Comments on: Komli’s iResearchPanel – Downloadable tool that records your browsing behavior

By: Amit Bagree

Amit Bagree — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:32:42 +0000

I’m would be apprehensive to be honest. I feel its a little too much invasion of privacy. Passing all my browsing history sounds scary. Plus how do you deal with security in such a service. With sites doing stupid things like passing your userid/password/sessionID in the URL itself, possibly giving complete access to my logged in session. We all know what you can do after that . Considering the information security industry being in its nascent stage even here in US, I’m not too positive on how advanced we are in India with online security. I’m not even sure if there are regulations and policies to protect users. All that being said I do see a different approach being tried to solve the problem. I just don’t see an easy way of having enough scale to have credible data. Wooing with free stuff can be one strategy … I won’t be wooed though …. tag it along as to a bigger service maybe?

@Nisha: I would be interested in that methodology, if you can give an update when its there.

By: Nisha

Nisha — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:56:34 +0000

Ashish, thanks for using ViziSense! I’m Nisha Menezes and I take care of marketing and corporate communications for Komli. I’d like to bring the following to your attention: 1. ViziSense presents audience and traffic estimates for thousands of websites accessed by the Indian audience. We believe these estimates are good, but certainly not perfect. However, we are constantly improving it and getting better with every passing month.
2. ViziSense runs a panel of more than 12,000 people who have given us explicit permission to anonymously track their browse behaviour online. They can easily uninstall this application from Windows at any time. We are not as accurate on sites that are out of the top 500 or 1,000 and plan to get better on those sites over time as we grow and improve our panel. Pluggd.in is not among the top 2000 sites in India, so it’s hard to be super accurate from a panel perspective. Clearly, the estimates for pluggd.in are marked as “low confidence”, if you’ve noticed. However, we encourage publishers to embed ViziSense tags into their websites to help us represent actual traffic stats.
3. Our panel recruitment is not fundamentally different from what any online research panel employs. Your post makes an unwarranted conclusion that this is the *only* way our panel is recruited. We sign up panel members through direct mailers, targeted ads and promotions, reaching out to a diverse cross section of India’s online population.
4. We are constantly listening to our customers, as it only helps us improve the product. Please feel free to contact us for further details at contact (at) vizisense dot com. You’re also encouraged to share your site logs with us.. we’d be happy to analyze reasons for discrepancies if any.
5. It might be of interest to you that we’re soon publishing the Vizisense Measurement Methodology on ViziSense.com.

By: Karan

Karan — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:06:08 +0000

All these networks have raised ugly money. How do they show the VCs that they are working? With toolbars?

By: Sameer

Sameer — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:07:54 +0000

Quite a fail whale if you ask me!..loooong time to go before they achieve any credibility..guess they are trying to own the stat market as well..so that they become defacto place for advertisers..