A former employee of mobile analytics maven App Annie has launched his own analytics platform, Whally, that's designed to identify and track 'whales' -- people who spend significant amounts of time and money playing mobile games.

This is notable for at least two reasons: One, chasing and capturing 'whale' players is an ethically complex issue. Two, it's surprising that nobody's tried to do something like this yet, though it's also worth noting that Whally currently only tracks publicly-available playtime and scoring data -- not spending habits.

An analyst consulted by VentureBeat believes Whally is one of the first mobile analytics platforms to try and pinpoint 'whales' by tracking the publicly-posted scores (on Game Center and social media sites) of over 190,000 iOS games.

While the platform launches publicly today, Whally was founded in France earlier this year and recently raised an undisclosed sum of investment during a seed funding round led by serial mobile game investor London Venture Partners.