On Friday 8 October, I will be joining IT professionals in a sponsored sleep-out on the streets of Cambridge in aid of Action for Children, as part of the funkily named Team Miscellany.

There are many reasons why children and young people can find themselves vulnerable and without a safe, secure place to live. Byte Night raises money to help Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness.

Each year, at least 75,000 children and young people experience homelessness. One in three attempt suicide and 1 in 7 young runaways are physically or sexually assaulted.With your support, not only can we help keep thousands of children and young people off the streets and away from the risk of physical and sexual assault, we’ll also help them build better lives with secure accommodation, education and training opportunities.

Byte Night raises money to help Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness. Visit http://www.bytenight.org.uk/ for more information on the difference Byte Night makes. I'd really appreciate your support via JustGiving and thank you for any donation you feel you can make.

In an article from Econsultancy the topic of losing sales because of too much choice (be it product or web navigation) is considered. The post’s suggestion is to avoid offering choice where possible and show the most common choice(s) by default with the option for the user to drill down and customise should they wish to (much like me asking the waiter for the specials board).  Essentially the writer tells us that we shouldn’t worry about trying to please all of the people all of the time, and focus on pleasing most of the people most of the time with default (one-size fits-all) content. This may seem like sensible advice, but what if the default set of choices caters to a 51% majority? That leaves 49% of your audience mismatched with the content on your site.

With our technology, that’s one of the challenges we overcome at Cognitive Match; matching content that best fits the profile of site users. Think of our technology as the smart waiter who already knows which menu type suits me and which suits my wife. The waiter that instinctively averts my choice paralysis while offering my wife plenty to choose from would certainly deserve his tip.

We asked our team & clients this very question & common phrases we heard were “relevance”, “real-time”, “optimisation” and “user experience” - all core elements of the Cognitive Match system.

One client commented “Cognitive Match allows websites to react to their audience, transforming them from dumb shop fronts to active salesmen.” Of course, in our physical lives this personalisation isn’t just limited to retail but occurs all the time.

But what about online? Our Matching Engine is perfect for e-commerce but also has a broader reach – from publishers to advertising – allowing a better visitor experience across the whole of the online world.

Asking why we were different, many identified that being a fast, reliable and real-time system offers great advantages over traditional offline data analysis due to the constantly changing nature of online visitors. The ability to optimise content for the individual user instead of settling for 'one size fits all' was highly valued by online marketing professionals. Core to this is to identify visitors behaviour – and now Cognitive Match offers marketing professionals a tool to identify and target them in real-time.

Driving Cognitive Match’s innovation is an active academic panel comprised of some of the leading minds in Europe supporting our in-house research and development teams. This allows Cognitive Match to be a leader in making online experience more relevant, which in turn makes our clients more successful.

Tell us... What does Cognitive Match mean to you?
Comment or follow us on twitter (@cognitivematch)

All you need to do is read the replies to see the general sentiment, which varies between “I did this a while ago to my Facebook… if you are an early 20s woman, the ads are almost all for diet pills” to “just get an ad blocker”.

What seems clear is this: The variance within gender can be greater than the variance beween genders

What that means is that quite frankly today I might behave like a typical “male”, and tomorrow, when looking at something else, like a “typical” female.   That undermines much of gender-based targeting, and supports the premise of the LifeHacker posters: that simplistic gender targeting can be self-defeating.

I’m a big advocate of using ALL possible sources of data to drive targeting, of course, but only in a way that takes into account what is most important for each single targeting event.  Otherwise, beyond complying with marketers preconceived segmentation notions, targeting won’t actually deliver returns…

In a week when our New York team move into their new offices on Park Avenue, our international reach & multiculturalism will continue to take the company from strength to strength.

Click here to see where in the world our team members come from.

]]> http://www.cognitivematch.com/node/77 Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:20:27 -0400 Lucy We are looking for an experienced Ad Operations Manager to join the rapidly expanding team in London.

You need to have 3/5 years hands on Ad Ops experience and a good range of experience across various Ad Servers.  You will be responsible for account managing your various clients across the UK and EMEA, troubleshooting issues that may effect tracking, implementation and reporting.

Interested? Please send your CV to lucy.chapman@cognitivematch.com

Photo Credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Watch the full video interview here

Arseniy has over 4 years’ experience of software development in both corporate and startup environments, most recently with Amdocs. Prior to that, he took part in developing JSystem open-source test automation framework. Arseniy is a graduate of the Israel Open University in Computer Science.

Cathrin Kihl also joined us this month as office manager, Cathrin looks after our expanding Mayfair office & is likely to be the first person you speak to when you call us! Cathrin has many years’ experience in the digital media industry & will also be executive assistant to Cognitive Match CEO, Alex Kelleher.

Alex Kelleher comments, “We’re really pleased to welcome Arseniy, Sion, Sten, Robert & Cathrin to our team; as our company grows, it’s critical we continue to provide both a cutting edge product & fantastic service – having an exceptional team is at the core of this.”

Photo shows (left to right): Arseniy, Robert, Sten, Sion & Cathrin outside our Mayfair offices.

“We’re really pleased to be invited to the iGaming Super Show after huge interest at the EGR Live event in London last year. Online gambling companies have always been at the forefront of innovation in online marketing and as such they are ideal clients for us.” says Glen.

Do contact us to book an appointment to meet our team in Prague.

From Monday 17th May we look forward to welcoming you at 26a Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4HY.  (map)

Walmsley explains the Cognitive Match system, stating that ‘information such as location, the site from which the user linked or what they searched for and time of day are combined with known actions from previous site visits to present a version of the page that emphasises products the user has a higher propensity to buy.’

Read the full article here

Our development team has also expanded; Marcel Dziedzic now looking after the client facing UI design and Liviu Tudor joined us as a Senior Java Developer. Marcel has over 5 years experience of UI design, working on a number of large scale projects including MyBuilder, NetPlayTV & MrTed, while Liviu has been working in senior development positions for a number of years, in both corporate and startup environments, most recently with Vibrant Media.

To service our ever growing international client base, Kristy Shipman joins to head up US Business Development. Kristy is based in our new San Francisco office & her experience spans multiple SaaS solutions including most recently, Meltwater Group.

We welcome David, Marcel, Liviu & Kristy to our ever growing team!

(Photo, left to right: Liviu Tudor, Marcel Dziedzic, David Stobs-Stobart & Kristy Shipman)

Chad Raube, partner at Dawn and board member at Cognitive Match, commented: “Our continued support of Cognitive Match reflects the fact that the team has launched with several blue chip clients while proving the science behind the product is both scalable and dramatically improves the response rates, and ultimately profitability of online businesses.  We are even more confident that Cognitive Match is positioned to set the benchmark for delivering content relevance and behavioral insight in the online arena.”

CEO Alex Kelleher commented, “We are delighted with Dawn Capital’s continued support, both financially and in helping our business to grow.  This additional funding will enable us to enhance our sales and business development activities to more rapidly address the high levels of demand, that have exceeded even our own expectations.  At the same time, it ensures that we can continue to deliver increased profitability to existing Clients.  The internet is now all about data, and Cognitive Match delivers maximum value from that data to its Clients.”

Download the full press release (PDF)

Ben Geach, Technical Account Manager, commented; "We're proud to have been awarded this prestigious certification, which cements our commitment to our client's privacy. TRUSTe are an ideal partner for us as market leaders in the field of online compliance."

We'd be happy to talk to you about any aspect of our privacy policy or any of our products, just get in touch.

BVCA has recognised Cognitive Match as one of Britain’s most exciting young companies and praised us for our invention and innovation in the area of online real-time optimisation. Read more

Glen Conybeare, Co-Founder & Commercial director at Cognitive Match will be delivering a 1 hour presentation on how realtime optimisation can significantly increase conversion of site visitors into depositing players as well as increasing cross-sell opportunities for existing players.

Cable companies are in fact ideally positioned to collect and process this data, as they provide the infrastructure for millions of customers to engage with digital media.  The benefits of relevance can of course be substantial to the end-user.  However, privacy concerns remain, which is why light data processing and a focus on context is a benefit.  In addition, this kind of data tends to be the most predictive, and is therefore the focus of Cognitive Match’s solutions. The Panel discussed this opportunity as a way of liberating ARPU for the cable industry, an industry that is currently being challenged by content-providers that are delivering business models "over the top" of the cable companies’ bandwidth infrastructure.