#Brussels

One of the surprise highlights of the day was Ian Thomas from Microsoft presenting a sneak peek of Microsoft Gatineau — their upcoming free web analytics tool designed to compete with Google Analytics. This was the worldwide first public demonstration of the beta version, and the fact that it happened here in Brussels (home of the privacy-concerned European Commission) rather than in Redmond or San Francisco says something about how seriously Microsoft was taking the European analytics community.

This week, the Web Analytics Association and OX2 just organised a Web Analytics Wednesday here in Brussels. It was the first time we had this event in the capital of Europe and it was a nice event IMHO. I wanted to thank again De Persgroep for hosting this event in their magnificent premises.

18 people showed up (I hope to increase this number for the next edition in a couple of months). As you know, the agenda included some presentations delivered by Michaël Notté, Julien Coquet and myself (I’ll publish another post with a copy of these later on. You can read the agenda here) and it was followed by a networking cocktail. The audience was mainly composed of practitioners, but we had also 1 consultant (beside us) and 2 vendors (WebTrends and ClickTracks).

This presentation was delivered by Thomas Dusart (Franchise & Marketing Director of Panos) and myself at the IAB NetCafé. The case is also cited in Avinash Kaushik’s book Web Analytics 2.0 (p.379) as an example of integrating online and offline measurement.

This thursday, I arrived from eMetrics at 8 am. I went to a have a little nap as I needed to prepare myself for 2 presentation. One that I was addressing at the CMS Congress and one at the IAB NetCafé as we had been winners (along with other 2 cases) of the Efficiency IAB Best Case of year 2006.