Have you ever wondered how GoSquared started? Few of you know that the company actually started 6 years ago, albeit in a very different form.

In February our CEO, James Gill, spoke at Tomorrow’s Web; a meetup in London aimed at inspiring young people do to brilliant things with technology. James told the story of GoSquared and how we started, where we’re going. We thought we’d share that with you today.

Today we’re pleased to introduce Timeline – a dramatically improved way to see how the number of people on your site has varied over the past 48 hours.

We felt Timeline, along with the Traffic widget and Notifications contained 3 of the most important pieces of information you need in real-time, so they’re now the most prominent areas in the GoSquared Dashboard interface.

Prioritisation

Glance to the top left of Dashboard and you’ll always have “Traffic” showing the total visitors online number and dial – so you can immediately see how many people are online, and compare this to your 7 day max.

Top centre we have the new “Timeline“, showing you your traffic for the past 24 hours, overlaid on the previous 24 hours before that.

In the top right corner “Notifications” shows you a list of all recent traffic spikes and dips, giving you quick and easy access to in depth snapshot reports about the state of your site at that time.

Works everywhere

As with everything in GoSquared, the latest improvement to Dashboard work on all devices, so even if you’re out in the field on your iPhone you can still see everything you need about your site in real-time.

Let us know your thoughts

We hope you’ll love the latest improvements to Dashboard, and we have a lot more in the labs that we just can’t wait to start rolling out to you.

Let us know your thoughts on the new Timeline via Twitter – we’re @GoSquared, or via email.

Coupons on Interest is a rather cool service that was developed in under 48 hours at our hackathon, London Real-Time. It allows e-commerce sites to give potential customers a discount on their products, based on the interest of a web page.

Using the GoSquared API, Coupons on Interest checks the concurrent number of visitors to a product page. Once a pre-defined threshold has been reached (for example 50 visitors) the site owner is sent an SMS (using Twilio) prompting them to offer a mass discount code to page viewers. When activated visitors get a push notification in their browser (using Pusher) with discount coupon details.

Coupons on Interest capitalises on the human fear of missing out, in this case missing out on a deal. You have to be quick to use and apply your discount code before it vanishes. It offers instant gratification and in some respect feels earned. A fantastic marketing technique.

Oras Al-Kubaisi created the service entirely by himself, at London Real-Time, as a way to allow sellers to create their own Groupon-esque sites without having to pay for expensive services. There’s no need to hire extra staff for support and sales and it drastically reduces the cost of monitoring.

The London Real-Time judges were so impressed with Coupons on Interest that it won “Best Frankenstein” hack and consequently $1,500 of Amazon Web Services credit.

In the future Oras would like to add the ability to send coupons based on keyword searches, system information, geographic location again powered by the GoSquared API. Additionally he would like to make it easier for you to share the coupon with your friends, family and social networks.

We’re very excited about this creative use of the GoSquared API and want to encourage more developers and entrepreneurs to build fantastic stuff with and around our tools and data.

Find out more information about the hack on the London Real-Time hacks blog.

The source code for Coupons on Interest is available to download at http://shloud.com/realtime-code.zip

Check out a deployed and working version of the app here.

Presenting GoSocial: a set of 41 (and counting) social networks, at the ultra-handy sizes of 16px and 32px. They’re provided in PNG, ready to instantly drop in to your site, but we went a step further: if you need to customise or create any more icons, we gave you a rainbow of blank slates to start from, along with the PSD file that was used to make these icons. Nice, huh?

Icons included:
Anchor CMS, AIM, Apple, Bebo, Blogger, Cloud, Delicious, DeviantArt, Digg, Dribbble, Dropbox, Email, Facebook, Formspring, Forrst, Github, Google, GoSquared, Grooveshark, Last.fm, LinkedIn, lkd.to, MySpace, Path, PayPal, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, RSS, Skype, SoundCloud, Spotify, Steam, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, Yahoo!, and Youtube.

Blank slates are provided in black, blue, green, grey, orange, pink, purple, red, white, and yellow. The PSD is also bundled for your convenience.

Licensing
You’re free to do what you wish with these icons (they’re licensed under the ☺ licence), but if you sign up for a free GoSquared trial, we’ll love you forever.

New to GoSquared?
We do realtime analytics. You should check us out; go sign up for an account here.

Suggestions, questions, queries?
We’d love to hear what you think of GoSocial. Either fire me or GoSquared a message on Twitter, and we’ll do our best to get back to you. Scout honour.

Download GoSocial now!

We’ve just introduced Layouts – a dramatically better way to arrange your GoSquared Dashboard to suit your needs.

A layout for every member of the team.

Whether you’re the CEO, a member of the sales team, a designer, or on customer support, it’s likely you’ll need access to your analytics. But you don’t necessarily need the same information. You can now customise and save your GoSquared Dashboard to suit you – prioritising what matters most and hiding anything you don’t need.

Saved layouts.

Clicking the new “Layouts” tab in the GoSquared menu bar will bring a drop down menu that will allow you to select which of your saved layouts you’d like to view, as well as giving you the option to create a new one.

Editable layouts.

“Edit” lets you edit your current layout and customise it exactly as you wish. Just drag out the widgets you need from the recessed widget area. Hide any widgets from the Dashboard by dragging them back in to the recessed widget area.

We have some great new widgets in the works that’ll help you get the most out of your site and GoSquared.

Layouts will play a key part in streamlining your workflow and enabling you to focus on what matters and cut out the clutter.

Don’t have a GoSquared account? Watch your traffic unfold right now – sign up for the 14 day free trial.

137 developers, 48 hours, 27 hacks, 100L of Orange Juice, 150L of alcohol, 70 large pizzas, 300 croissants, 150 burgers, 200 sausages, 300 Kraft slices, 400 bread buns, 800 cans of Coke, 600 sandwiches and an unlimited amount of coffee from Pret A Manger. These are just some of the select figures from London Real-Time, the weekend long hackathon that GoSquared ran, along with support from Twilio, Pusher, Geckoboard and RabbitMQ.

We can’t do the event justice in a mere blog post, so here’s a wrap up of all of the daily wrap up videos (produced by Olly Newport of Keyone Productions), the blog posts and general media coverage of London Real-Time.

London Real-Time Daily Video Updates

Olly Newport, from Keyone Productions, worked incredibly hard over the weekend to bring daily updates of the previous day’s events at the hackathon. He essentially worked for 72 hours straight, continuously shooting and editing footage, to create three masterpieces which capture the emotion and atmosphere of the weekend perfectly.

Outriders: BBC Radio 5 Live

Jamillah Knowles from BBC Radio 5 Live’s “Outriders” captured the exhaustion of our attendees and organisers at the end of London Real-Time, after the demo afternoon on Sunday. She pieced together a 10 minute documentary into the event and delved into what made it so special.

The Next Web

Jamillah, in her capacity as Editor for The Next Web UK, also wrote two articles covering the event; both before and after the competition started.

"London Real-time hack weekend gets going to inspire new projects on the fly" on The Next Web.

"London Real-time hack event ends with exhausted and innovative winners" on The Next Web.

PostDesk

PostDesk were our official media partners for London Real-Time. Sam England, Founder and Editor, attended for the full weekend; capturing interviews with attendees and organisers, as well as working closely with Keyone Productions to produce some awesome video coverage.

PostDesk's coverage of London Real-Time

The Kernel

Milo Yiannopoulos, from The Kernel, attended London Real-Time as one of our guest judges (and chief burger flipper). He captured the ‘festival’ atmosphere of the event in his rather glowing report.

"An Orgiastic Festival of Social Awkwardness" on The Kernel

If you’ve signed in to your GoSquared account in the last few days you will have noticed some major changes to GoSquared.

Back in February, we celebrated our 6th birthday by releasing the entirely new GoSquared Dashboard into beta for all premium members of GoSquared.

All your sites in one place.

Now when you sign in to GoSquared, instead of getting a list of plans, or viewing your personal details, you get a beautiful overview of all sites in your GoSquared account. Easily see which sites are owned by you and which have been shared with you by other team members.

You can now see how many people are on each of your sites right from home. Click the settings cog icon to change settings for any of your sites – edit its name and URL, change your notification settings, share the site with other team members, and more.

Easier access for developers.

Head over to the “Developer” tab to see your API key and Site Tokens for all of your sites in one easy to read screen.

Year plans.

We’ve always been striving to offer you the best real-time analytics at the very best prices. Until now, we’ve offered monthly plans that can be upgraded, downgraded, or cancelled at any time. In order to drive down the cost for you even further, we’re now offering yearly plans that take the equivalent monthly price down by almost 20%. If you downgrade or upgrade within a year of signing up for a year plan, we’ll credit your account for the remaining time so you won’t lose out.

GBP pricing.

Time and time again, we’ve had people in the UK asking us why all our pricing has been in USD. The simple reason has, until now, been that we didn’t have time to implement it. We decided to make time, and now GoSquared is available on monthly and yearly plans in both USD and GBP. This also makes invoicing and accounting much better for UK businesses using us. If you’d like to switch over to GBP pricing (if you’re a UK customer paying us in USD) please get in touch with our billing team.

Dramatically better billing system, with invoicing.

You can now grab your invoices in a matter of seconds by going to “My Account” and downloading any that you want as PDFs. We’ll also email you invoices every month.

Works everywhere.

People use GoSquared on their desktops, and on the go on their phones, and on their iPads. People even use GoSquared on TVs so the whole team can see what’s going on. That’s why we designed Dashboard to work on almost any device, scaling up and down dynamically depending on screen size and browser capabilities. We designed the new Home of GoSquared to work just as well on your phone as it does on your iMac. Try signing in and scaling up and down your browser window – we think you’ll love it.

Usage stats.

Another little feature – you can now see how many pagviews you’ve used in your current billing cycle. So you can now very quickly understand when you’re going to go over your limit for the given billing cycle, making it easier to avoid hitting your limit and losing any traffic data.

@GoSquaredStatus

Follow @GoSquaredStatus for updates on GoSquared uptime and any issues that you may be experiencing. We’ve also included the latest GoSquared Status within Home so every time you sign in you’ll immediately have an answer if anything’s not working as you expect.

The GoSquared team is a little on the thin side this morning. Those of us who have turned up look completely and utterly burnt out; dead almost. This past weekend we played host to 137 developers, who created 27 fantastically awesome hacks, all at our very own hackathon; London Real-Time.

A little under two months ago we embarked on the spectacularly foolish, but equally brilliant, idea to organise and run our very own hackathon; along with the help of a few close friends in the form of realtime startups. The result was phenominal.

On Friday 13th April at 6pm, a day traditionally believed to be cursed and unlucky, we threw open the doors of White Bear Yard and kicked things off in style. Attendees were greeting by a smiling team, signed in and then toured around the facilities. Then open bar was flowing with beer, gin, whisky, coke, etc and the GoSquared BBQ was on full blast.

Opening talks were given by GoSquared, Pusher, Twilio, Geckoboard and RabbitMQ. The hackers were introduced to the available APIs with a brief explanation of what was on offer; before delving into some serious coding.

On Saturday and Sunday developers spent their time eating amazing food, hacking together awesome apps and putting themselves through sleep deprevation experiments. Everyone worked incredibly hard to have something presentable for the Sunday afternoon judging.

Photo: Olly Newport

Representatives of our API partners were joined by Greg Young, from Passion Capital, and Milo Yiannopoulos, Editor of The Kernel, to judge the best real-time apps.

Prizes were awarded to GoCubed (GoSquared), Tring Tring (Twilio), Shout JS (Pusher), Many Pie Charts (Geckoboard), YouChoose (RabbitMQ) and Coupon Interest (Frankenstein). Each API prize winner was awarded a tablet, of some variety. The winner of the Best Frankenstein app was awarded $1,500 in AWS credit.

All of the hacks have been uploaded to http://hacks.londonrealtime.co.uk – Videos are currently being polished and finished off by Olly Newport, from Keyone Productions, and will be slowly added. Keep your eyes peeled over the coming days for updates.

Although the entire GoSquared team is completely knackered from the event, we’re already plotting and planning a second London Real-Time. Please subscibe to updates at http://londonrealtime.co.uk.

Finally we’d like to thank all of the volunteers, unsung heroes and organisers for London Real-Time. You were fantastic, without you we couldn’t have pulled off such a great event!

You can read more glowing reviews and posts about the weekend’s event here:

PostDesk, Friday: – http://postdesk.com/london-realtime-coverage-day-1

The Next Web, Friday: – http://thenextweb.com/uk/2012/04/14/london-real-time-hack-weekend-gets-going-to-inspire-new-projects-on-the-fly/

The Next Web, Sunday: – http://thenextweb.com/uk/2012/04/15/london-real-time-hack-event-ends-with-exhausted-and-innovative-winners/

The Kernel, Full wrap up: – http://www.kernelmag.com/scene/1844/an-orgiastic-festival-of-social-awkwardness/

Magnate, Live feed: – http://www.magnatemag.com/2012/04/live-coverage-london-realtime/

Magnate, Full wrap up: – http://www.magnatemag.com/2012/04/whats-not-wrong-with-the-london-startup-scene/

6 years ago, in a garden shed, GoSquared was founded by three 14 year olds. Since then James, Geoff and JT have gone from strength to strength, assembling a great team and building an awesome real-time web analytics service.

Young Rewired State is a week long hackathon for under 18s in the UK. The aim is to get young people to learn how to code, develop their skills, teach other, learn from experienced mentors and create brilliant things with open data.

The initiative is run by Emma Mulqueeny, a special tech advisor to the Mayor of London, and a steering group who oversee the entire project. Young Rewired State is open to anyone in the UK, under the age of 18, whether they can code or just have an interest in technology.

Having started from such a young age too, GoSquared is incredibly excited to announce support and sponsorship for Young Rewired State 2012. Not only will we be providing financial support to the project, many of our team will be on hand throughout the week as mentors.

Young Rewired State still has a long way to go with fundraising and they’re seeking donations from individuals, as well as startups and big corporations. If you can spare as little as £10 to support a fantastic cause please donate to ensure that this event can go ahead – http://www.peoplefund.it/young-rewired-state/

GoSquared is proud to help support the next generation of coders.

We’ve spoken about the APIs. We’ve spoken about the food and drink. We’ve spoken about the location. One thing we haven’t spoken about is the prizes that we’re giving out at London Real-Time.

Each API partner is donating a prize for the best hack that uses their service. GoSquared, Pusher, Geckoboard and RabbitMQ have all promised new retina iPads for the best hack with their APIs; Twilio have yet to confirm what their prize is, but we have a good feeling that it’ll be the same.

What if you’d like to use more than one partner API in your hack though? Why not go all out and use ALL THE APIs in one app?

The Best Frankenstein Hack is an award / prize that will be given to the best result we see, combining the most partner APIs. Our friends at Amazon have kindly agreed to give the winner of The Best Frankenstein Hack $1,500 in Amazon Web Services credit. A prize worth seriously competing for.

Our event is very relaxed and the only rules we have are that whatever you show off at the Sunday demo afternoon must be based around at least one of our partner APIs AND must have originated during the hackathon. Please no cheating and working on hacks weeks before the event, that’s just not cricket.

We hope to see you all there and as an extra incentive the first 50 people to use the promo code “GoSquaredLovesDevs” at http://londonrealtime.co.uk get free entry to the event!