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Monday, March 9, 2009, 10:27am – Posted in the San Antonio Business Journal Online edition

Pear Analytics, a marketing performance consulting firm, took first prize at the Innotech Beta Summit for its Web site analyzer tool.

Held last week, InnoTech San Antonio is a business and technology innovation conference and exposition that creates an environment where education, innovation, peer-to-peer networking and the latest technology and business solutions are on display for IT professionals.

New to InnoTech San Antonio this year, the beta summit was a sneak peek into the future of technology. The format included six eight-minute demonstrations of new products and/or technologies from some of the Alamo City’s most promising companies.

San Antonio-based Pear Analytics’ Web site analyzer tool is a free online utility that allows anyone to analyze their Web site for searchability on Goolgle and other search engines. In about 20 seconds, the tool will return a score from 0 to 100. It also provides a full explanation of what each score means, as well as extensive details on how to improve those scores.

“We wanted to create a do-it-yourself SEO tutorial for small and medium-sized businesses who struggle with being found on search engines,” says Ryan Kelly, founder and CEO of Pear Analytics, a company he started just under a year ago.

The other unique aspect of the tool is its portability, Kelly says. Pear wanted to allow anyone to grab the analyzer “widget” and place it on their Web site with one line of script code. Anytime the algorithm or application itself is changed, all of the external widgets are automatically updated.

In addtion to Pear Analytics the following local companies also presented at the beta summit: Blellow, Gizaplex, Impact Advanced Concepts, IncSpring, Mosso|The Rackspace Cloud.

“When the results came in, I was shocked. I knew we had a good product, but the competition was fierce,” Kelly says.

Each presentation was followed by a two-minute verbal grilling from a panel of judges including venture capital investors from Houston’s DFJ Mercury, which currently carries a $50 million portfolio.

“All of the presentations were outstanding,” says Blair Garrou, managing director for DFJ Mercury. “The reason we chose Pear Analytics as the winner was because of how they took a seemingly technical and complicated process of analyzing the searchability of a Web site and put it into a non-technical, easy to understand tutorial. Because of that, the market for this application has immense potential.”

It took Kelly and his team about six months to develop the algorithm for scoring, as well as to design, develop and test the application. He bootstrapped the development by investing a portion of the firm’s revenue from other client work.

One of the other tools Pear is currently building is a marketing budget analyzer, which will aid marketing managers in analyzing the efficiency of their efforts by individual sales funnels.

The public can test the Web site analyzer for free at http://analyzers.pearanalytics.com .