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Tag: Hunch

  • eBay Acquires Hunch

    eBay Acquires Hunch

    eBay has acquired recommendation engine Hunch, with the aim of improving eBay’s personalized recommendations.

    Hunch has been around for a couple years now. The company’s stated mission is to “build a ‘taste graph’ of the entire web, connecting every person on the web with their affinity for anything, from books to electronic gadgets to fashion or vacation spots.”

    Here’s a video that it explains what it’s about:

    Hunch Intro – Homepage version from Hunch on Vimeo.

    “We’ll be tackling all kinds of interesting challenges as part of eBay including predictive merchandising, interpreting unstructured data and creating merchant insights,” Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon says on the company’s blog.

    @cdixon
    chris dixon    This happened: http://t.co/D63K77os Thanks to everyone at hunch and nyc tech community. 49 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    “We are engaging consumers in innovative ways and attracting top technologists to shape the future of commerce,” said Mark Carges, eBay CTO and SVP, Global Products, Marketplaces. “With Hunch, we’re adding new capabilities to personalizing the shopping experience on eBay to the individual relevant tastes and interests of our customers. We expect Hunch’s technologies to benefit eBay shoppers as they browse and buy, and to bring sellers on eBay new ways to connect the right products with the right customers.”

    Hunch.com will continue to operate as a standalone site, and the data that users have already shared will be governed by the company’s existing privacy policy.

    Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Michael Arrington believes the price to be somewhere around $80 million.

  • Are iPhone Users Elitist?

    Are iPhone Users Elitist?

    The iPhone vs. Android battle is an intense conflict between warring groups hell-bent on making it well know that the opposing groups sucks. It’s as American as North vs. South, East vs. West, Boxers Vs. Briefs or dare I even say it, Coke vs. Pepsi.

    Recently, we looked at a report that framed the battle as a geographic one, putting more Android users in the South and West and iOS users in the North and East.

    Now, personal recommendation service Hunch has used its “Teach Hunch About You” questions to come up with some interesting distinctions between iPhone and Android users.

    The inforgraphic discusses the differences in the groups’ politics, personality, travel experience, tech-savvy, film preferences, beer preferences and much more. Based on 80+ million responses, here is Droid vs. iOS, the battle of the ops:

    It looks like iPhone users tend to be more liberal, while Android users leans more the the right. Android users tend to be more pessimistic, but iPhone users are more high-maintenance.

    It’s interesting to see that iPhone users are 50% more likely to be early adopters of the internet and are also 50% more likely to text while driving.

    Is it just me, or do the culture preferences make iPhone users out to be elitist? For instance, iPhone users prefer The Antlers, Belle and Sebastian, the BBC and Franzen’s novel Freedom while Android users prefer ESPN, Comedy Central, 1984, Radiohead and How I Met Your Mother.

    The food and drink differences definitely paint Android users as more of the “common man.” They like corn pops and cheerios with iPhone users like Kashi GOLEAN Crunch. While Android users prefer a good sirloin or cheesesteak, iOS users prefer sushi and tapas.

    Of course, I’m totally serious kidding about the whole elitist thing.

    Do these descriptions of Android and iPhone users fit you? Let us know in the comments.