Data Drives Bizo

I asked Bizo's Director of Engineering, Donnie Flood, to write a post about the technology behind the Bizo ad targeting platform. He obliged and here it is:

Bizo's technology is built around three things: data, data and data.

More specifically, we make it easy to collect, classify, target, analyze, and report on bizographic data. Whether creating drop-dead simple integration code for our publishers to gain insight into their traffic or providing deep bizographic analysis of an advertiser's campaign, the engineering team eats, drinks and sleeps data.

The reason we love data so much is because it allows us to make users happy by showing them ads that are relevant. We believe happy users are the secret to success in the ad industry. Here's why: happy users (e.g. users seeing relevant ads) lead to better performing ads. Then the rest of the equation falls into place: happy users = happy advertisers = happy publishers.

As a result, Bizo's technology is very much a cyclical process. We take in raw data that we classify into targetable bizographics (we'll go deeper on bizographics in a future blog post.). We target advertising at these bizographics and take in raw data about ad performance which we use to tune our classifiers. And the cycle continues: Raw data begets targetable bizographics begets ad performance data begets better classifiers begets better targetatble bizographics and so on.

In terms of technologies that we employ at Bizo, we take pride in being on the industry's bleeding edge. Our entire infrastructure runs atop the AWS Cloud and uses nearly every web service. We code mostly in Java but have bits of Scala, Ruby, Bash and Perl. Like many organizations that make use of huge amounts of data, Hadoop is a major aspect of our data processing along with the recent addition of Hive for our data warehousing needs. Finally, GWT — or the Google Web Toolkit — is a recent adoption that we are seriously investing in for the future.

Our technology team relishes being ahead of the curve on new trends and we're also passionate about passing on what we learn. Most of the technical "aha" moments we share on our technical blog (dev.bizo.com). Follow us there to learn more.