The Four Seasons

Picking up on my last post, my wife and I just stayed at the Four Seasons Scottsdale to celebrate our first anniversary. This was my first experience staying at a Four Seasons for anything but a quick business trip, and it was wonderful. One of the things that struck me the most was how personalized the experience was. From the moment I made the reservation (on the phone), they started discretely asking questions – was this my first time staying, were we there for business or pleasure, special occasion, etc. Conversational, to the point that I almost didn’t notice that I was being questioned.

When we got there, we were greeted with a Happy Anniversary. At the restaurant that evening, the Maitre D, waiters, staff all knew it was our anniversary. At the end of dinner, brought us out a complementary Happy Anniversary desert. This happened throughout the stay, always discrete in the Four Seasons way.
I can see some ways in which a technology-only solution could have figured this all out (although Hilton, with all their CRM technology, didn’t on our wedding night, despite the fact we had also blocked a dozen or rooms rooms for our wedding guests, and that I am Diamond in their HHonors program).

But the “Just Ask Them” approach the Four Seasons uses guaranteed a highly personalized, and enjoyable, stay.

Personalized Search – Hype?

Via Battelle:

“Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo begs to differ with all the hype around personalized search (including in my book), and the idea of major engines mining your clickstream to better understand your intent (and give you more personalized ads, of course). In a short paper outlining his views, (PDF download), he outlines five major problems with personalized search and concludes:

…. search personalization is likely to waste the talents of top computer scientists. It may even give worse results…”

The key problem brought up in the paper is that of inference. Can you infer what a person wants from the actions she takes? This is not only an issue for search – it is, more broadly, a key issue for behavioral advertising as a whole.

Valdes-Perez ended the article by saying “the best personalization is done by persons themselves”. At a high level, I agree. I’ve wondered for a while why few people have really explored the approach that I’ll call “Just Ask Them”.

Perhaps the best targeted advertising system around is Amazon’s book recommendation system. They are successful precisely because they use information provided by other users to help you find what you are looking for. Yes, there is a lot of math involved, but the math is “just” to automate the understanding of the volunteered information.

What is yapaZOO?

Welcome to the yapaZOO blog!

Yes, this is yet another blog about yet another stealth stage company. Yes, we know this is a little annoying, and we promise not to keep everyone in the dark too long.

So given that we’re not ready to say what exactly we’re doing, why are we writing a blog? Well, we enjoy reading blogs and have grown a little tired of just contributing via comments on other blogs. We’ll still do that, of course, but thought we would share our ideas from this little soapbox as well. Of course, we’re hoping to get people interested in yapaZOO, but more importantly, we are hoping to share, discuss, and refine our ideas with anyone who happens upon our site.

What will we be talking about? Our general interests (yapaZOO related interests anyway) are centered around Attention, Search (and its Opposite), Filters, Spyware and Adware, and Online Marketing. I am sure I am missing something, but we can deal with that later.