GigaOM » ChoozOn

Lots of data is great, but knowing how to get value is better

Erica Ogg — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:02:51 +0000

So you’ve got a lot of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. How do you or your business get the most value out of it? Nick Weir, CEO of ChoozOn, which uses intelligent matching to connect people with the best deals, gave some basic tips on the most important things to consider when mining your data in a presentation here Wednesday at Structure:Data 2012 in New York City.

As the former vice president of data strategy at Yahoo, Weir has plenty of history with poking around large amounts of data. From that experience, the biggest challenges, he says, are: being able to truly exploit all the data available to you, proliferating analytics throughout your organization and driving significant business value from it.

The data he gave as an example: the 800 million Google queries per day, 250 million tweets per day and 800 million Facebook updates per day that shows what customers are either searching for and what they’re saying about your brand online.

The best way to squeeze actual value out of all these tweets, updates and searches, he said, is:

Understanding user intent
Knowing how people generally feel about your brand
Pinpointing context: where and when people are talking about or searching for your brand

He gave an example of what Yahoo has been able to do. They take their gobs of data they suck in every day from their millions of users and do behavioral targeting to get higher value CPMs, Weir said. “Yahoo constructs DNA for each user. They construct models that look at behavior, score users on a number of dimensions and target ads to those users,” he said.

Besides crunching all that data, there’s a lot of modeling involved, he noted. “Not just the intensity with which [someone] is looking at a topic, but recency matters” too, another example of how important context is for deriving value from having a lot of data.

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NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 07:01:05 +0000

For once, the biggest news in social media and real-time technologies didn’t come from Facebook. Rather, it was Google that, at the end of the second quarter, introduced an innovative collection of technologies, under the Google+ label. Another big headline was the return of digital music: Pandora filed a successful IPO, and Google and Apple unrolled cloud-based music offerings. Meanwhile, other social networks generated valuable lessons about technology and business strategies. LinkedIn went public, while Myspace was sold. And Apple essentially appointed Twitter its mobile social network infrastructure supplier. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Skype, Groupon, Turntable.fm and Amazon. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Meet ChoozOn, a Social Network for Shopping Deals

Ryan Kim — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 07:00:27 +0000

Even as Facebook works to leverage its social network for commerce, it’s still primarily a personal network designed more for sharing photos than deals. That’s where ChoozOn, a new Bellevue, Wash. startup built by a trio of former Yahoo executives, comes in. The new social network is built around shopping and personalized deals and works hard to bring brands and consumers together, to their mutual benefit.

The service, which doesn’t go live until early summer, offers a familiar social networking platform, but built around identifying, sharing and receiving discounts, particularly from brands and retailers users have chosen to communicate with. On one level, it helps make sense of the onslaught of deals being thrown at consumers. Users can manage their various daily deal and discount services through ChoozOn, which picks out and highlights the ones most relevant to a user based on their tastes and preferences. Upcoming mobile apps for Android and iPhone will also highlight deals, particularly location-based ones nearby.

This alone is a help in managing the cascade of growing number of discounts being offered to consumers. But ChoozOn also allows users to manage their loyalty and reward memberships so they’re up to date on offers from companies they already have a relationship with. The most relevant deals are surfaced in a news feed as they come in, or are highlighted by ChoozOn. Consumers are also able to sign up for loyalty programs through ChoozOn.

But the real interesting work happens when users share their shopping preferences and the brands and retailers they like, and those brands are able to craft specific discounts for them. That allows brands to speak directly to their most loyal followers and keep them interested with deals that speak to them. Users are also able to use the search function on the site to pull up deals across the universe of offers, filtered by their relevance to the user. They’re can search ChoozOn for deals organized by verticals and categories. In some cases, the service pulls up deals only available to members of specific loyalty programs, but it gives users an easy way to sign up.

“We’re creating a whole new network where people can manage their deals, their affiliations with brands they like and loyalty programs they belong to and the subset of friends who are their shopping pals,” said co-founder and CEO Nick Weir. ” We felt there is a tremendous opportunity in the online marketplace for consumers and brands alike to create some type of way for everyone to communicate in a beneficial way.”

ChoozOn builds off the experience of its founders, who have a background in online marketing, data mining and search technology. Co-founders Weir, Usama Fayyad and Hunter Madsen all met at Yahoo, where they first hit upon the idea of giving users more power over their information and how they wield it to gain deals.

By creating a network expressly built for shopping, Weir thinks it has the potential to meet the needs of both consumers and brands. It also brings together like-minded people who can shop together and rally around certain brands or categories. Facebook already has pages for brands and is infusing more social features into shopping. But it’s still not as broadly constructed for deals and it’s not as focused on surfacing relevant discounts for users.

For all its shopping-specific features, ChoozOn will still need to achieve some type of scale to matter. That’s one of Facebook’s big advantages. It’s got 600 million users who make a great target for offers and deals. So far, ChoozOn has 300 merchants signed up, but will need many more if it’s to cover all the different brands people are attached to. It will have to ensure that service can surface relevant deals, especially ones that would have gone unnoticed. But I think there’s promise in something like ChoozOn. There’s room for more social networks that address specific needs and interests. And I think brands are looking to make their offers more meaningful and less commoditized in a way that benefits them, not just consumers. But with Facebook, Groupon, Google, and a gaggle of others looking to bring consumers, merchants and brands together, ChoozOn has its work cut out for it.

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