CrowdSPRING won a Stevie Award in The 2009 American Business Awards, and Ross Kimbarovsky will chair the judging committee for the New Products & Product Management categories in the 2010 ABAs.

What book are you currently reading?
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande. The book is focused on the medical industry, but I’m intrigued by the central premise: that there’s far too much information today for a person to keep organized in their head.

What was the last movie you saw, and would you recommend it?
James Cameron’s Avatar (at an IMAX, in 3D). I highly recommend it.

What is your favorite sport or hobby?
I love soccer and basketball (I play both poorly). I also love music, reading, and chess. I used to play 100 games per week online (but far fewer since starting crowdSPRING).

Who is your favorite historical figure?
That’s a tough question—there have been many remarkable people that could easily be my favorite historical figure. I would put Albert Einstein in my top five.

Who is your favorite living person?
Aside from my family­—Nelson Mandela.

If you could choose another profession, what would it be?
Teaching. It’s a great joy to help kids learn new things.

What quality or qualities do you most value in your business associates?
I want my business associates to be honest, dependable, transparent, and driven.

What do you think is the worst bad habit to have at work?
Gossip. It’s a huge waste of time, and unlike other leisure activities, which can contribute to team-building, gossip can be extremely destructive.

Is there anything you'd like to improve about your own work practices?
Many things! For example, while I’ve learned to work efficiently, I look for ways to improve my decisions so that I always focus on the most important priorities.

As someone at the top of your profession, what keeps you inspired or makes you hit the ground running in the morning?
Creating real and meaningful opportunities for people around the world. crowdSPRING has leveled the playing field for tens of thousands of small businesses and tens of thousands of creatives around the world, offering them opportunities that they never had previously.

What do you consider has been your greatest achievement in business?
Too many companies believe their own press releases—and this leads to complacency, mistakes, and, ultimately, failure. My greatest achievement is to remember this fact every day, and to never go to sleep satisfied.

What advice or useful tip would you give to someone who is just starting out in business?
Four to five times every week, I video blog on my personal blog with tips and suggestions based on the many mistakes I’ve made in business and the lessons I’ve learned. I hope that others will learn from my mistakes and lessons. If I had to give one piece of advice it would be to jump. Too many young business people worry about making mistakes and spend a tremendous amount of time reading, thinking, planning, and talking, but very little time actually executing. It’s important to do all of those things, but it’s even more important to jump: Execute your idea and see where it takes you—and if you fail, focus on the next one.

About Ross Kimbarovsky
In 2007, Ross co-founded and became co-executive of crowdSPRING, a Chicago technology start-up that operates an online marketplace for buyers and sellers of creative services. Buyers who need a new logo, website, marketing materials, product design, or other creative content post what they need, when they need it, and how much they’ll pay. Once the request is posted, creatives from around the world (nearly 50,000 from 170+ countries) submit actual work—not bids or proposals. As the submissions come in, buyers are able to review, sort, rate, provide feedback, and collaborate with multiple creatives until they pick their favorite.

crowdSPRING is helping to radically transform the creative industries by providing a level playing field for tens of thousands of talented designers and by offering small and mid-size businesses real choice for their graphic design needs.

Prior to co-founding crowdSPRING, Ross spent thirteen years as a successful trial attorney. He counseled and represented clients (from small internet startups to Fortune 100 companies) in complex disputes involving intellectual property in United States state and federal courts and before the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Ross emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1979. In 2006, Ross was named an Illinois SuperLawyer® and one of “40 Illinois Attorneys Under Forty to Watch” for intellectual property and complex commercial litigation.  Ross holds a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from Northwestern University, and a law degree from the University of Illinois.

About crowdSPRING
crowdSPRING is an online marketplace for creative services. For buyers, crowdSPRING is a place to post a creative project, watch the world contribute ideas, and choose the one they like. For creatives, crowdSPRING is a global stage for creativity where title and experience don't matter. crowdSPRING is a privately held company based in Chicago. For more information, visit www.crowdspring.com.

To begin the year, we look at a Stevie Award winner from 2009 that may well impact your business in 2010.  Quantivo, of San Mateo, California, won the Stevie Award for Best New Service of the Year for its on-demand behavioral analytics in the 2009 International Business Awards.  Here we look at how this low-cost, high-speed service is revolutionizing Business Intelligence(BI).
 
How can a company be “cool” and “hot” at the same time?  These—along with “disruptive” and “revolutionary”--are just some of the adjectives being applied by industry analysts to Quantivo’s on-demand Behavioral Analytics offering.

Quantivo describes its service as combining “powerful innovations to smash the barriers between managers and their customers’ behavior” by providing insights that support smart business decisions. The service enables consumer-centric companies to get a rapid understanding of the latest behavioral patterns exhibited by their customers online or offline, for sales, marketing, or web interactions.

The brainchild of co-founders Paul O’Leary, CTO, and Brian Kelly, CEO, Quantivo was officially launched in September 2008, when the company was invited to DEMO, a premier launching pad for emerging technologies.

Launching a new on-demand behavioral analytics service into a market dominated by few but large players was not easy, but in just a few months Quantivo had already secured customers that included well-known brands like Cisco/WebEx and Orchard Supply Hardware.

In addition to the Stevie Award, Quantivo has received several industry awards and recognitions for its technology. Gartner, Inc., the world’s largest and leading information technology research firm, named Quantivo a “Cool Vendor” in March 2009, a prestigious nod that recognizes the most innovative vendors and products. The Silicon Valley Business Journal awarded Quantivo the Emerging Technology Award in December 2008 as Silicon Valley’s hottest up-and-coming Cloud Computing company.

"The Stevie Award further validates Quantivo's disruptive impact on the business intelligence status quo," said Brian Kelly, CEO of Quantivo. "Our revolutionary combination of behavioral analytics and cloud computing continues to challenge traditional thinking around the speed, cost, and usability of Business Intelligence. From web analytics to general business intelligence, Quantivo truly is the 'best new product' to innovate in this space in a very long time."

How Do They Do It?
Quantivo is the only BI solution that combines large-scale analytics with low-cost, rapid SaaS delivery, allowing companies to act upon valuable insights in just minutes, regardless of data volume.  

As Paul O’Leary, CTO of Quantivo, explains it: “The need for speed and flexibility in customer analytics has been amplified by the proliferation of social media and the mobile Web, shrinking the window of opportunity to capitalize on behavioral trends to just hours or even minutes. To help companies keep up, we didn’t just move traditional BI technology into the cloud. Instead, we combined our revolutionary analytics approach with a cloud-based architecture for an entirely new vision of Business Intelligence. Quantivo customers can throw billions of records into the cloud and begin analyzing their data in ways not previously possible, and at a fraction of the TCO of tired relational data warehouse solutions based on decades-old technologies.”

1. Get More Customers
Using a patented Affinity database, Quantivo can quickly uncover behavioral patterns across any aspect or combination of online or offline customer interactions—whether companies want to drive more web traffic or increase website stickiness, understand a promotion’s impact on customer behavior, recognize the sequence of events that lead to and follow purchases, or understand combinations of online actions that drive conversions.

A cloud computing infrastructure allows customers to be up-and-running in two weeks and to scale their usage up or down without a huge investment.

2. Keep Customers Happy
For online data analysis, Quantivo offers deep insights that go beyond available tools. While most analytics solutions offer simple statistics and reports, Quantivo’s behavioral focus enables users to see why online traffic does what it does. This unique capability allows decision-makers to uncover unforeseen, fast-changing visitor trends that translate into concrete actions.

Quantivo offers Repeat Visitor Behavior Analysis based upon any measure of visit recurrence. Visitor behavior can be analyzed across frequency of visits, visit number, total number of visits, visits per period, and more.

Quantivo provides a revolutionary approach to enabling in-depth understanding of customer behavior, allowing companies to uncover key factors that drive sales, identify tactics that increase loyalty, discover patterns in clickstreams, and more.

3. Grow Revenues
Each industry has its own unique customer behavior challenges and opportunities. Quantivo offers industry-focused solutions that enable the discovery of profit-driving insights for applications such as market basket and loyalty analysis, merchandising and marketing optimization, and online analytics.

Going beyond typical business intelligence and analytics, Quantivo enables:

•           Dynamic Segment Definitions that allow new segments to be defined
interactively and evaluated instantly, allowing marketers and web analysts to
react to the latest trends.
•           Multi-level Behavioral Analysis across multiple events that can be analyzed to understand content or offer combinations that increase views, conversions, and transactions.
•           Dynamic Train-of-thought Analysis to dig into custom events and
include them in ad hoc analysis, making it possible to understand visitor
behavior from all angles.

Quantivo also includes the Affinity 360 Finder, a feature that performs an exhaustive search for all relevant affinities, uncovering new or disregarded patterns to allow companies to “know what you don’t know.”

Behavioural Analytics for Dummies
If you want to know more on the topic, Behavioral Analytics For Dummies gives marketing, web analytics, and business intelligence professionals the knowledge required to turn customer data into profit-driving actions.  For a free copy, go to:
http://www.quantivo.com/resources/quantivo_dummies.php.

About Paul O'Leary, Co-founder & CTO:
As the company’s technology leader, Paul guides the development of the Quantivo platform. He has more than fifteen years of development and engineering experience in the Business Intelligence and CRM industries.  Paul was a founding engineer at Broadbase, now part of Kana Software. In that role he helped the company develop customer-focused analytic and marketing-automation applications that were widely adopted by Fortune 1000 companies.

About Brian Kelly, Co-founder & CEO:
Brian has twenty years experience in enterprise software development and
marketing, focusing on Analytic Applications and CRM solutions. Before joining Quantivo, Brian was EVP of Products at Kana, where he was responsible for worldwide marketing, product management, and industry solutions delivery. He came to Kana from Broadbase, where he ran product management and engineering. At Broadbase, Brian directed the company's successful IPO and managed the acquisition and integration of several technology companies. Prior to Broadbase, Brian founded Kelly Information Systems (acquired by Peoplesoft) and was at Teradata developing BI applications for some of the largest U.S. retailers.

About Quantivo:
Quantivo is pioneering a fundamentally new approach to behavioral analytics. For the first time, corporate decision-makers can quickly uncover behavioral patterns across any aspect of their customer interactions and act on these timely insights to increase customer acquisition, retention, up-sells, cross-sells, and web monetization. By combining large-scale analytics with rapid SaaS delivery, Quantivo puts revenue-generating insights directly into the hands of a wide set of executives and analysts for applications such as market basket and loyalty analysis, merchandising and marketing optimization, and online analytics. For more information, visit www.quantivo.com.

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs and web sites that we think might be of interest to you.

Oxfam America: As a global organizer of emergency assistance programs, Oxfam is provided much-needed assistance to the people of Haiti. See what they are doing and how you can help.
DeepPeep: Still in Beta, this site helps you discover the entry points to content in Deep Web (aka Hidden Web) sites, including online databases and Web services.
New York Times: Owners of the New York Times may be about to charge for this site, so make the most of it while it is still free.
Great Leadership: Opinions and information on leadership and leadership development from Dan McCarthy.