Loomia, a recommendation engine that is used by ecommerce and content websites to suggest new stuff to users, locked up a marquee business development deal with the Wall Street Journal.
The module, which appears next to stories, suggests other Wall Street Journal content based on what the user has read previously on the site, and compared to what other users have read, too. The module is titled “People Who Read This…” – see image below.
Loomia competes directly with Aggregate Knowledge, a high flying startup that has raised a total of $25 million in venture capital.
Like Aggregate Knowledge, Loomia offers its core recommendation engine to both content providers and ecommerce sites. Their pricing differs based on the type of partner – they charge a CPM for content sites and a percentage of sales that can be tracked to referrals for ecommerce sites. Pricing is here. They also have a free product for blogs and other smaller sites.
Ultimately, what Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia are offering are merchandising tools to Internet companies. Sites like Amazon can afford to develop their own solutions in-house, but other sites, battling razor thin margins already, need to outsource this. Companies like Loomia and Aggregate Knowedge are there to fill that need. BazaarVoice is another company in this sector, although they offer a different product – reviews and commenting features.
Interesting, but what’s the big deal? I’m sure it’s dead useful, but aren’t there plenty of other programs like this?
-Chris
http://www.nerdcouncil.com
Yes, there are other places that do recommendation. The company I work for does the same thing – Criteo. They are out of Paris, France. Their recommendation engine works really well. In fact, they hit up the blogosphere with their widget to spread the word.
I’d like to see Mike or Duncan do an article on Criteo. I’d really like to see Mike install the Criteo Widget.
Rex
Chris – no, as far as I know, just Loomia and AG. It’s important because it’s an easy way for sites to generate sales and/or page views with little risk.
Yeah, but these guys dont charge you an arm and a leg for it.
Mike – See comment one minute before yours – Criteo dude!
– Rex
Chris, you would think there are a bunch of programs like this; however there are not, Thus the significance of Loomia. I use the Loomia to give people restaurant recommendations based on our 18,000-review base. You can see an example with the restaurant [Home on Market] http://sf.tasty...com/rd.asp?r=32 look to the right below the skyscraper banner; you’ll see the recommendations.
There are not many of them because it is a hard problem to solve (well)
Hi Mike. Hi Rex. Nik, it is a difficult problem to solve. Collarity provides the same kind of “users who liked this, also liked this” widgets, plus refined user-driven site search (based on anonymous visitor activity), tagclouds, and there are no set-up/ongoing fees for websites willing to share in the incremental advertising revenue created. Fox Interactive TV Stations (example: http://www.myfoxny.com) and Pearson Education (http://www.info....com/index.html) are both using the service.
Hey, mike since you cover aussie search engine two months ago. He’s everywhere on search news. What happen to mylivesearch.com?
http://www.tech...me-the-aussies/
Are they suppose to release due date?
The Loomia team is a bunch of seriously brilliant engineers and entrpreneurs.
Big congrats to them. They deserve it.
This is Good News for the Loomia team. There are quite a fe companies who are competing in this space. I am following recommender systems with some interest and am attempting to keep track of them on my blog at http://www.tomp...mender-systems/
I have been involved wth recommender systems since 2004 could this be the year they really take off?
Baynote: http://www.baynote.com seems to get left out of this list way too often. They are well funded with the Stanford background (these are smart folks). They have an unnamed client larger than any of their competitors. Business 2.0 just did a piece on recommendation engines and also looked over Baynote – mistake. *I do not work for them.
Congrats Loomia. If you would like me to infiltrate Aggregate Knowledge and headhunt some of their folks for you, it would be my pleasure.
Boris
http://www.bincsearch.com
This is weird cat and dog style. Check out.
http://www.yout...;watch_response
Test from iphone
I think sphere is competitor too. It does something different to recommend content, but at end of day it is competing for real estate with loomia and gang.
hmm…maybe not.
I think so
Thanks for the props for Loomia Mike. As noted the math and tech behind good recommendations is pretty difficult work. What’s interesting is that the few companies in the space are all taking different approaches to the math and tech. We obviously feel we have the best approach.
@Rex – Loomia actually offers a number of different recommendation types – the WSJ is just using one for now. Loomia offers Personal Recommendations (people to people), Similar Items (what the WSJ is using), and Checkout/Session Recommendations (people to item).
@Anthony – Correct – anyone can get started for free and go from there. We’re focused only on charging for value we deliver to our customers.
@Wayne – cool use of Loomia Recommendations.
@Ted – Thanks for the kind words. David, Francis and the rest of the guys are going great work.
@Tom – Thanks – Great blog and I think you’ll be impressed with where things go from here for Loomia.
@Jason – I think the challenge is they came from the social search space (where they compete with Endeca, FAST, etc.).
@Brian – We’re actually very familiar with the guys at AK – turns out for instance I know the founders from prior lives.
@Venture – Sphere is coming from a search perspective – as you can see WSJ is actually using both them and Loomia.
It is not hard problem to solve.
@Todd – Sounds great about Loomia. I was just trying to point out to Mike that there are others such as – Criteo – doing the recommendation thing. I just wanted to make sure that we weren’t “forgotten”.
Hit me up in e-mail if you’d like to talk further.
Rex
Nice client for Loomia indeed. Congratulation!
As far as I know, neither Loomia, nor Aggregate Knowledge have participated into the Netflix Prize. As it takes only a couple of hours to summit a set of predictions, I wonder why they did not give a try.
Criteo (www.criteo.com) did participate. We managed to join the leaderboard in a couple of days, beating Netflix own engine by 5% in accuracy.
As a matter of fact, we were surprised to see none of our competitors capable of similar performance (including also Choicestream, BayNote and Cleverset).
This “shyness” is deeply regrettable. More than 16,000 teams have participated into Netflix Prize. It would have been a great way to compare accuracy of recommendation providers…
Disclosure: I’m the CEO of Criteo
@Jean – David and Francis (co-founders and the lead product and dev guy at the company) actually looked at the netflix challenge. They decided to pass because there are some fundamental flaws in the way netflix wants to approach the problem from David and Francis’s perspective. We’re working on a blog post that will detail our netflix reaction. I look forward to seeing criteo around.
I am sorry that Mike forgot to mention Spotback in this list.
Apart for being an awesome rating and recommendation engine, it integrates extremely well with all major blogging platforms (check out our WordPress plugin for example).
Spotback is also content type independent, which means that it is working very well with photos and videos and not just with text.
Visit our site or contact us to learn more about how Spotback can work for your service (feedback (at) spotback dot com).
Thanks,
Micha
CEO
Spotback.com
how does this compare with “sphere it” or whatever.
Great string, the only reason left to come…..just kidding.
Interesting to see the product managers/ developers, and CEOs weigh in on the topic specifically. There must be good competition in this space.
@todd, nice comp intel, but………………………………….Put-up or shut-up, don’t bother with the mkt song and dance. Jean’s group obviously put-up and delivered.
Disclosure- I know nothing about this space or the players. Great opportunity to develop niche offerings.