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CleverSet

Winner

Company: CleverSet, Seattle, Washington
Entered by: Marketing Alchemist
Company Description: CleverSet is a technology services company that helps eCommerce sites increase their revenues by personalizing the online shopping experience for customers. CleverSet powers merchandise recommendations for more than 70 eCommerce companies, including Alpineer.com, Overstock.com Auctions, Paradise Pen Company, Awinestore.com, Denverfabrics.com and 80sTees.
Nomination Category: Company, Office & Product Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Company

Nomination Title: CleverSet Inc.

1. Tell the story about what this nominated company achieved in the past year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Six years ago, a team of computer scientists led by Dr. Bruce D'Ambrosio were
awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to research a subset of
artificial intelligence called statistical relational modeling, or SRL - a new
computer technology that analyzes the relationship between people, places and
things to come up with complex behavior models. While developing this
patent-pending technology, which is also used by the U.S. Department of Defense,
Dr. D'Ambrosio realized it had a real commercial application. He realized SRL
could be used to create a revolutionary e-commerce personalization service that
would allow retailers to offer highly-personalized recommendations.

The CleverSet Recommendations Service is the most accurate and effective
recommendations services available today. Using SRL, it maps and analyzes the
relationships among customer behavior, product attributes and website attributes
to surface real-time, click-by-click, recommendations that are truly unique to
each shopper - not general recommendations based on the past collective buying
habits of groups. Each shopper who comes to a website sees products related to
his current needs, not products related to the last time he shopped on the site.
http://www.cleverset.com/solution/index.html

By showing customers products they actually want to buy, the over 70 retailers
who use CleverSet have boosted revenues-per-visitor by an average of more than
20% and boosted overall sales by at least 25%. In the highly-competitive world
of e-commerce, those are extraordinary figures.

CleverSet is different than any other recommendations technology on the market
today. CleverSet's software-as-a-service technology has been developed over six
years through the dedication of some of the brightest science and technology
minds in the U.S. CleverSet delivers recommendations that are unlike the product
recommendations consumers have grown used to on sites like Amazon.com and
Netflix.com. These sites use static rules-based technology that only takes into
account past purchase behavior, often putting forth recommendations that are
outdated or irrelevant. (Many people have had the experience of going to
Amazon.com and seeing product recommendations for, say, children's books because
they purchased one Dr. Seuss book for their nephew a year ago, even though this
time they are looking for management strategy books.) Other sites put forward
"top sellers" by analyzing the most popular products purchased among large
groups of customers. We call these recommendations strategies the
"generalization" of the Internet, instead of what we offer, which is true
"personalization".
http://blog.cleverset.com

CleverSet is innovative in that it actually predicts what a customer will want
to see next, and delivers those recommendations in real time. CleverSet analyzes
data from multiple sources - including real-time clickstream data, stored
customer information, purchase history and product descriptions and attributes –
to provide relevant merchandise recommendations throughout each and every
shopping session.

Top e-commerce and technology experts believe in CleverSet. Barry Gilbert,
former CEO of Smith & Hawken, is on our Board of Directors. Peter Norvig,
director of research at Google, and Andreas Weigend, former chief technology
officer of Amazon.com, and Michael Dearing, former Senior VP and General Manager
at eBay, are on our Board of Advisors.

2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

Barry Gilbert, Former CEO of Smith & Hawken, Joins Board of Directors of
CleverSet, the Leading Online Recommendations Service
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/1/prweb499751.htm

CleverSet Knows Its Online Shoppers
Seattle Times article by Christina Siderius
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003545755
_btinterface29.html

CleverSet bolsters Board of Directors with retail expert Barry Gilbert, and
announced $2 million in funding
DM News article by Cara Wood
http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/catalog-retail/39778.html

BrandWeek: Techies Suggest Overhaul Of Suggestion Features
BrandWeek article by Todd Wasserman
http://www.brandweek.com/bw/magazine/current/article_display.jsp?vnu_cont
ent_id=1003528581

Venture Capital: CleverSet Predicts a Role for Itself in Shopping
Seattle Post-Intelligencer article by John Cook
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/243733_vc07.html

Tap the Power of Suggestion to Boost Sales
E-Commerce Guide article by Michelle Megna
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3660996

3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader of this nominated company:

Dr. Bruce D'Ambrosio is CleverSet's founder and Chief Technology Officer. Bruce
is the bridge connecting state-of-the-art developments in statistical relational
learning (SRL) to innovative commercial applications. Bruce has founded two
companies and has 30 years experience in the computer software industry. He also
took a 20-year detour into academia to focus on research in graphical,
probabilistic models, particularly algorithms for efficient inference in
Bayesian networks. He is now emeritus faculty at Oregon State University. An
engineer at heart, Bruce is happiest when building things - from companies and
electronics, to strange contraptions that we're not quite sure what they do.