Woopra is our derivation of “Woop” as that is what people do when they see Woopra. :D We call it the “Woop Effect.” The logo and our mascot represent spies. We’re always watching you.
In follow-up to our review of Woopra – realtime web analytics, we requested the Woopra team to give us a peek behind the doors and tell us how the whole experience has been. Lorelle VanFossen, Editor-in-Chief, obliged. We talked to her at length about the development experience and the road ahead for Woopra (read the whole interview at Digimantra). Already an exciting and powerful tool, Woopra only gets better with time. We were inspired by the spirit the team showed and the fun side of the rigorous development exercise.
The ability to decide fast, right now, is most important. If you get that instant event notification that TechCrunch or Forbes has published a story about you, you can monitor the server traffic loads and spikes to respond fast to keep the site going. If you put up an ad banner and it isn’t working, you can change it now instead of wasting time hoping it will work. If you make an announcement on Twitter and no one comes, maybe your audience isn’t there. It’s waiting for you on Facebook. Go get them. While the web developed as a way to share information, it has become a highly social community. With live stats, you can watch that social at work. With the Woopra Live Chat, you can break down the walls between you and your site to chat with your visitor, expanding the social relationships.
Yup, Woopra proves to be a very smart application – one that can help you take smart decisions without wasting time. For a long time, Woopra was behind closed doors, but now the team has moved out of beta. That should tell a lot of people what to look forward to in the web analytics business.
The first exposure to the public was at WordCamp Dallas 2008. There were only 200 invitations for beta testers distributed to the attendees. We really thought that would be enough to get us through the next phase in development. Unfortunately, the response overwhelmed us.
Word quickly spread once the attendees got a live preview of Woopra. Cali Lewis of GeekBrief did an interview with John and within a couple hours the launch was picked up by TechCrunch, Mashable, and across the web. Coverage expanded to The Financial Times, Wired, PC World, ZNEt, and more. Within a few weeks, more than 30,000 applications for beta testing sites were requested!
They have come a long way from there. After many sleepless nights, frenzied meetings and back-breaking coding sessions, The team has come up with a robust tool, a desktop client, smart pricing plans for businesses and a product we all love.
Woopra’s main goal is the democratization of the Web. It is our intention to bring big-time analytics tools to companies of all sizes. We intend to keep leveling the playing field as we expand our service to include millions of Websites.
It would be fun to see how this affects the analytics industry. Read the whole interview at Digimantra
Author: Kinshuk Sunil (72 Articles)
Kinshuk Sunil is the founder of the WiSy Blog. An active evangelist for Open Source and a enthusiast Game Designer, Kinshuk focuses on reviewing Softwares, Services and Games here. However, a jack of all trades, Kinshuk can be found talking about almost everything. Catch up with him on twitter @kinshuksunil.
