BuiltWith Reveals The Tech Used By The 130 Million Web Sites That Matter Most

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Search engines like Google scour the web to figure out how to rank content. Measurement firms like comScore sample users to estimate traffic to web sites. But what if you want to know which of some 2000 technologies a web site is using? And, what if you want to know what the tech trends are across the 130 million largest sites on the web today?

You could just dig through the source code for each site you’re interested in to answer these questions piecemeal, or you could repurpose other web site profilers designed for search engine optimization or other jobs.

Or, you could use BuiltWith.

The five year-old bootstrapped startup, built by one-man team Gary Brewer in Australia, looks at the publicly available code for each site, and figures out each piece of technology that it’s using. It shows that TechCrunch, for example, is using the WordPress VIP content management system, ad targeting from Quigo and AdSonar, traffic measurement from comScore, ChartBeat, Optimizely, Google Analytics, and many others. It also shows all the Javascript  libraries and widgets that we’re using, including Facebook for Websites, JQuery, and the Twitter Platform. You can take a look at the full results here.

Organized, easily accessible data about the profile of any one web site can be valuable for, say, someone trying to sell cloud hosting or ad network products to new clients — especially for figuring things out like which clients are already using competitors’ technology.

But even more interesting are the big-picture trends that BuiltWith reveals. By aggregating the data about usage across all of the sites that it tracks, BuiltWith can show which web technologies are gaining or losing in usage across the web. Some examples:

Adobe’s Shockwave Flash embed technology has been seeing steady declines over the past couple years. Among the 10,000 largest sites on the web, its market share has declined from 13.71% in January of 2011 to 9.88% last month.

JQuery, a Javascript library, has been blowing up. From 21.88% of the top million web sites in January of 2011, it has reached 33.92% last month.

What about Facebook’s efforts to introduce its widgets and other platform services around the web? BuiltWith shows that the Facebook SDK is now being used by 747,588 sites around the web, and grew by 0.29% between February 5 and 12. Facebook for Websites, which includes social plugins, along with its Facebook Connect authentication service and other platform features, now has 1.35 million sites on board; it grew by 0.14% over the same period. The Like button itself is used by 1.12 million sites. Check out the full list on the BuiltWith Trends site.

How is BuiltWith monetizing all this publicly available but painful-to-aggregate data? Through a professional version called Trends Pro that lets people buy access to run custom reports across its database. Each report comes with further details on each included site, such as available contact information, and includes options to export to spreadsheets or into your company’s customer relationship manager software.

At this point, Brewer is focused on fine-tuning Trends Pro, and building out a team who can help him sell the product. He says he hasn’t ruled out taking funding but for the time being wants to see how far he can get by bootstrapping. Considering how much he’s managed to build over the last five years, I’d bet he’ll make it pretty far.

Tracx Secures $4.4 Million To Bring Big Data To Social Media Management

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On Tuesday, we covered the launch of Nimble 2.0, a simple, affordable social relationship manager designed to give SMBs the same mileage out of social that enterprise has been able to create with its CRM strategies. For most companies, managing customer relations on social media is difficult, time-consuming, and less-than-precise, and they outsource different parts of the social media management, marketing, and sales to disparate solutions.

Thus, B2B startups are increasingly looking to throw a wrench into the gears of legacy CRM models, providing SMBs with lightweight solutions that make it easier for them to interact with customers on social networks, track those conversations and manage relationships across platforms.

Today, the space greets another unified management player, as New York City-based Tracx is officially launching its social media management platform into the wild after several years of building, tweaking their infrastructure and beta testing. Simply put, the startup is offering a modular and scalable platform that enables professional users to build, manage, and monetize their social presence. Using its proprietary tech, the startup allows brands and agencies to define their “ultimate audience profile,” manage, and to monetize that profile to drive engagement, conversion, and good old ROI.

To support its launch, tracx is also announcing that it has closed a $4.4 million round in series B funding. The round was led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Revel Partners. As part of the round, Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge and Charlie Kemper of Revel will be joining the startup’s board of directors. The team says that it will be using its new capital to push its service in international markets, ramp up hiring, and continue touching up its UI.

With a growing number of options out there for social CRM, tracx’s SaaS solution looks to go beyond simply managing Twitter and Facebook feeds to providing brands with a more granular view into the entire lifecycle of social media campaigns. From planning, testing, and strategizing how to most effectively distribute content to better understanding and communication with your brand’s social media influencers, tracx wants to offer an end-to-end service that allows brands to get more bang for their increasing spend on social campaigns.

But the real key to the startup’s value proposition is its data engine. Tracx says that it is currently collecting and analyzing “over a terabyte of social data every second” — which is mind boggling if you think about those big data implications — to give its customers a more accurate, realtime view of audience segmentation across marketing, sales, and customer relations.

Like Nimble, tracx wants to go beyond “listening and monitoring” platforms by offering big picture analysis of the competitive landscape and giving them more realtime data than the next service to enable them to quickly strategize, research, and measure conversations that matter most to their business. And access detailed reporting.

Bringing big data to social CRM can have a big effect on how deep marketers are able to go in planning the best ways to reach and engage their customers. Companies don’t want to bring a knife to a gun fight, and building a SaaS solution on top of a massive data silo — as long as that realtime engine doesn’t encumber the user experience — allows brands to arm themselves with more effective ammo in an increasingly data-driven world.

Tracx launches with 180 brands and agencies in tow, including Coca Cola, Interpublic Group, and Porter Novelli, to name a few.

For more, check out tracx at home here.

Podio Plugs Google Docs Into Its Collaboration Tools

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Startup Podio says it just addressed one of the top feature requests from the 40,000 companies that use its collaboration tools — it now integrates with Google Docs.

When TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis wrote about Podio a year ago, she called it “Yammer with its own app store and app builder.” Judging from the demo I saw earlier this week, many aspects of the basic interface will indeed feel natural to Yammer users (or really anyone who can handle a threaded conversation), but as Alexia’s description suggests, Podio’s real selling point is extensibility — if Podio doesn’t have a feature you want, you can build a simple app for it, and the company also integrates with other online services through its APIs.

One of the company’s goals, says VP of Apps Ryan Nichols, is getting as much information into Podio as possible. He argues that existing chat and project management tools can create an unnatural divide — you do your work, and then you go to a website where you talk about doing your work.

Podio, on the other hand, should be the place “where you actually get work done.” So everything on the site is associated with a file. You can create a conversation and assign tasks around a document or a spreadsheet, replacing the tedious and confusing back-and-forth that can happen over email.

Until now, however, you couldn’t do that with Google Docs — or rather, if you wanted to include Docs, you had to use a clumsy workaround like pasting the links into Podio and hoping the invites and permissions worked properly. With the new integration, Google Docs work like any other file in Podio.

This builds on a feature released last December, Podio for Google Apps, which allows you to turn Gmail messages into actionable tasks. With these integrations, Podio is hoping to both appease existing customers and reach new ones. However, in Europe (which makes up 40 percent of Podio’s customer base, and a higher percentage of premium customers), Nichols says penetration of Google Apps is relatively low, so there’s also an opportunity to introduce Apps to Podio customers.

Communication is the Most Important Medical Instrument

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Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

“A good scalpel makes a better surgeon. Good communication makes a better doctor.”

- Dr. Josh Umbehr

The future of medicine in the U.S. is clear. The days of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement are numbered as they have produced one of the most inefficient healthcare systems in the world. While there are many unknowns regarding the future model, one thing is crystal clear — highly effective communication will separate the winners from the losers.

The quantum improvement in the depth and breadth of communication seen in the consumer Internet and in the consumerization of the enterprise (iPhones, Yammer, etc.) has yet to fully impact healthcare. With healthcare representing nearly 20% of the economy, the stakes are so high that it is inevitable that communications will be a key driver separating the winners from the losers as the tectonic shifts in the landscape shake out. This will usher in an array of new technology entrants similar to consumer and enterprise arenas disrupting ineffective and expensive communication methods of the past. The stars are aligning to make this happen.

“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of communication in clinical care. Even with devices, robotics, genomics and personalized care, it all rests, and depends on, clear communication.”

- Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, MBE, FAAP

The Individual (aka the Patient) is the Most Important Member of the Care Team

It’s long been said that the most important member of the care team is the individual (or their family member).

Quite simply, in a world where one is compensated on value and outcome, it’s nearly impossible to have success without recognizing the importance of the patient. Consider the diagram in this article. It is clear and appropriate that the “system” — i.e., the collection of healthcare providers — is in control of decisions that drive outcomes in high acuity cases such as when one is unconscious in the hospital. In contrast, in low acuity situations such as managing a chronic condition, the individual and/or their family are clearly in control of actions that will drive the ultimate outcome. Whether adhering to an exercise, diet or prescription plan, the patient/family plays the central role in determining the outcome.

The importance of this can’t be overemphasized given that 75% of healthcare spend results from chronic conditions. Decisions made while a condition is in low acuity can rapidly lead to high acuity flare ups that drive large medical bills. As Dr. Swanson states, “the steering wheel should be attended by the patient.” After all, 99+% of an individual’s life is spent away from healthcare providers and no one else besides them is in the driver’s seat.

It is a good thing that there has been great focus put on improving communication between healthcare professionals through standards and incentives related to the new models being driven by private and federal insurance programs. The Patient Centered Medical Home and the Accountable Care Organizations are the two most high profile of these. However, the communication focus has been about the patient not with the patient. Having worked in and seen literally hundreds of healthIT systems, the fact is the fundamental purpose of the patient as envisioned by these systems is that the “patient” is merely a vessel to attach billing codes to — not a core part of the care team. This legacy approach will prove to be a fatal flaw in the new reimbursement models. Throwing bodies (e.g., care coordinators) at the problem can help, but will be at a disadvantage versus approaches that combine the best of human and technology driven communication methods.

There are efforts being made to tweak legacy software to address these requirements. Unfortunately, they are as likely to meet the new imperatives as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have been at becoming market leaders in social networking. The reality is Facebook built social networking into their core design from the ground up and bolting a dramatically different approach onto an old system rarely works whether it is social networking or patient-provider communications.

Good News for Forward Looking Healthcare Organizations

I get knowing nods from my physician friends when I exclaim that I hear more frequently from my dog’s vet than my doctor or my kids’ doctor. We realize why the historical reimbursement models have contributed to this dynamic. Considering that people retain less than 20% of what a doctor tells them, this lack of communication and patient retention is a brutal combination driving sub-optimal outcomes. The good news is there is a tremendous competitive advantage that a healthcare provider can realize if they choose to focus on improved communications for the 99+% of the time when a patient isn’t staring them in the face.

Not only can this opportunity provide a competitive advantage, it is imperative in the new models. Simplistic patient portals, however, won’t get the job done. I’ve yet to meet the physician or individual who thinks that just making lab results available to patients or allowing for secure messaging is changing the care paradigm.

Whether out of desire or necessity, consumers are ready for improved communication so they can save on their healthcare costs. It’s expected that roughly one-third of the workforce will be permanent freelancers, contractors, consultants, etc. with zero expectation of employer-provided insurance. Even those with employer-provided insurance, are picking up an ever-growing percentage of the premium. The current average is 30% of the costs are picked up by an employee (up from 10% in the recent past). This coincides with the rise of consumer empowerment that has happened in virtually every other sector. Dr. Patricia Salber wrote about DIY Healthcare  to explain how far things have already come and to assert her opinion that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thought-leading Physicians Are Ready

Fortunately the economics and simplicity of the consumer Internet and SaaS have finally come to healthcare. Once upon a time, sophisticated new software was first deployed in large enterprises. Today, greatly improved communication technologies begin with small organizations. Consider a physician like Dr. Craig Koniver who uses various free (e.g., Evernote) and low-cost off-the-shelf software to manage his communications without employing any administrative staff. Dr. Kent Bottles wrote about reverse innovation in healthcare talking about offshore innovation making its way to the U.S., but it’s not just offshore healthcare that can be a source of innovation. Dr. Howard Luks, an orthopedic surgeon, is another example of an innovative individual physician that is more sophisticated than most large healthcare providers by simply using free and low cost software to communicate with current and prospective patients.

As was highlighted in The Rise of Nimble Medicine, there is an explosion of disruptive innovators as well as innovation groups inside established healthcare organizations. In many respects, healthcare has been measured on production with an almost factory floor-like model of producing as many “widgets” (i.e., procedures, appointments, tests, prescriptions, etc.) as possible. However with a shift to a service model where success will be driven by factors such as satisfaction and health outcomes, smart healthcare providers recognize that systems optimized for production are ill-equipped to optimize for outcome. With that in mind, recognition grows that communication becomes the most important medical instrument of the future.

SanDisk Acquires FlashSoft To Expand Enterprise Lineup

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Flash memory maker and storage system technologies provider SanDisk announced today that it has acquired FlashSoft, a company focused on caching software products. Going forward, SanDisk will sell FlashSoft’s products both as standalone software, as well as offer them in combination with its other products, including SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.

The company says that it expects the acquisition to be neutral to its earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013, but additional details were not provided.

FlashSoft is currently the maker of software for Flash Virtualization which lets customers increase application performance and virtualization capability while reducing hardware and operational costs. The software is available for Windows, Linux and VMWare platforms.

With SSD-based caching, the most frequently accessed data resides close to the CPU in high-performance memory – this is how it offers the touted performance improvements. For customers, the end result is smaller, more cost effective storage configurations, which, in turn, allows them to deploy more virtual machines per server.

Through the acquisition, SanDisk is moving towards becoming a complete solution provider for enterprise and cloud customers by offering SSD-optimized software, including those from third party providers.

Update: Alongside this news, comes word that Divergent Ventures is exiting FlashSoft, one of its portfolio companies. Divergent was an early stage investor in FlashSoft in April 2011. It previously exited from Pliant Technology, another flash memory technology company, in 2011.

Shoutlet Fires Off New Trigger-Based Social Marketing Platform

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Here’s why social media marketing is broken: my company wants to launch a contest on our Facebook app and website and post about to all our fans and followers, post when we hit 1000 entries, and post again when the contest ends after 5000 entries. Sequencing like this was difficult because marketing team would have to monitor for those milestones to be reached, then manually rotate our apps and publish updates.

Social marketing platform Shoutlet today launches a way to turn the cacophony of disparate campaigns into a concerted push. It’s called Social Switchboard, it uses trigger-based campaign publishing, and your marketing department wants it.

Social Switchboard lets marketers schedule status updates, tweets, YouTube videos, emails, apps and more to be published when a trigger is hit, such as a Facebook Page reaching a certain Like count or a number of contest entries being submitted.

Shoutlet also has a new drag-and-drop application builder and an enhanced social CRM system for creating apps and choosing who to send marketing messages to. Next it’s building its own Ads API product that will leverage the CRM data and taps into Social Switchboard to launch ad campaigns alongside promotional apps and status updates.

When I interviewed Shoutlet in September, I worred it was wasting its $9.2 million in funding by offering a breadth of services widely available elsewhere. I recommended the company get serious about the Facebook Ads API which has proved a big money maker, and focus on differentiators to help it compete with Buddy Media, Vitrue, and other big social marketing platforms.

I’m not worried for Shoutlet anymore. At least not until other social marketing platforms wise up and add trigger-based campaign publishing too.

[Image Credit: redcmarketing]

WorldDesk Launches Dropbox-powered Way To Access Your Desktop

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It would appear Dropbox is building a pretty wide ecosystem around its service and the latest today is an integration with WorldDesk. Who are they? Well they provide desktop virtualisation software, and they’ve just launched a beta cloud-based desktop delivery platform leveraging Dropbox.

Right now WorldDesk lets you access your “desktop” (whatever that is these days) from any device,allowing access to your applications and personalised desktop from your physical machine. Using WorldDesk, you could use a simple USB drive, or access your desktop from a smartphone, for instance.