V-Tracker provides visiting avatar scanners, avatar event sensors (touch, pay, URL
navigation), and public channel avatar attached chat loggers. All scanners,
sensors, and loggers that have a similar stategic purpose or goal are grouped together by the Analyst into Campaigns. Campaigns can be utilized for long or short
term projects. An example of a long term campaign could be monitoring all
avatar traffic within a few Sim Regions for several months, to then perform an analysis
of which features within the Sim Regions were most popular.
A short term campaign
could be to monitor the traffic, click though rate, and public chat for a product
launch lasting just a few days.
No longer must you guess when trying to determine who's coming to your space, what
they are doing, and when were they doing it. Powerful graphics based reporting
allows you to quickly focus on areas of interest and gain immediate understanding
into what's really going on at your site.
V-Tracker is built on a scalable Microsoft based backend, and a high performance
C# ASP.NET based web application used for administration, reporting, and analysis.
V-Tracker utilizes the most recent advances in high performance service oriented
architecture offering a near-vertical scaling path. The final data repository
is an SQL Server 2005 relational database, so the data can be exported easily into
a variety of formats, using automation as appropriate.
V-Tracker is available today in version
2.0. It has been through many 'trials-by-fire' and was used for the launch
of Coldwell Banker Realestate Corporation into Second Life. The technology has been further refined and is easy to use, quick to set up, stable, and proven.
When your brand is at stake, don't be someone else's test subject, use a system
that's tried and tested like V-Tracker.
There are three portions of the V-Tracker platform: In-world systems, web service/data
storage, and web analysis/admin tool.
The In-world systems are writen in Linden Scripting Language (LSL) and utilizes
lessons learned and libraries developed over 18 months. The scanners, sensors,
and loggers all come in 2 file pairs. The first file is the locked down script,
the second is an XML notecard that the analyst can edit and thereby configure the
metric capture device themselves.
Most other LSL based sensors are limited to 16 avatars per sensor sweep, with avatars
above this number ignored. Using a variety of advanced techniques, a single
high-volume scanner can handle a full sim region worth of avatars per scan. (60+
avatars). Most installations can do with 16 avatar limit scanners, but clubs
and special events will need the high-volume model.
Code4Software advises against unattended or remote logging of chat, even on your
own land.
Only attended public channel chat logging is supported by V-Tracker and Code4Software.
A chat logger entails attaching the logger to an avatar, who will be referred to as
the recording agent. Each agent who records chat has a unique identifier and
all chat recorded by them can be searched by this identifier and date range. This makes quality control for customer service oriented environments much simpler, as
searches can be performed against the database instead of having to wade through
chat .txt log files.
In order to more easily extract meaningful information from the raw collected passive
sensor data, single minute scan records are rolled-up into visit records during a data warehousing routine that runs on a scheduled basis. This datawarehousing
step opens the door to many more reporting options and speeds up processing and
response time.
All data stored by V-Tracker is writen to a relational database with normalized
data architecture. This has been performance tuned and only allows data access through precompiled Stored Procedures, which increases performance significantly
and provides a built-in scalability route. V-Tracker is no script/file based
kludge, but rather a full-blown enterprise capable relational SQL database system,
with all the reporting and data export/connectivity options that it provides.
Just drop these two files into your collection object (plant, chair, lamp,
Etc.) and you're in business.
