Aggregate Knowledge Unveils Strategy for Leading Online Discovery Market

Deployed on the websites of some of the world's largest online retailers and media companies, Aggregate Knowledge is already powering over 50 million unique visitors per month for its customers. Blue Chip investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as well as DAG Ventures, recently announced an investment of $20 million in the company, bringing total investment to $25 million dollars.

Aggregate Knowledge's Discovery Service instantly analyzes the behavior of other users to suggest additional content that users might want but could not find or did not know existed. To facilitate these serendipitous discoveries, Aggregate Knowledge employs a super computing architecture aggregating billions of anonymous data points in real time. The result is a dynamic series of optimized suggestions that capture and adapt to rapidly changing online consumer behavior. Aggregate Knowledge's Discovery Service is offered as a web service that can be deployed in as little as two weeks and offers a unique pay-for-performance business model.

The company was founded by Paul Martino and Chris Law, both founders of the social networking company Tribe.net, which was recently acquired by Cisco. While at Tribe, Martino observed that what people do on the web, where they go, and what they read reveals much more about them than the words they type into a search box. Martino and Law based Aggregate Knowledge on the premise that they could offer users greater visibility into a broader range of relevant content by finding the implicit associations between items as demonstrated by the widening array of Internet user behavior.

Aggregate Knowledge's Product Roadmap for Discovery

Aggregate Knowledge has a five-point strategy for leading the Discovery market. The strategy is embodied by its current and future service offerings detailed below.

Discovery for Retail(TM) deploys on customer sites as a window displaying the familiar "people who bought this also bought..." to help retail sites suggest relevant, follow-on products to shoppers. Currently deployed across numerous retailers, Discovery for Retail achieves breakthroughs in sales, customer conversion, shopping cart size and site ease-of-use for online retailers. Over 20% of the holiday sales of Overstock.com, for example, came through the Aggregate Knowledge Discovery Window.

Discovery for Media(TM) meets the ultimate discovery challenge by delivering relevant online content in a dynamic environment. For example, when news breaks, Aggregate Knowledge responds by tracking real-time reader behavior and adapting its content delivery to meet emerging consumer interests and associations. By surfacing relevant additional articles, Aggregate Knowledge Discovery for Media achieves significantly higher click-through rates (CTRs), higher page views and elevated reader time-at-site. Discovery for Media currently powers the Discovery Window for the WashingtonPost.com, among other media sites. Discovery for Media is ideal for high volume community and social network sites often characterized by large volumes of unstructured and difficult-to-navigate content.

Collective Discovery Network(TM): Currently in internal beta and planned for availability in the fourth quarter of 2007, Aggregate Knowledge's Collective Discovery Network is the industry's first service to enable discovery across multiple online sites. Content from a retail site, for example, can be easily associated to related news articles from a different site by virtue of the identified, overlapping community interest. This filtering approach creates a larger, richer and more relevant collection of information for users than could ever be offered by a single site alone. The net effect is that site operators can ensure that they are always delivering the most relevant content, which leads to increased site usage and higher ROI.

Discovery for Email(TM): Using the prior purchases of a user on a retail site, Aggregate Knowledge can generate personalized emails informing consumers of products that are relevant to their purchase history. Results to date have been impressive, with 40% more sales for retailers versus non-personalized email. In addition, suggestions for products can be drawn from a site's full range of products instead of selecting only a few items for massive distribution.

Discovery for Mobile(TM) and Other Devices: Aggregate Knowledge is working with corporations on beta products that will bring discovery to devices such as mobile phones and television set top boxes. In addition, it is working with major retailers on services that allow the knowledge gained by the behavior of other online shoppers to be leveraged in brick and mortar stores at the point of sale.

"The media world is exploding with an ever-increasing volume of content choices, and consumers desperately need more sophisticated methods of guidance and navigation to find what they're interested in," said Tim Hanlon, senior vice president at Denuo, the media futures consulting unit of Publicis Groupe, the world's fourth-largest communications services company. "Intuitive search, personalized recommendation and 'wisdom-of-crowds' discovery -- like that offered by Aggregate Knowledge -- are all poised to bring long-overdue intelligence to the media delivery and consumption equation, to the delight of viewers and readers everywhere."