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Winning clients is often a complex process. It all starts with lead generation and qualification. This is – from own experience – often a cumbersome process.

Instead of talking to the right contact person quite often the lead database produces unqualified connections, people simply not interested and other useless contacts.

Our partner MatchCode focuses on exactly this: With their Precision Profiling Method they are able to identify the correct contact person faster.

Once identified Squirro offers a digital research assistant to further enhance the profile information of your contact. Your sales team will know to whom they talk and about what they need to talk.

We invite you to join us this coming Wednesday April 18, 2012 to our event “Successful Lead Generation”. You’ll learn how the combination of MatchCode and Squirro will provide true value for your future lead generation campaigns.

Our special guest at the event is the renowned profiler Dr. Thomas Müller. He is one of Europe’s leading crime psychologists and won his fame with his work as profiler in some of Europe’s most remarkable serial murder investigations. He will talk about human behavior and how it can be decoded.

For our new project Squirro we are starting our jet engines again. So at the end of last year we were again looking for great software developers to join our team. For that we did a pitch at the December Webtuesday in the hope of attracting one or or two good people. And indeed a few days later Patrick approached us and by the next Webtuesday he had already joined our team.

He had not written much Python before and still he was productive from the second day on. In this first weeks since he started, Patrick wrote several web services from scratch (I think the average is one per week). And he has just taken over management of our whole live infrastructure, using good old Puppet.

Patrick and me actually met briefly back in 2003 when he won the software development showcase event at the WorldSkills in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Outside of work he’s an active OpenStreetmap mapper and a pirate.

Thanks for your work Patrick!

A system is only as valuable as far as it integrates with others. I came across the fact that many of our dear users actually don’t know what Memonic can do for them in addition to the core web platform. This post is dedicated to shed some light on our “Tools” section and all the systems we do seamlessly integrate with.

Maybe still best known is the web clipper. I’d go so far and say it’s the most powerful feature of Memonic – and the best web clipper available in the world. It’s never been easier to catch information according to your specific needs. We have several extensions for various browsers – and do even support the iPad browser. Features may vary among browser extensions, which is mainly due to missing support of some techniques in certain browsers. If you haven’t had it installed before – you definitely missed something.

Secondly, we also do offer clients with full offline support for all major plattforms. We do support Windows and Mac on the desktop side, as well as the iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) and Android on the mobile side. Unfortunately, the framework we use to code our native clients does not support Windows Phone 7 yet – though we get many requests.

Creating notes by email is very easy. By sending an email to post@memonic.com (using the email address you registered with as sender), the subject will be the memo’s title and the email body will become the memo’s content. Attachements do work as well!

The Memonic save button can be integrated into any website, thus enabling you visitors to save any piece of your website straight into the visitor’s Memonic collection. Just a pity Wikipedia did not integrate it yet ;-)

The Memonic badge is a tiny little iFrame that you can add to any website, displaying a predefined folder of your collection. It’s an easy way to give insights into a particular set of memos which is being updated automatically.

The Memonic WordPress plugin will give you direct access to your Memonic collection within your WordPress installation. Research for a blog post has never been easier and more efficient! Additionally, you can enable the Memonic save button on your blog and even add the Memonic badge to display a particular folder of your collection to your blog – the plugin handles it all!

With Memonic for Facebook and Google Reader, you can simply save any Facebook status or pic as well as any article in your Google Reader into your collection – with one click only!

Last but not least, the integration into Click.to enables you to save literally anything from your desktop computers into Memonic!

That’s quite a few tools for you! Make sure you try the ones you might find useful and let us know how you like them!

At Memonic we rely on MySQL for most of our data storage. In any relational database system the correct creation of indices is important, otherwise queries will be inefficient and slow. The problem with that is, that the indices often are forgotten, especially when updating an existing query. As a tool to detect queries without proper indices MySQL offers the slow query log. All queries that take more than a certain time are logged there.

We host our platform in Amazon’s cloud. For database we rely on their on their Relational Database Service (RDS) service. As we don’t have root access to those machines we can’t just tail the slow log to see what’s up. Instead RDS optionally writes the slow log into a special system table. From there a query can be used to retrieve the data. See the Amazon RDS FAQ about how to configure the slow log on RDS.

For automated analysis of the slow logs we like to use mk-query-digest. This excellent utility groups all logged queries together by their general type and thus allows a big-picture overview. As an example take these three queries that may have been logged:

SELECT * FROM events WHERE user_id = 'foo';
SELECT * FROM data WHERE created_at >= '2011-12-13 10:12:00';
SELECT * FROM events WHERE user_id = 'bar';

These will be grouped together by mk-query-digest as just two queries:

SELECT * FROM events WHERE user_id = '?';
SELECT * FROM data WHERE created_at >= '?';

This is accompanied with how often each query type was executed, how long it took in total, etc. This is a great way to focus any optimization effort first on the queries that are actually used a lot.

Unfortunately mk-query-digest only works with the normal MySQL slow query log format and can’t access the proprietary table that Amazon RDS keeps. To work around this, we wrote the db2log.py script which we hereby release into the public domain.

It simply dumps the current contents of the RDS slow_log table in the same format that MySQL usually uses for their slow log file. This output can then be piped into mk-query-digest to generate a report.

We ended up doing just that in a daily cron job which sends a mail to our developers.

There is one line which needs further explanation: the filter. We filter out any slow log events that were triggered by either the bi or the memonic users. The former is used for asynchronous generation of some statistics and performance isn’t required for that. The latter we use for ad-hoc queries which we don’t need to optimize.

So there you have it: an automated mechanism to analyze slow MySQL queries. From time to time when deploying a new release a new slow query may pop up. But the next day we are informed about it and can fix the issue.

In business, you are well advised to keep an eye on your competitors. If you’re a Salesforce user, keeping track of your competitors’ activities is super easy – thanks to Memonic for Salesforce. In case you can’t believe it, here is the evidence: