ATG gets Personal with CleverSet

Resource type: News Article
Resource URL: http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7537

According to this new article, E-commerce solutions provider Art Technology Group announced plans to acquire recommendation service provider CleverSet for $10 million in cash. (Wow, CASH @_@) The acquisition aims to enhance ATG's existing personalization technology to create a more relevant online shopping experience, which will, in turn, increase conversion rates.

The CleverSet's technology is based on the theory of "the wisdom of the crowds" and it can obtains a more holistic understanding of what a consumer wants or may want. By incorporating this technology, E-commerce solutions can provide an automated system that takes the burden off the merchant and delivers the best product recommendation to their customers.

Referring to the Conneighton's reports, CleverSet customers have seen 20 percent to 50 percent lift in upsell, cross sell, and conversion rates. I think it is one of big reasons why ATG is going to acquire the CleverSet's technology.

John Lovett, senior analyst of site technologies and operations at JupiterResearch says, "My belief is that personalization will be best delivered not on a one-to-one basis, but more on a one-to-segment basis". Therefore, by leveraging the data of the individual and combining it with collective data, CleverSet can obtain a more holistic understanding of what a consumer wants or may want. I like his word "one-to-segment basis", it seem the personalization is more fine grained than before and close to the user's desire.

Autotags for music recommender systems

I found an interesting paper : "Automatic Generation of Social Tags for Music Recommendation"  that was presented at NIPS 2007.

This paper propose a method for predicting music social tags directly from music files. Using a set of boosted classifier, it map audio features onto social tags collected from Web. If there is a music DB with untagged or poorly tagged music files, this methods can make "autotags" for these music files and avoid the "cold-start problem" common in recommender system.