Recos, Cross/Up-Sell, Widgets & GlobalRoads

By Vivek | August 31st, 2007 at 03:24 pm ET         

GlobalRoads has hit just the right set of buzzwords as to what they deliver- “Enterprise 2.0 Sales Automation”. Lot’s of depth in the words and the product the small team of 10 is building out there for the past almost 2 years. Core concept behind GlobalRoads’s product is to drive personalized recommendations at consumer websites. Think BestBuy or Wirefly or 1800Flowers.com or Amazon. Yeah, similar direction taken by Aggregate Knowledge, Baynote and few more. But GlobalRoad’s comes with much more.

While most the startups are hitting the not so easy recommendation path, GlobalRoads does not only that, but also delivers better customization of orders, ability to offer dynamic bundling, add cross/up sells, and smart promotions and discounting to attract more visitors. That’s not only 3 times more than what other startups are offering, but also lot of number crunching delivered all via the On-Demand service.

As for the actual gains from deploying the system, customers will have easier reach to related products and for retailers, increased sales. If you have difficulty abstracting how the product would eventually look, imagine you are out there looking to buy a LCD TV on Bestbuy.com. While that decision in itself is tough given the myriad of options, you can end up wasting more time on searching the perfect TV stand for the smaller dimensions. GlobalRoads recommendations widgets will enable easier combination offers at the site for these situations, resulting in ease of shopping for you, and higher sales of high margin accessories and parts for the retailer.

Currently the GlobalRoads program is in private beta with few retails customers signed up for the service. The service will be free for retail customers to signup and start using. From it’s end, GlobalRoads will provide support, documentation, API, rule based engine, and more to get it’s customers started quickly.

Subscription fees for the service will kick in after 1 month of being in the program and customers will pay only if improvements in sales are visible are clearly evident in the monthly revenue statement. On it’s end, GlobalRoads has built an intelligent analytics engine that tracks performance of it’s recommendations and resulting impact on earnings.

Earlier last year, GlobalRoads had shown the strength of it’s recommendation service when it participated in the competition organized by Netflix to improve recommendation accuracy of the Netflix Cinematch(SM) system. While the goal is to better the system by 10% to win the $1 million prize, GlobalRoads did better it by 5.2%.

Twitter Address book import would have been…..

By Vivek | August 31st, 2007 at 02:11 pm ET     2 Comments »    

Late night yesterday while trying out the Twitter Gmail Address book import, I was easily able to locate 50 or so contacts from 400+ in my address book already Twittering out there. Much better way to find people as compared to search(review).

Still it was kinda tough to guess who was worth following since there we no stats like - x number of posts in last week or day or month… A tiny aggregation script would have helped for sure.

While we are at Twitter, this would be the first startup that I have come across in the last year of blogging that didn’t respond to my support email. Strange but true, given they have an experienced team.

Thoof- Pops questions to improve recommendation

By Vivek | August 31st, 2007 at 01:51 pm ET     2 Comments »    

Thoof, the news reading and recommendation site launched earlier this year, is hooked to Flickr’s new app release per week process for real. New small but smart thingy from Thoof - questions. Once in a while(1 in 20 stories), Thoof will pop a question at you. When you answer the question, you will be shown a nice pie chart showing how other people responded to the question.

The feature doesn’t end there. Thoof in turn uses these answers to improve its story recommendations, “based on which stories other users that answered the question liked”. Interesting idea around likeness.

Besides this, since it’s launch the site has added ThoofRank that indicates the percentage of Thoof stories a story is better than the one you are reading, ”Thoof it” button for browsers, ability to search by source or submitter, varied coloring according to read/unread status(stories seen but not read read - green, stories completely new - blue, and stories read - gray), and like always Tag streams.

For those not following the startup, earlier this year Austin, Texas based Thoof had raised $1m in seed funding from Austin Ventures and Ron Conway.

Loooow Post Volume

By Vivek | August 31st, 2007 at 01:11 pm ET         

Long weekend is really showing the effect at StartupSquad.com. You can expect low post volumes for the next 3 days.

And now: Dailymotion gets mor’money

By Vivek | August 30th, 2007 at 05:56 pm ET         

It seems, second season of video sharing is shaping up real well. France based Dailymotion has raised $34 million in venture funding. The investment round was participated by Advent Venture Partners LLP of London and AGF Private Equity of Paris.

Dailymotion had earlier raised $9.5 million last year.

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Related:
Dailymotion beta with Related Videos …
Dailymotion gets ahead of Metacafe