ECommerce Blast: Emerging Opportunities in Recommendation Systems and Brand Commerce
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Speakers:
Dan Darell, Vice President of Products & Marketing – Baynote (http://baynote.com)
Vik Singh, Founder & CEO – Slice Data (http://slice-data.com)
Paul Twohey, Co-founder – Ness Computing (http://likeness.com)
Brian Johnson, Director of Search Query Services – Ebay (http://ebay.com)
DESCRIPTION:
Recommendation engines suggest products and services that a user might like based on past transactions and the transactions of users with a similar purchasing style. Current performance metrics suggest that recommendation engines can add up to 8-10% in incremental revenues.
This panel will discuss emerging technology companies and trends in recommendation systems with the backdrop of new e-commerce trends such as,
Channel Strategies & Methodologies: Users are increasingly mobile and social and businesses are using ad exchanges. How do recommendation systems adapt to the type of channel that a consumer uses? How are emerging recommendation systems describing, weighting and assigning lifetimes to likes, raves, faves, social graph context, relationship type, relationship strength, social context, social intent, and recency of social information? Depending on the channel, are there ideal locations/contexts/times to insert recommendations?
Emerging Algorithms: Sites, such as Amazon, have use collaborative filtering techniques to power their systems. Is it still king or are we moving towards newer techniques? How are the performance of the engines being measured? How are emerging recommendation systems describing, weighting and assigning lifetimes to data independence / randomness, integrity, consistency, reliability, completeness, context, frequency, recency, accuracy, bots, etc
Recommendations as a complement to Shopping Portals and Brick+Mortar Brands: Recommendation engines have typically catered to the interest of the consumer. Can it be used to improve a company’s brand? How do you categorize different brands – e.g. by type of goods and services, customers, channels, ad budget, financial markets, web presence, web traffic, web engagement, store presence, etc. How can brands be matched up with different recommendation techniques and categories.
SPEAKER BIOS:
Vik Singh, Founder & CEO – Slice Data
Vik Singh is CEO and Co-Founder of Slice Data, a big data intelligence venture focused on helping companies close more customers. Slice Data is backed by top tier investors like Andreessen Horowitz and the Social+Capital Partnership, and its customers include several of the Fortune 1000. Prior to starting up Slice Data, Vik was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures, where he helped the firm identify new ideas and markets as well as evaluate early stage investments. Previously, Vik helped create and architect Yahoo! BOSS, an open search platform that runs over 1 billion queries a month. He developed supporting examples like TweetNews (which Wired called “the best mashup we’ve ever seen”) and the new Delicious.com homepage. Vik also worked at Google and Microsoft, both in research and products, helping ship Custom Search and XP SP2 Wireless. At MSR he worked with Turing Award winner Dr. Jim Gray, co-authoring a paper about the SkyServer. Vik has filed 13 patents in the areas of search, social networking, systems infrastructure, and content optimization. At 24, MIT’s Technology Review listed him as one of the Top 35 under 35 Innovators for his contributions to open search. He and his work have also been mentioned in news sources like CNET, Slashdot, TechCrunch, Washington Post, and the WSJ. Vik graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. In high school, Vik competed in policy debate; he won the California State Championship and was selected as a Kentucky Fellow, which ranked him among the top 12 debaters in the country.
Dan Darrell, Vice President of Products & Marketing – Baynote
Dan is an experienced software industry marketer with a strong background in marketing automation, online optimization, and analytics. Prior to Baynote, Dan was the Director of Marketing for both Adchemy, a digital advertising technology company, and Interwoven Optimost, a multivariable testing and targeting platform, where he focused on product and company messaging, public relations, analyst relations and marketing programs. Before that, Dan was a Director of Product and Solutions marketing at Oracle and Siebel where he drove innovative projects for the marketing automation and analytics products. Dan holds an MBA from the Carnegie Mellon University and Bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Paul Twohey, Cofounder – Ness Computing
Paul Twohey is co-founder of Ness Computing, which provides
recommendations catered to your unique tastes. Their first product is the Ness
Dining Guide, helping you find great places to eat. Before founding Ness, Paul
was an early software engineer at Palantir Technologies where he designed and
implemented the first version of the Palantir geo-spatial search engine to
support queries over millions of versioned objects. Prior to joining Palantir,
Paul was a PhD candidate at Stanford where his research focused on automatic bug
finding and error detection in large open source software projects. He earned
his undergrad degree from UC Berkeley in EECS where he was president of the
Computer Science Undergraduate Assocation and spent three summers interning at
Apple working on the first three versions of the Mac OS X server. Paul is also a
distinguished student of martial arts and was nationally ranked in Takewondo,
having medalled both nationally and internationally.
Brian Johnson – Director of Search Query Services, eBay
Brian knows the satisfaction and importance of good search results, and his team is responsible for ensuring that the millions of queries entered onto the eBay website provide just that. The words “Did you mean…?” are incredibly meaningful to Brian as he combs through a universe of queries altered by synonyms, acronyms, attributes, and expansions. Brian is responsible for query reformulation, spell correction, and related searches as the Director of Engineering for the Search Science Query Services team at eBay. Brian has been at eBay since 2002 in a variety of engineering management roles, including search metrics, crowdsourced human judgment, classification, data publishing, and browsing. Prior to eBay Brian was at Handspring, Excite@Home, Synopsys, and AT&T Bell Labs. Brian received his PHD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 1993. His papers regarding visualizing hierarchical and categorical data with Treemaps have been cited hundreds of times. http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianscottjohnson
Agenda:
6.30 pm – 7.00 pm Snacks, Drinks & Networking
7.00 pm – 7.15 pm Introductions
7.15 pm – 8.00 pm Panel Presentations
8.00 pm – 8.30 pm Moderated Panel
8.30 pm – 9.00 pm Q&A and Adjourn
Useful links:
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/the_social_economy
http://mashable.com/2012/07/10/ecommerce-trends/
http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1942-10-Questions-on-Product-Recommendations
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/30/amazon-5/?iid=obinsite
Contact:
Ritu Malhotra | Chris Wong, Chairs
Mihoko Ward, Assistant Chair – Investor Management
Benjamin Hautefeuille, Assistant Chair – Technology Management
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