A Test of the Recommender Engine

Score! The first results from The Product Recommender Engine arrived.

A group of customers received a business-as-usual email of product highlights. Some of these customers returned and bought some more stuff. Let's call that conversion rate index 100.

Another group received customized emails, recommending specific products, based on the product purchase history as decided by The Engine. These customers converted at a rate of index 157. Money was made.

Innohead is now in the process of packaging the recommender algorithm as a standard component on the platform. I wonder who else, besides booksellers, could use the system?

Logo Fight!

Innohead is picking a logo. 16 designers submitted a range of logos in the competition. From that, I and Lars picked 8. 

Which logo do you prefer? 

Please go to the competition on 99designs and help us choose. The 99designs voting page: http://99designs.com/logo-design/vote-uoshhc

Fun in Startup Land

I'm very excited. Innohead has their first few customers onboard with a subscription model and the rest of 2011 looks good, financially speaking.

We have our first hire, genius programmer Lars Bojsen-Møller, onboard too. Lars holds a MSc in Computer Science and Mathematics, played the piano since age 6 and loves Nick Drake, stands 192 cm tall, is pale and prefers to meet in late.

My mom sometimes asks me what the company does: "You do these logarithms, right?" Here is a rundown of the two core activities:

a) Customer Data Warehouse. We gather all the data we can find in a client company and feed it into a specialized warehouse. Call center interactions, website visits, product transactions, survey responses and so on. We use MongoDB as the database engine behind it. Love it.

b) Continuous Analytics. Based on customer data, we predict

• what leads might become valuable customers, 
• which customers might be open to buy more and what they might buy, 
• which customers might be at risk of exiting the company in the near future

These measures can be used to estimate Customer Lifetime Value, the value one can expect to earn over the lifetime of the customer.

Predictions are based on modern statistics and machine learning methods, labeled artificial intelligence in the old days. In many ways, there have been a fruitful convergence between machine learning methods and statistics, in that we are starting to understand how to analyze some of the machine learning algorithms in statistical terms.

Picking from the customers, we have

• a bank running a lead scoring algorithm
• a television provider and 
• a lottery running customer exit scoring models and Customer Lifetime Value measures
• a financing and major appliances company running a product recommender

In February, we take a look at

• an insurance company
• an electricity distributor
• a transportation company

Innohead just launched a $300 logo design contest for Innohead on 99designs. They create the contest, I pick the winner. I might ask for your help in that respect.

Running a startup company is great fun. Does your boss suck? Do you want more freedom? Can you create real value? Then think about doing a startup.

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On Denmark's Industrial Future As Seen From The 1880's

I was moved to write a brief response on an article about Denmark's future economic growth. It appeared in Weekendavisen February 5th 2010. Translation:

In a Weekendavisen article, CBS associate professor Mark Lorenzen is presented as a proponent for the view that Denmark's future economic growth should not be based primarily on risky high tech, but rather on the so-called creative sectors.

During the 1880's, the Confederation of Copenhagen's Industry was still governed mainly by the interests of the applied arts. The confederation's view was fundamentally, that "although the location of our country must be said to be favourable for great industrial development, our people is probably unfit for such activity given their soft character and indolent temper, since they are used to easily find food on our fertile lands". (Vagn Dybdahl in "Erhvervshistorisk Årbog 1980").

This state of affairs can arise again.

Slideshow Paradigm Shift: Don't Go To The Next Slide, Zoom To The Next Object

The guys from www.prezi.com have made a wonderful new way of creating slideshows. The whole nature of a slideshow is changed to a trip over a map, following a path.

The freedom in throwing away the "slide" part of shows is simply brilliant. Mindmaps, cooperative creation, news ways of integrating pictures... This is a paradigm shift in presentation. I heard the guys at TED invested some money in this. Check it out!