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Overstat: The easiest way to test your website?

overstatTesting, testing, testing — it’s one of the mantras among startups, but it can be tough to find the resources to make that happen when you’re a startup with relatively little capital and a tiny tech team. So a new company called Overstat is hoping to win itself a customer base by simplifying the testing process.

Overstat demonstrated its product on-stage this morning at the Launch conference in San Francisco. Optimizely has made headway in this market already, but Overstat offers an interface that looks impressively easy to use. During the demo, founder Matthew Cordasco brought up a heat map of the Mint.com welcome page.

“A moment ago we knew that 200,000 people had come to this web page, but we didn’t know [what] they were clicking on,” Cordasco said. “Now we’re beginning to get a clear picture of what they’re interested in.”

In about two minutes Overstat’s team saw that the Mint registration button wasn’t getting many clicks, so it created an alternate version of the page with a different image, then launched a test to compare the number of clicks received by the two images.

Overstat said it goes beyond testing a single page, with the ability to track a sales or registration “funnel” across multiple pages.

The conference judges said there seemed to be a lot of potential in the company — although they also had some reservations. Cordasco suggested that Overstat could be used by large and small companies alike, but the judges said larger companies will have more sophisticated needs and will want to build their own tools. And even though websites only need to add a snippet of JavaScript to their pages to make Overstat work, some companies might have reservations about adding yet another feature to their site that they don’t control.

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Do women play more games than men?

Women now play games more than men, according to a report by mobile app analytics provider Flurry. At least that’s true in the realm of mobile and mobile social games, where the likes of Zynga’s FarmVille and Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies are at the forefront.

More than half of all mobile and mobile social gamers — 53 percent, to be exact — are women, bucking the stereotype that gaming is typically a male-dominated form of entertainment, according to the report. Only 40 percent of “traditional” gamers are women, according to the report.

The report found that women social gamers were typically older than their male counterparts — as women outnumbered men in the 26 to 65 age range. Men barely outnumbered women in the 18 to 24 age range. Just about a third of all mobile and social gamers were also in that same age range — 18 to 24 — while about half of mobile and social gamers fell in the 26 to 44 age range.

A majority of mobile and social gamers also appear to come from middle-class origins and make between $50,000 and $80,000 yearly, according to the report. Mobile and social gamers typically earn 50 percent more than the average American and are twice as likely to have a college bachelor’s degree. The majority of mobile and social gamers — about 65 percent — are white, as well.

Flurry detected more than 250 million devices running Apple’s iPhone operating system and Google’s Android mobile operating system, and detects around 750,000 new activations across both operating systems each day, according to the report. Flurry tracks around 26 million unique users that play social games for an average of about 25 minutes each day.

[Photo: popculturegeek.com]

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Interactive TV has finally happened — just not on TVs

Comcast Xfinity iPad app[Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.]

Ever since Yahoo Connected TV launched at CES in 2009, there has been a steady stream of TV app platform launches, including Google TV, Samsung, Broadcom/Adobe, Boxee, Blu-ray players, MythTV, and even Microsoft Xbox. However, there haven’t been any breakout apps for Internet-connected TVs — so-called “smart TVs.”

And the dirty secret? The TV apps out there are rarely used. I know this first-hand: At Transpond, the social apps-developer I founded and sold to Webtrends last summer, we made a couple of connected-television apps for one of the major broadcast networks, and the apps had almost no traction.

So what happened? It’s pretty simple. TV apps are cumbersome and awkward to use. Using a remote control to navigate across a bunch of app features is slow and confusing. In the process, you annoy everyone else watching the TV. This is the reason that Apple is not supporting apps on the Apple TV, even though it is essentially an iPod Touch with an HDMI port instead of a touchscreen. Games are the only apps that people want to run on a big screen, and they usually want to run highly interactive, multiplayer games that are well beyond the capabilities of connected televisions. In addition, delivering TV apps required implementing a ragtag assortment of quirky APIs from players ranging from Yahoo Widgets to proprietary offerings from Blu-ray manufacturers.

Instead, people are using their smartphones, tablets, and notebook computers for all of the much-ballyhooed interactive TV scenarios. Who’s that actress on Entourage? Let’s look it up on IMDB. What’s that song at the beginning of Gossip Girl? Let’s Shazam it. What are people saying about this episode of Glee? Let’s search Twitter for #Glee. Even the onscreen guide, the one staple interactive unit that you’d expect to run on the TV screen, is moving to your palm, with apps such as the Comcast’s Xfinity Remote iPad app (show above) that lets viewers browse TV listings and even program their DVR.

There is an entire category of TV engagement apps emerging on mobile devices. ABC has launched iPad apps that can identify what TV show you are watching, using audio soundprinting technology from Nielsen that works like Shazam but for TV shows, and offer up options to interact with the show. GetClue lets viewers “check in” to TV shows and offers a recommendation service based on people’s expressed preferences.

The only popular connected-TV apps are the ones that let you select video and audio content on demand, such as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, and Pandora. Even these apps are now being replaced with a new generation of mobile devices that can transmit what they are playing onto television screens. Much like using the iOS Remote app to play iTunes music on a stereo with an AirPort Express, Apple’s AirPlay will stream video from any iOS device to a TV with an Apple TV set-top installed.

It is not a huge leap to assume that Google will iterate on its failed Google TV launch and make it so that Android devices can easily stream video to TVs. Vizio already announced at CES last month that their new tablets will be able to seamlessly hand video streams over to Vizio TVs. Even Intel got in the game at CES, and launched WiDi 2.0 which will enable mobile devices and notebooks to stream full 1080p HD video to any TV with a WiDi adapter.

With flat panels relatively commoditized, TV manufacturers attempted to differentiate with connected-TV features and 3D. However, the market has moved and the real differentiation is offering interactive features in the remote control. When the core differentiator for TVs becomes the controller you hold in your hand, Apple becomes a very scary competitor — and Google looks more like a friend. TV manufacturers should seriously consider bundling Android-based controllers that can run engagement apps and transfer streams to their large screens. It’s either that, or watch their customers change the channel once and for all.

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