06/17/2008

Baynote unveiled the Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform. The SaaS solution allows businesses to deploy peer-driven recommendations, social search and other services across multiple channels from a single point of measurement, testing and control.

ebizQ received the following:

"The time is here to fundamentally rethink the old way of doing business where we relied on experts' recommendations and judgment to guide us online," said Jack Jia, Baynote CEO. "Dynamically injecting the collective intelligence of site visitors into the editorial and merchandizing process, across any digital channel, makes businesses far more nimble and thus made the Collective Intelligence Platform the next logical step for Baynote."

The New Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform

The solution combines five new offerings, expanded APIs, and Baynote's existing recommendations and social search capabilities in a single, unified platform. In addition, because Baynote is delivered as a software service, businesses can deploy one or more offerings in just days, without the hassle and expense associated with traditional enterprise software installations.

All New Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform components include:

-- Baynote Email Recommendations -- displays targeted product or content recommendations within emails to maximize click-through.

-- Baynote Mobile Recommendations -- automatically renders the most appropriate article, video, web link, or product to engage the mobile visitor.

-- Baynote Insights™ -- analyze, test, and control the impact of the community across all digital channels. Built using AJAX techniques, Baynote Insights is highly intuitive and includes the following new features:

- The Community Analytics interface displays emergent visitor segments, like-minded visitor clubs, content and product gaps, and a variety of other community-driven insights.

- The Testing Console enables A/B/n or directed testing to measure the impact of Baynote on key business metrics such as incremental revenue, profit, pageviews, engagement time, click-throughs, support resolution rates, search success rates, registrations and more.

- The Merchandizing and Editorial Console allows users to combine expert control with the inherent community wisdom distilled from visitor behavior to tailor the delivery of recommendations and search results.

All platform capabilities are exposed through a high-performance REST API that gives developers the keys to integrate Baynote with legacy applications, envision new applications, or mash-up Baynote services with other web services and applications. Baynote's partners, including Bazaarvoice, Google, Mercado, Omniture, Responsys, Vignette and others, will be able to leverage its platform to increase engagement across multiple channels and applications.

"We see a tremendous potential to offer recommendations through email that cater to the specific interests of end customers," said Jeff Clayton, vice president of strategic alliances at Responsys. "The Baynote Collective Intelligence platform offers us an easy to integrate recommendation capability that helps our users deliver higher value to their customers."

"Leveraging the collective intelligence of site visitors to drive user engagement allows us to deliver a competitive advantage for our customers," said Dave Dutch, senior vice president of products and marketing at Vignette. "Baynote's Collective Intelligence Platform extends the reach of Vignette Recommendations and helps our customers improve their strategic Web experience across any channel or device."

Existing Baynote capabilities now part of the unified platform include:

-- Baynote Content Recommendations -- allows businesses to dynamically display links to content, multimedia, or downloads that match the visitor's intent and are proven to increase engagement, generate leads, and resolve support issues.
-- Baynote Product Recommendations -- enables eCommerce companies to dynamically display products for cross-sell and up-sell based on the implicit behavior of shoppers, resulting in increased conversion and higher average order value.
-- Baynote Social Search -- improves the relevancy and effectiveness of on-site search by applying a social layer that re-ranks results from existing search engines such as Google, Endeca, Mercado, Autonomy, Fast, or open source and hosted search technologies.

"Tutored by sites such as Amazon.com, today's workers and customers expect -- and in many cases demand -- that information be tailored to their ever-changing tasks and interests," said Guy Creese, vice president and research director at Burton Group. "Accordingly, enterprises implementing technology delivering 'real-time relevance' are gaining both loyalty and significant competitive advantage."