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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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Twitter CEO Dick Costolo

As Twitter has become an increasingly important part of the media strategy for content producers such as newspapers, TV networks and other media players, measuring the impact of a tweet has become even more important — so that those companies can show that spending time on Twitter has actual business value in terms of driving traffic and engagement. Until now, using analytical tools like Bitly’s link-tracking and Chartbeat’s dashboard have been the only way to do this, but Twitter has just thrown its own offering into the ring: an analytical tool-kit the company announced on Tuesday that can track tweets and links across the network.

In many ways, what Twitter is releasing — in a rollout that will see certain corporate partners of the service get access to the analytics, followed by a broader public launch over the next few weeks — is Twitter’s version of the analytics that Facebook provides for users of both its pages and the ubiquitous “like” button. Just as brands and publishers use those tools to track who is engaging with their content via Facebook, Twitter’s dashboard shows who is interacting with a site’s content either by tweeting or retweeting a link to it, or by using the Twitter button the company offered for websites and publishers since last year.

How effective is a Twitter link?

The analytics rollout clearly seems intended to demonstrate just how effective Twitter is for publishers and content creators when it comes to distributing their content and engaging with users. That’s undoubtedly a big part of the company’s marketing effort for brands and advertisers as it continues to roll out ad-focused features such as Promoted Tweets — which Twitter said on Tuesday will be coming to users’ timelines soon (based on algorithms that try to determine which promoted tweets are most relevant to a particular user’s interests).

The analytics are a direct result of Twitter’s acquisition in July of a small Y Combinator-funded startup called BackType (founded in Toronto), which provided a lot of the kind of tracking and analytical tools that are now being offered as part of this rollout. In a blog post at the Twitter blog, BackType co-founder Chris Golda described the company’s reasoning behind the new offering:

Twitter is a powerful platform for websites to share their content, and drive traffic and engagement. However, people have struggled to accurately measure the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to their websites, in part because web analytics software hasn’t evolved as quickly as online sharing and social signals.

The reality is that a lot of analytical tools still don’t take into account the kind of social activity that occurs on Twitter, even though that activity drives a significant amount of traffic and engagement for websites — according to a presentation by the company’s director of web business development at Disrupt, the network drives 100 million clicks a day at sites across the web. Traditional tools such as Google Analytics, comScore and Omniture can track pageviews and hits, as well as a user’s activity within a site, but they fail to capture the kind of social link-sharing that occurs on Twitter and Facebook.

Building on Twitter’s link shortener

That’s why many publishers have turned to services such as Bitly and Chartbeat to do this, so that they can see who is interacting with their content in real-time (Chartbeat also recently launched a news-focused service called Newsbeat with even more Twitter-related features). Bitly has had built-in analytics for links that are shortened using its service for some time, which was a big part of the reason why many websites and publishers used it to shorten their links when they started using Twitter.

Last year, however, Twitter started rolling out its own link shortener (t.co) and “wrapping” all links on the network — even those that had already been shortened by another service — with the t.co shortener. This was an obvious move into the territory occupied by Bitly, which pioneered the link-shortening business (a product of John Borthwick’s New York-based Betaworks incubator, as is Chartbeat). Twitter said that it didn’t launch the service to try and take over Bitly’s business but to offer a consistent experience for links, and to cut down on malicious links and other spam (for its part, Bitly has said that it is doing just fine without being the default link shortener on Twitter).

One obvious outcome of the introduction of the t.co shortener, however, was that Twitter gained control over all the links passing through its network as part of the more than 200 million tweets that get sent every day, and therefore was able to start tracking and analyzing that data, as a way of showing just how valuable Twitter can be for content creators. Because many users are posting with different clients and through a variety of third-party services, it has been difficult to get a true picture of how big a role Twitter plays in terms of driving traffic and interactions with content.

The new analytics dashboard will make it very obvious how effective (or ineffective) Twitter is, including showing which links were getting the most activity and when. While it may not directly impact Twitter’s revenue — since the company is offering the service free of charge, and will also be rolling out an API that allows other services to integrate Twitter tracking — it is clearly a big part of the company’s pitch to advertisers and content companies that its network needs to be a crucial part of their online strategy.

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Clicker Redesigns Its Online Video Guide; with a web site redesign it unveiled on Thursday, Clicker hopes to guide viewers to the shows they want. (NY Times Bits blog)

Omniture in Three-Screen Data Pact With NBC for Online Video Reporting; Omniture is developing a three-screen system for analyzing consumer interest and behavior, and has signed up NBC as one of its first customers for the solution. (Beet.TV)

YouTube Will Be Profitable in 2010; Patrick Walker, director of partnerships for YouTube, said he expects the online video service to be profitable this year. (Broadband TV News)

Sky Plans Germany’s First Live 3-D Telecast; Sky Deutschland is following in the footsteps of its UK counterpart with a live 3-D transmission of the Bundesliga. (Broadband TV News)

HDMI Group Releases 3D-TV Version of Spec; the entity responsible for licensing the High-Definition Multimedia Interface specification has released version 1.4a of the spec, which adds mandatory 3-D formats for broadcast content. (Multichannel News)

Not always. And particularly not right now when it comes to web and social media startups, many of which are still more focused on innovation and building up audiences than on making profits. Rushing them into deals to fulfill long-delayed plans for an exit strategy could derail the evolution of a strong business plan.

From an investment standpoint, founders and venture capitalists have good reasons to cash out now. Market caps of public tech giants are rising — the Nasdaq gained 15 percent last quarter alone – and so are their cash stockpiles: Microsoft is sitting on $49 billion in cash; Google, $24 billion. The IPO market is coming back to life, but not enough to meet the pent-up demand. And high-profile deals like the ones we’ve seen recently have a way of spurring on other acquisitions.

The risk is that, just as the quality of IPOs tends to deteriorate the longer a market boom lasts, a wave of M&A deals will bring on marriages that make less and less sense. Sure, Amazon buying Zappos was a good transaction all around, as was Facebook’s investment in Friendfeed. But we’re already seeing some that, from a user standpoint, are questionable. As a fan of Mint, am I really going to benefit from its purchase by Intuit? When your biggest competitor takes you over, it blunts the competitive spirit that can drive innovations.

Internet mergers rarely happen for the reason they do in older industries — to cut costs through consolidation. More often, they involve an aging company buying a young, promising one to amp up revenue growth. TimeWarner buying AOL and eBay buying Skype come to mind. Even snapping up a hot startup for its technology or talent — Google buying Dodgeball or Yahoo buying Flickr – can lead to culture clashes, customer anger and other disappointing results.

Yet expectations are high that more web mergers are on the way. Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Collins Stewart, argued in a report this week that growing confidence in the economy and broader adoption of the Internet will keep deals coming. He lists 20 startups and matches them with five Internet giants.

Aggarwals’ report has some interesting points, so it may be unfair to nitpick over some potential matches. But just because, say, Microsoft could easily buy SecondLife, Yahoo could go after Digg or eBay, Zillow, should they? Many of the deals would benefit investors more than users, and that’s often a recipe for a messy marriage. There are times when mergers make sense, but for web companies, now is not one of those times.

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However, Adobe is tardy in its effort to offer this capability, as companies like Clearspring already tout widgets and applications in Flash.  Plus, Facebook opened up its API to developers in 2007, so the rush of developers looking to build apps on the social network has dried up over the years. Because Flash doesn’t interact well with the various characteristics of each social network platform, a company called Transpond (formerly iWidget) has offered a service for the last year that helps developers make applications that accommodate the languages of each.

Flash isn’t supported on the iPhone, one of the hottest mobile platforms out there, so iPhone app developers who want to use Adobe’s new service will have to build special versions of their applications that don’t use Flash. The service is supported on Symbian and Windows Mobile phones, however.

Today’s launch of Adobe’s distribution service is another sign of the San Jose, Calif.-based company trying to strengthen its position in the advertising market. Last week, Adobe acquired web analytics company Omniture for $1.8 billion, a move that many viewed as a way for Adobe to better track advertising sales.

Gigya and Adobe announced their partnership back in March, saying they joined forces to work on a solution for publishers and advertisers dubbed Project Radiate that was set to release this summer. Gigya received $1 million in Series C funding led by DAG Ventures in October 2008. While Adobe is late to the game with its distribution service, making things easier for developers is always a positive.

Image courtesy of Adobe

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• Intuit buying Mint for $170 million.
• Adobe buying Omniture for $1.8 billion.
• Private equity syndicate buying Skype for $2 billion.
• Computer Associates buys NetQOS for $200 million.
• VMware buys SpringSource for $420 million.
• Nokia buys Plum and Acuity Mobile for an undisclosed amount.

What do these deals have in common? None of them involve the usual suspects. Typically, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems are big buyers, but this time we’re seeing a whole new crop of companies looking to make acquisitions. They’re buying to:

• Extend their current products into new markets. (VMware-Springsource)
• Find new markets (Adobe-Omniture)
• Ramp up their web presence. (Intuit-Mint)

What’s even more encouraging is that none of these deals are the small microtransactions that Silicon Valley got used to over the past few years, but are significant. I expect to see more of them. To buffer their businesses, I expect large companies — data center operators and networking hardware makers, in particular — to get acquisitive.

The fact is that despite the slow comeback of the market, small technology companies are still a bargain. J.P. Morgan Research shows that small-cap stocks have declined 23 percent so far this year while large caps have increased by 3 percent. Large companies have been cutting their R&D budgets in order to get their fiscal houses in order. And they have also built up large stashes of cash. In other words, they have both the needs and the means to buy, J.P. Morgan says.

Although it seems that the technology market has been a mainstay in M&A activity, we have recently seen it all but dry up. In 2008, we note that only 45 deals were completed vs. in 2007 where we saw 94 deals completed in the internet space. However, we think acquisition multiples are much more attractive than in 2007. (“The State of the M&A Market” report by J.P. Morgan.)

Here is what J.P. Morgan thinks (and I agree) makes a good likely/potential acquisition:

• Must-have brand (Mint)
• Must-have product leadership (Omniture)
• Easy to integrate (SpringSource)
• Barriers to entry. (Omniture)

J.P. Morgan has come up with a list of possible takeout candidates, with Omniture at the top of the charts, followed by Latin American auction giant MercadoLibre. (Good call, guys.) The complete list is at the end of the post.

So what about the smaller, more web-centric startups? On that front, there is good news in the making.

1. Brad Garlinghouse, a president with AOL, told me that he’s interested in shopping for startups that will help bulk up AOL’s communications business.
2. In June, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told FOX Business News that he’s looking to buy technology-based companies where it’s easier to buy than build.

So now for the fun part: Who’s going to buy whom? These are my top 10 picks. Of course, you can play along by suggesting your picks in the comments. I’m not going to get into reasons — at least for now.

1. Cisco Systems buys Sonos, the music player maker.
2. Cisco buys some cloud computing startup such as RightScale.
3. SugarCRM is going to be fancied by everyone from IBM to Red Hat.
4. RIM buys Slacker.
5. Perennial favorite: Dell buys Palm.
6. Network Appliance, Extreme Networks and Force 10 Networks are likely buyout candidates.
7. Microsoft buys Twitter ;-) (OK Now I’m just being mean!)
8. Nokia buys Spotify.
9. Electronic Arts buys ngmoco.
10. Broadcom buys Atheros.

My outliers/unlikely deals:

• eBay buys Etsy.
• Cisco or RedHat buys Box.net
• EMC and IBM become big buyers over next 12-18 months to bolster their cloud computing efforts.
• Yahoo buys Facebook. (Not that it could happen.)
• Yahoo buys Hulu. It really should :-)

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Narayen said it was “clear customers would like [Adobe] to do a lot more.” Media companies want to understand which rich video content is performing the best, for example, while advertisers and ad agencies that use Flash to produce online ads want to know the click-through rate of those ads in real time. Currently, Omniture integrates with Flash, but with the companies under the same umbrella, Adobe hopes to sell more of Omniture’s products to its existing customer base. One analyst noted during the Q&A that “all Omniture customers are probably Adobe customers, but not the other way around,” leaving a large customer base to which Adobe can push its wares.

Adobe has $2.6 billion in cash and short-term investments; company execs said it’s financing the deal through cash on hand and its existing credit facility.

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Omniture has a few big advantages in the viral video measurement space, though it suffers on a feature-by-feature comparison to those who focus on video.

• Its video product is a free add-on to a product that a lot of people already pay for.
• Its massive and significant existing customer base. For instance, its named trial customer is Warner Bros.
• Perhaps most importantly, integration with measurement of things like site activity and customer conversion — the kind of soft impacts that viral video can have.

Omniture gets data through APIs and spiders, but it doesn’t do the kind of hands-on data gathering Visible Measures does to monitor videos as they spread. Unofficial uploads are a fairly important aspect of viral distribution, so that could be a significant limitation. Omniture also doesn’t get involved in syndication, which leaves that part of the lifecycle open to providers like TubeMogul.

The company is targeting both publishers and advertisers. Customers can create watchlists and alerts to monitor keywords they are interested in.

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At the company’s user summit this week in Salt Lake City, Omniture unveiled a variety of enhancements to its service that open it up to external tools and developers. For example, marketers can share visitor activity with advertising networks, e-mail marketing, video delivery and visitor surveys. Or they can test different content to see what increases visitor engagement. Or adjust hundreds of search terms across several search companies to maximize purchases.

In its quest to help customers build the optimal online experience, Omniture last year acquired two firms whose technologies can not only test different content, keywords and offers, but can automatically modify a web site based on what drives more traffic, better engagement, or increased purchases.

Fans of this autonomic site optimization say it will free marketers to focus on what they do best: creative marketing. But critics warn that pandering to visitor whims leads to lowest-common-denominator content and countless computer-optimized sites that resemble one another.

We sat down with Gail Ennis, Omniture’s chief marketing officer, to get her take.

GigaOM: Autonomic analytics is a major topic. Are customers ready for sites that optimize themselves?

Gail Ennis: Some customers say, ‘I don’t want the system to do it. I want to control it.’ And we love them to do that. Particularly as it gets to the keyword spend, it’s so complicated to try to optimize keyword rules so people are much more reluctant to say, ‘I’m going to let an algorithm take that over for me.’ But some companies, and some marketers within companies, just get it right away: ‘We’re going to throw everything into that autoserve, let the creative serve up, let the algorithms build.’ [At this year's user conference, Omniture CEO Josh James in his remarks] opened up with this very fact, that algorithmic marketing is so ripe for automation right now.

GO: You’ve focused a lot on industry verticals at this show. Which vertical is the least likely to embrace automation?

Ennis: Funny enough, retailers are a little bit more resistant. They have people there whose job it is to figure out promotion and merchandising, and a lot of other verticals don’t have that. They have the data and could automate it. I’m not saying this is true for every retailer, but we’ve seen it where they go, ‘Well, no, we have people who do that sort of thing.’

It makes me think about which industries are getting closer to ‘What does the customer really want?’ rather than ‘What do I want to give them?’ Those companies are going to get to great user customer experience first and be more competitive in the marketplace.

GO: On the other hand, consumers tend to go for the lowest common denominator. If you took 10 retailers and let autonomics do everything it could to choose the offer, the pricing, the keywords — wouldn’t you wind up with 10 stores that were identical?

Ennis: You might. That’s where the balance is. What should I automate? If I automate that, would it free me up to focus more about my strategy and my brand? I don’t think it’s going to be 100 percent automated.

This happens to me all the time as a CMO. People say, ‘Look at this ad that’s pulling!’ and I say, ‘But it’s so off-brand! It’s so not us!’ You get into this dilemma of ‘That’s what people want’ and ‘That’s not the image we want to portray.’ There are some things we automate 100 percent, like awareness. Others, like our webinars, are probably different from an ad banner or other awareness-type branding.

Ultimately, though, Ennis sees the business of winning over customers as a process, not a one-time fix to content. “It’s not about ‘Touch me once,’” she said, “it’s about ‘How do you touch me in the right portfolio of ways to convert me through my cycle?’”

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