The Race for Relevance

1. The Race for Relevance Adam Fox and Jayce Van Haren

2. Intelligent Agents • Originally thought up by Nicholas Negroponte in 1994 • Made to personalize TV programs and news that is relevant to each specific viewer • Negroponte assumed that his idea would spread to all media outlets • Jaron Lanier, a virtual reality creator, suggested that intelligent agents would be more loyal to companies than to the people they served

3. Early Intelligent Agents • Based on Negroponte’s ideas, both Apple and Microsoft created operating systems using intelligent agents as a main selling point • Both products failed to the point that they were laughed at • Since then, intelligent agents are used only in secrecy and not as a selling point

4. Amazon • Jeff Bezos looked for ways to personalize books sales • Found filtering methods used by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) • Found personalization methods researched at MIT (which were actually a predecessor to Pandora) • In 1997, combined these methods to create a personalized book store called Amazon

5. PageRank • Created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to find pages on the web using similar techniques that Amazon used with selling books • Used a “vote” system to determine which pages were most relevant • Originally designed to have little to no advertisements • Went on to become Google

6. Google • Used the PageRank system as well as what the called data signals • Data signals are bits of information used to determine a web page’s relevance • Used Gmail and Google Apps to personalize data signals and make searches more relevant to each individual user • Google’s goal is to eventually be able to answer hypothetical questions tailored for each user

7. Facebook • Created by Mark Zuckerburg in 2004 to connect people to real-life social connections. • Used the a “Newsfeed” to create a personal information source created by a person’s online friends. • EdgeRank allows Facebook to sort out which people and updates are more likely to appear in a person’s newsfeed.

8. “Facebook Everywhere” • Attempts to make the entire internet “social.” • Allows people to see what their Facebook friend’s music they are listening too, restaurants they like and products they enjoy by setting up a Facebook “like” button on millions of sites.

9. Advertising and “Lock-In” • Advertising is at the center of major online company’s focus. • Advertisers choose sites based on who will cause they to make the most money for their dollar. • They need to profile users to give relevant ads to potential buyers. • “Lock-In” is also an important factor for advertisers. • “Lock-In” is where the user is invested so much in the online technology they find the desire to switch technology not worth it.

10. Acxiom • Acxiom is a database that buys internet data based on what we press. • It sells the data to the companies with the highest bidding so they can put their ads where they will be most profitable for the company.

11. Personalized Advertising • Companies like Loopt and Foursquare use mobile phone’s user locator to provide information for companies. • Companies use this information to decide when and where they want to send ads to people. • This allows companies to change the ads as the user moves away from certain stores and lingers at others.