Archive for the ‘Personalization’ Category

Checking In at the Check Out Counter

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places and Yelp - among others - have popularized the concept of “checking in” at a particular location on a smartphone - basically broadcasting one’s location to friends, followers and/or business owners over a particular application or multiple social networks. Multiple variations on the theme exist, most ...

hulu Makes it Personal

Friday, May 14th, 2010

hulu has just rolled out a new release that introduces new (and welcome) levels of personalization to their service: personalized recommendations to help users discover new shows Ad Tailor - a “like” button for ads Finding shows on hulu was notoriously difficult - mostly parsing through an endless list with limited sorting options ...

Mobile Retail – Coming to any Store near You

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Forrester’s Sucharita Mulpuru (@smulpuru) has a new research report out with interesting findings about emerging trends in mobile and multi-channel retail. Overall, the report confirms that the mobile web is on the cusp of becoming a game-changer for both web and brick-and-mortar retailers. Smartphone users are becoming as likely to ...

Competing with Amazon in a Depressed Environment

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Amazon’s results this week were in sharp contrast with the overall health of the retail sector. As highlighted during the holiday seasons, Amazon ruthlessly grabbed market share in an overall down retail market and turned a respectable profit on its very solid execution. Amazon’s success builds on - a ...

Netflix’s Million Dollar Baby Only Expected the Day After Tomorrow?

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

For the second year, Netflix has awarded a $50K progress prize. The winning team – BellKor in BigChaos – improved on Netflix’s recommendation algorithm by 9.44%. Although the 10% improvement seems to be getting closer in absolute terms, the last stretch might prove elusive for a little while longer. Is ...

Music discovery services chart new paths for gift recommendations

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Pandora, Last.fm, and iLike have broadened the appeal of recommendation algorithms and social discovery and sharing. Despite a challenging – even hostile - business environment, passionate entrepreneurs and music lovers are bringing to market new ways to explore and discover new music. Mufin has gathered the most attention so ...

Why Invest in Personalization Now?

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Today’s statistics about ecommerce show the devastating impact of the financial crisis. Ecommerce websites have been hit hard and revenue growth has ground to a halt. Tim Walters at Forrester makes a compelling case for advancing personalization efforts in corporate and ecommerce websites, despite the current recession – and ...