We love being inspired by other tech companies, and 2010 has been a great success! It’s so easy to forget how quickly the web evolves, but Perpetually comes to the rescue. Here’s our top 10 favorite redesigns from tech startups in 2010:

Foursquare goes mainstream:

Groupon simplifies:

So does Living Social:

Twitter:

Gowalla differentiates:

Carbonmade gets even prettier:

Hunch goes private:

GroupMe, still young, iterates quickly:

SeatGeek is all about the tickets:

And lets not forget The Startups That Facebook Bought (then shutdown):

Our friends at The Huffington Post published a great survey of news websites at midnight on election night (powered by Perpetually, of course!). Check it out!

This September I attended the xChange summit in lovely Monterrey, CA. If you haven’t heard of it, I can tell you that it’s UNIQUE! The magic is all in its structure: it encourages open conversations with undoubtedly the smartest people in the measurement world.

The topics covered are similar to events like Omniture and eMetrics, but the difference here is that you get to be a real part of the discussions. Dubbed huddles, these groups are small, with about 7-10 people. Each huddle generates great conversations because they don’t just present challenges facing their community, but also genuinely brainstorm about how to get past them.

The two huddles that I enjoyed  the most were  ”Predictive Analytics” led by Kim Weller (ESPN), and “Analytics Best Practices” led by Andrew Bakoni (HP). “Predictive Analytics” included an awesome discussion by Gary Angel from Semphonic about the increasing use of econometric data in models. Jing Suk’s team from Reuters spoke about their in-house Firefox extension. Knowing how hard it is to come by a good extension developer, I was impressed. The extension overlays analytics data on their live site, giving them real-time intelligence to anticipate what content will keep bringing them traffic.

In the “Analytics Best Practices” huddle, I was interested in Karl Reinhold (Nike) and his team’s nifty handling of complicated tag deployment. Incorrectly implemented tags are a common issue, and it’s too late to fix them once you find an empty or inaccurate report. From a build and deployment perspective, I liked the safety nets their team has in place for this.

This was my first time out the Bay Area. I’m glad I made the trek. If you can manage to get a ticket for this event next year, you should absolutely attend!

With the midterm election primaries all finished, Team Perpetually has started thinking about how we’re each going to vote in November.

For a while now we’ve been archiving the official public websites for candidates in our home states, and more races from around the country. Of course, Perpetually’s archiving engine is doing all the heavy lifting for us. But now it’s time to start digging through the data.

Our findings so far have been really encouraging. Enough so that we’ll be dedicating some resources over the coming weeks to opening up this information to the world. Politicians evolve through the election cycle, and it’s important information for voters to consider.

We’ve got nothing to announce just yet, but keep an eye on this space as we get closer to the election. And if you’re interested in helping us, please reach out to us via email: contact@perpetually.com. We’d love to talk with you!

Web pages often contain many small images and scripts that remain invisible until the user interacts with the page. To speed up browsing, the browser won’t download them until the user does something to necessitate it.

Until now, Perpetually has followed the same rule: Only archive the resources necessary to make the initial page render perfectly. But starting in today, our archiving engine now predicts user actions that will trigger additional downloads and archives that content as well. For example, an image or slideshow that appears when the mouse is over it will now simply work without customization. This improvement is what Perpetually is all about — perfectly capturing the page so that it can be fully used in the future.

Have you ever used the Annotations feature in Google Analytics? It’s really useful. With Annotations, you and your team attach notes to your analytics data indicating important events and changes over time. We’re a small team, and while we take careful notes on what we’re changing, I see that all too often important changes fall through the cracks. And it’s often only weeks or months later that we realize what we’ve forgotten. It’s why we use software like Git to automatically track and compare our software changes over time. It’s also why we use Perpetually.

Perpetually is automated annotations. Our team has stopped managing Annotations in Google Analytics. Instead, we let Perpetually capture perfect records of everything once a day. Now, when we see a change in our users’ behavior, or need to evaluate our outreach efforts, we look at our site’s evolution next to our Google Analytics data.

It’d be nice if everyone on the team took perfect notes, and Google’s Annotations makes it easy to do so. But nowadays we’ve lightened that burdon — Perpetually’s got us covered.

I know what you’re saying — What a sales pitch! Who’s he kidding? Well, yeah. This is our company blog, and we like shouting about our strengths and asking questions about our weaknesses. Oh, and did you know that we now let you pull in your Google Analytics directly into your Perpetually records? Remembering and explaining your performance is getting easier and easier.

A couple weeks back I went to Harvard Business School to see Romanos, who’s been interning with us since January, present Perpetually to his Managing Networked Businesses class. Everyone in the class had worked through the semester with a startup as part of a field study, and Romanos was asked (with two other classmates) to present what he’d learned about our nascent business.

Needless to say, Romanos hit it out of the park. It was great fun for me to see him on stage talking about the product and business we’ve all spent a year building. And it was great to listen to (and interrupt) questions from guests, students and professors. I always learn a lot from listening to how people respond to Perpetually — their questions reflect both what we’re excited about, and areas we fail to address properly.

I’ve known Romanos since Columbia, and when he offered to work with us for the semester we jumped at the opportunity. One of our core challenges at Perpetually is also one of our biggest strengths: we’re all tech nerds. Romanos was the first person to work with us who wasn’t a programmer. But he has an uncanny ability to understand and articulate technical ideas and problems. It’s an incredibly important ability for us, and it proved extremely valuable as he researched new markets, interviewed customers and tried out new outreach methods.

I’m sad to see Romanos’ semester end, but he certainly ended it in style. How could we possibly top him in the fall semester?