Monthly Archives
July Personalization Round Up
By Dan Darnell in Personalization on July 26, 2012
The Personalization Roundup is an ongoing blog series featuring the most evocative news, articles and blogs curated by Baynote each month highlighting the rapidly growing topic of web personalization. For this month’s roundup, we’ve combed the web to once again bring you the latest and greatest on the personalization revolution.
Emergent Ants
By Scott Brave in Onsite Search, Recommendations on July 24, 2012
Ants are pretty dumb creatures. Watch one, all by itself for a few minutes and you’ll quickly get the impression that it’s wandering around aimlessly. And you’d pretty much be right. Ant colonies on the other hand, are brilliant. There are few organisms on this planet as relentless and efficient in pursuit of their goals of discovering, transporting, and consuming resources. Just ask anyone here in California who’s had ... Read More »
Employee Spotlight: Joe Zusin
By Jen Burns in Company, Our Culture on July 19, 2012
When you think of a sales guy, you might picture the character Willy Loman, the main character in Death of a Salesman, right? Well, that’s not what comes to mind after meeting Joe Zusin. Usually one of the first in the office, Joe is successful in sales because he’s calm, cool, collected and tenacious. And by being an honest sales professional to prospects from the start, he helps ... Read More »
Why do Humans NEED Personalization?
By Scott Brave in Featured, Personalization on July 18, 2012
In my new whitepaper: “The Human Need for Personalization: Psychology, Technology and Science”. The paper defines the psychology, technology and science that underlie a shopper’s desire for a personalized ecommerce experience.
Revenue, Margin, Seasonality and the Problem of Choosing the Best Recommendations
By Robin Morris in A Word from the Engineers on July 17, 2012
On the back of my business card it says, “Baynote: personalized shopping experiences.” This can often seem very remote from what we in engineering work on day-to-day, where much time is spent in the technical guts of the products. So every now and again it’s good to think about the end goal that we’re working towards – providing services to our customers that allow them to personalize their websites ... Read More »
Machine Learning: Lessons from High School Algebra
By Scott Brave in Personalization, Recommendations on July 12, 2012
As I mentioned in the first part of this two part post, “Intelligence is the ability to generalize and learn useful patterns from data and/or experiences.” Another common mistake when trying to train machines against big data sets is what’s known as over-fitting. To explain this one, I need to take you back to high school algebra for a brief minute. ... Read More »
Machine Learning: The Omniscience vs. Intelligence Fallacy
By Scott Brave in Featured, Personalization, Recommendations on July 10, 2012
Misconceptions of machine learning can run fairly deep. People not only have unrealistic expectations of what a machine can automatically figure out, but truly impossible ones. I sometimes think of this as the omniscience vs. intelligence fallacy. Intelligence is the ability to generalize and learn useful patterns from data and/or experiences. This is what we humans do naturally every day. But intelligence requires data.
Your Own Personal “SuperComputer” Store
By Edlo in Personalization on July 5, 2012
Only a few short years ago, people were afraid to use their credit card on the internet. Now consumers shop avidly online, finding better deals and discovering new vendors. It’s no surprise that with the amount of commerce onsite, personalization has become critical to a successful online and in-store business.
The Cost of Getting it Wrong
By Marti Tedesco in Customer Experience, Personalization, Recommendations on July 3, 2012
Online retailers and ecommerce personalization vendors talk all the time about getting “it” – as in personalization – right. It’s rare that one hears a story about a retailer getting it wrong. Last week, Internet Retailer posted a story about how Urban Outfitters got into trouble with their customers by profiling them based on gender.