Our comScore Gearing Up To Kick Ass And Take Names!

I just heard the former AOL’s Senior Vice President of Global Products, Eric Bosco who had left AOL two month ago, just joined comScore. Those of you my non-techi readers or not familiar with our comScore, they are a marketing research Reston, VA based company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet’s largest businesses.

I met Eric a few times during the networking events. So, I don’t personally know him, but I think he is a very nice guy and a smart engineer – nice to have him find a good gig in the DC area again! Eric will be comScore’s Chief Product Officer which is a newly created position. He will be overseeing their global product development efforts.

He was with AOL for over 13 years and he really kicked ass while with them. He created the AOL Instant Messaging. He wrote most of the AIM backend software. He was also responsible for managing all of AOL’s community and communications products including AIM, Email, Chat, Blogs, Wireless and Telephony as VP, Community and Communications Engineering.

As for his new position, I wish him luck. He needs a lot of that. He is up against many tough competition including GOOGLE!

The way Google Trends, Compete, Hitwise, Alexa, and Quantcast who recently raised about $27 m from Cisco, going and rolling out new products, I hope Eric’s move doesn’t turn out to be a move from one sinking boat to another one.

Based on my experience with Google Trends, I think Google is the only one in the space with the power to offer truly accurate traffic information across a large portion of the web. I have a feeling Google will eat all their competitors in this market over the long run. They have a proper R&D division and their task is to scour the literatures to find something interesting to implement or used those ideas to invent new ones. Neither comScore nor others doing any of those. So, if anyone at comScore reading this, I hope they are taking notes. Unlike others, Google Trends triangulates actual value by combining traffic, search, and discussions, blogs and news data which to me seems far more important than an often inaccurate hit count. Further, with redistribution of content through feeds and embeds, the importance of hits to a given property is arguably diminishing. Google would be selling itself short to simply aggregate analytics data.

Another product Eric is up against is Mozilla’s opt-in traffic monitor to its Firefox web-browser. With an estimated 20% of the web browser market, the data would be very significant even if only a small fraction of Firefox users choose to participate. Has anyone tried it out yet?

Shit! Why do I feel I just promoted Google’s product as supposed to our local Washington company, comScore? I guess, because, I have no hands on experience with comScore’s. I have been only reading and hearing about their products from others who have had hands on with it.

Anyway, I personally wish Eric luck. I hope he makes our comScore to come out the winner in Web analytics space