Archive for the ‘UGC’ Category

Techmeme’s Human Eye for the Straight Algo

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Gabe Rivera of Techmeme fame has sparked a lively debate as he announced he had hired an editor to improve interestingness, reactivity and relevance of his news aggregation website (see VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and ReadWriteWeb). Rivera’s plight echoes Netflix’s challenges at boosting its movie recommendation engine, as algorithmic improvements gradually near ...

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 ...

Buy.ology’s Smart Tips for Online Marketing and Retail

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Buy.ology is a captivating read that presents Martin Lindstrom’s foray into neuromarketing – using neuroscience experiments, such as MRI scans, to determine what drives our consumer and shopping habits. Some results are quite thought provoking, such as the fact that consumer warnings on cigarette packs seem to not only fail ...

Invest in Recommendation, Search, and User-Generated Content to Boost Retail Website

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

The State of Retailing Online report for 2008 is an in-depth look at the top online retailers’ priorities and opportunities to strengthen and differentiate their websites. According to Sucharita Mulpuru, Senior Retail Analyst from Forrester Research, who wrote the report, “online retailers are finding that their best investment efforts are ...