On the basis of our focus on user-friendliness TraceWorks has acquired help from Snitker & Co. to engage in collaboration about Headlight and the individual user. Through different workshops we will try to find out exactly how we can make Headlight even better and more intuitive for our different users.

The danger in any development phase is, of course, to develop solutions which you find useful or cool yourself; thereby making decisions center around “what we want” rather than “what users need”.

In order to get a clear picture of actual user-needs together with Snitker & Co. we have used Personas which has proven to be very useful. In short, ‘Personas’ are tangible, but fictitious descriptions of the users and their actions, which you setup to fully understand demands, needs and interactions with Headlight.

As you can see this method involves a lot of post-it’s.

This weekend we experienced a small problem on one of our hard working data crunching servers. Unfortunately this resulted in delayed data.

The problem has been fixed and all the queued up data is being processed right now. We do however expect caching up will take several hours, before we are back at showing live data.

We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by this.

Update: We expect getting up to speed will take the remainder of today. During today Headlight might run a bit slow as a lot of data is coming in.

We’re delighted to announce that TraceWorks has been nominated for The Innovation Award 2008 presented by The Foundation of e-Commerce.

This year the Foundation of e-Commerce (e-Handelsfonden) brings “the personalized net” and the customer into focus. And furthermore; what are the next steps of e-commerce?

We are of course thrilled that others also regard us as innovative – and especially in connection with our focus on next-level marketing solutions through ease-of-use.

As The Innovation Award is given out for “a creative way to use the online-channel to create value or future value” it’s nice to be recognized as one of the top dogs by the industry. In particular as we’ll focus even more on different values for different customers in the future – and always with innovative systems built with the user’s understanding in mind.

The award takes place on the 27th of March. Fingers crossed.

Today between 1pm GMT and 6pm GMT, some customers experienced delays in click, conversion and page view data. This was due to a little problem in our server farm, which was fixed at 6pm GMT. Because of the delay, our servers are working very hard to catch up, and this can cause longer load times in when using Headlight reporting interface.

The next upload of fixes and features will happen this friday (11. january 2008) at 7 am GMT. During this timespan Headlight will be offline, and closed for login. Headlight will be back online when we finish maintenance work at 7.30 am GMT.

– UPDATE 7.14 am GMT –
Upload complete. You can now login to Headlight again.

We are proud to present to you two new features for adserving:

A lot of people have asked us for jpg-support; it’s now here!

Also testing has become better: We have changed the logic a bit so you will be able to start testing your banner campaigns immediately regardless of the start date you’ve entered in Headlight. We are convinced this will make your adserving life a lot easier.

Many - especially Danes - would argue that Denmark’s not the cheeriest of places this time of year. And, consequently, we need to focus almost entirely on indoor activities.

So, with distinct lack of vitamin D, but eagerness to keep improving TraceWorks and especially Headlight, we’ve jump-started 2008 with the hiring of yet another super traceworker.

As our new DBA (database administrator) Andrés will be part of what we expect to be a very significant year in the history of TraceWorks. So, welcome Andrés, and - to all friends, customers and affiliates - a great 2008!

Tomorrow morning (4th of January 2008) at 7 am GMT, Headlight reporting interface will be closed for login due to maintenance work.

This will not affect data quality or tracking in any way, and we expect the interface to be online again at 7.30 am GMT.

– UPDATE 7.30 –
Update complete. Headlight is back online.