RedMonk’s First Product: Developer Intelligence

“The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products.” – Mike Loukides, O’Reilly Radar

Since I launched RedMonk with Stephen in 2002 a constant refrain has been “we don’t do numbers”. We have always been mighty skeptical about hockey stick projections and questionable survey data. But over time we both came to realise it wasn’t numbers we had a problem with but the traditional approaches to gathering them.

Machine learning is key to real insights about user behaviour and desires. System logs are the great untapped resource. We don’t believe in firewalls to drive registration-based demographics. We do believe in the open web approach. We favour the NY Times approach rather than that of the WSJ. Value arises out of participation. Counting interactions is the charm.

So as Stephen and I started thinking about some changes to our business model – celebrating the developer, rather than being sheepish we didn’t have many end-user customers…. it seems natural to take our own advice.

Stephen went back to school to bone up on stats, and we hired CrowdFavorite to change RedMonk forever. RedMonk Analytics – Hello World. We now have a platform, a product we can sell, which dovetails perfectly with our grand plans to become the go to guys for Developer Relations advisory services.

Stephen does a super job of explaining more about RedMonk Analytics in

Introducing Project Arcturus, Part 1: The World’s First and Only Developer Intelligence Tool

and

Introducing Project Arcturus, Part 2: The Infrastructure Behind the Curtain

We don’t want to claim we have all the answers. But then that would not be the RedMonk way. But we do think RedMonk Analytics can add a huge amount of value to what we already do. And if it becomes the major driver of our business in the process…. well then great.

Arcturus is already changing the way I write. As most long term Monkchips readers know I kind of fell out of love with blogging for a while. It had been a treadmill. I am back enjoying blogging again and now Arcturus is another boost. I am certainly not saying I am only blogging to feed the data beast, but it has given me a new impetus to want to write great analysis that developers want to read. Because the database of developer intentions is exactly what we want to build, but first we need to attract them to redmonk.com.

Tim O’Reilly is a role model for me, and I am taking him at his word. Data is the new Intel Inside, and RedMonk wants to play. Please read Stephen’s posts, and of course let us know if you’d like a demo. Or perhaps you have a blog that the top developers read – if so we’d love to hear from you.