.

Regardless of that potential anomaly, the data underscores a few points I’ve made about mobile app ecosystems: If a platform doesn’t have a strong set of third-party apps available, consumer adoption of the platform becomes a greater challenge. To some degree, we’re now seeing that with Google Android Honeycomb tablets as well as RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook. There are other issues facing each of these, but a lack of optimized apps isn’t helping any, especially with the move from web to apps on mobiles.

Flurry’s data also has me pondering the future of web apps; namely, will HTML5 become as strong of an “app” platform as some would hope? As Chetan Sharma noted last year, the beauty of the web as an application distribution point is the reduced fragmentation it brings:

[T]he fragmentation issue in mobile only gets worse with each year with new devices, different implementations and operating systems, the cost of rolling out an app across multiple devices around the world can increase exponentially. As such, the browser provides the prospect of being the great unifier so you can truly design once and run everywhere (where the browser is available). For the simple apps that are less interactive and require less multimedia capability, like the popular social networking and news/weather apps, browser provides the perfect avenue to maximize impact with least amount of development.

Sharma’s thought made perfect sense to me back then, and while I’m still in general agreement with him, I’m beginning to wonder if the situation has changed. Instead of a mobile market with a number of platforms, we’re now witnessing the space become dominated by just two in Android and iOS. The third spot is up for grabs, although Windows Phone 7 has recently gained perceived momentum. BlackBerry / QNX and webOS are in transition, while Symbian is on the way out.

All the smartphone platforms are using WebKit browsers, so there’s still opportunity for web apps to unified across a large number of devices, but with such dominant operating systems in play, there may be less need for the web browser as a “great unifier” in mobile than there was just a year or two ago. And as long as apps keep appearing, the trend indicates consumers will keep buying.

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Nokia today announced the purchase of Motally, Inc., a San Francisco, Calif.-based mobile-analytics company with eight employees, for an undisclosed amount. Motally’s current tracking service, which supports iOS, Android, BlackBerry and web applications, will be adapted for Qt, Symbian, Meego and Java applications, although Nokia says current Motally customers and platforms will continue to be served.

The Motally purchase is a positive step for Nokia to make its Ovi application store more attractive to developers. A recent survey shows that 42 percent of third party developers creating software for Nokia devices rate the Ovi Store as below average when compared to competing mobile app stores. Better analytics could quickly change these kinds of sentiments about Ovi, given that such data helps identify user demographics, application performance and time spent within an app or a section of an app. Armed with this information, developers can retool their mobile software to boost revenues and target appropriate audiences.

While the terms of the Motally sale aren’t available, there is a prior Nokia tie-in, which could help explain why Motally was chosen as an acquisition: Motally is backed by BlueRun Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that formed in 1998 as Nokia Venture Partners and became BlueRun in 2005. Additionally, BlueRun co-founder and current partner, John Malloy, held a prior management position at Nokia.

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The App Developer’s Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

Mobile ad startups are hot commodities once again thanks largely to in-app marketing, which has given the segment a much-needed lift over the last year. Established Internet companies and software development companies alike are scrambling to gain a foothold in the space, much like in 2007, which saw a flurry of activity including AOL’s acquisition of Third Screen Media, Yahoo’s pick-up of Actionality, the Microsoft ScreenTonic buy and Nokia’s tie-up with Enpocket. While 2010 may not see as many blockbuster deals, the number of tie-ups could end up surpassing that of three years ago, Rich Wong of Accel Partners told me last week:

Brand managers now are spending in this medium. It’s real, and it’s genuine. I do think it’s going to be hard to have a quarterly earnings call as a major Internet company and not have an answer to the question, ‘What’s your mobile strategy?’

Data provided by IDC

The landscape is far different now than it was just three years ago, though, when a handful of startups were quick to emerge in the nascent space. Recent figures from IDC indicate that Millennial Media is clearly the largest startup left on the field (see chart); the mobile search firm JumpTap is the second-largest potential acquisition despite a mere 4 percent market share. Yahoo and Microsoft claim a combined market share of only 19 percent — which may prompt the high-profile players to make an acquisition or two this year in order to build their mobile businesses.

The field also teems with smaller player that specialize in targeted areas such as search or that serve specific geographic regions. And recent growth in the space has given rise to a host of startups that play supporting roles by providing analytics and other tools. Flurry, which pocketed $7 million on the heels of its recent tie-up with Pinch Media, may be especially attractive to ad companies that don’t have their own mobile analytics operations.

So while we may see one or two more big-budget acquisitions in mobile advertising this year, most of the M&A activity will center on smaller startups. Entrenched firms with deep pockets will look to fill out the holes in their mobile ad businesses, and independent players will forge alliances to better compete with their larger counterparts. Those deals won’t make headlines, but they will reconfigure the landscape of mobile advertising in 2010.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user floodllama.

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