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Technology Stocks : Net Perceptions, Inc. (NETP) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: papazitto who wrote (2012)	11/19/1999 4:59:00 AM
From: allen menglin chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2908

USA TODAY story about NETP: Why the price is often right, By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY The ability to compare one person's actions against a database of what thousands of others have done makes personalization and differential pricing possible. One company that does it is Net Perceptions, a Minneapolis firm that builds analytical database programs it calls "recommendation engines." Say a merchant notices that, based on past buying behavior, a customer is interested in things on sale. "I might recommend that when you're on the site, I'd check to see what was on my overstock list that might be of interest to you, and offer you a 45% discount," says Steve Larsen, vice president for marketing. That kind of offer won't work without recommendation programs that make a pretty good guess at what a given customer wants, because "giving you something at 45% discount with no relevance to you isn't going to work," he says. Prices already are more fluid than we imagine, Larsen says. His company wrote an add-on program for auction site Bid.com that figures out what items you might need and offers you a discount on them. It works by comparing the items in your shopping cart with similar purchases by other customers, then making a statistical guess about what else you want based on what others buying similar groupings have bought. "If you buy one or two items and our recommendation engine comes up with a third item, it's usually 20% or 30% off," Larsen says. "The rationale is there's already a truck coming to your house and a box open, so it's OK to offer a discount because the company will still make money." Differential pricing won't work for everything, says Michael Krupit, a technologist with CDnow. With commodity items such as CDs, which are exactly comparable and low margin, price isn't the deciding factor. Personalization can get his customers the content, merchandise and features that most interest them, but "it's not like we're going to give you a bargain that we wouldn't give to someone else," Krupit says. That doesn't mean CDnow won't give you some incentives, says Krupit, whose company uses a recommendation program built by Net Perceptions. Visit too many times without buying and the site might pop up a "Hey, you haven't bought anything from us recently. Here's a $5-off coupon" notice on the screen, he says. But beware: What can seem like individual pricing may be something entirely different. One CDnow customer noticed that if he put items on his "wish list," the third or fourth time he stopped by the site they suddenly were on sale. While that might have seemed personal, it wasn't, Krupit says. "If Melissa Manchester is on your wish list and we find her on a lot of people's wish lists, she'll go on sale -- for everyone." usatoday.com

To: papazitto who wrote (2012)	11/19/1999 5:14:00 AM
From: allen menglin chen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2908

news.cnet.com Net marketers to develop user data standards By Reuters Special to CNET News.com November 15, 1999, 4:30 a.m. PT SAN FRANCISCO--Internet marketers should move a step closer today to knowing just about everything about everybody in cyberspace, when nearly 25 makers of Internet marketing, tracking and analysis applications announce they are building a standard way to create, store and exchange data on Web users. CPEX, which stands for Customer Profile Exchange, is targeting the release of the first version of the standard for June 2000. Quote Snapshot ORCL 74.19 +3.19 VIGN 164.62 -0.62 SEBL 75.94 +5.94 NETP 95.63 +62.13 More from CNET Investor Quotes delayed 20+ minutes The CPEX standard would enable an e-commerce site that stores customer information in an Oracle database, for example, to combine that data with information collected by telemarketers for its print catalog. "Businesses don't have a good picture of who their customers are and what they need, so they can't service them well," said Matt Cutler, co-founder and chief e-business intelligence officer for net.Genesis of Cambridge, Mass., a maker of Web site analysis software. "It's our organization's point of view that having an integrated customer view is critical, because, in the Net economy, your competition is just a click away." The announcement by CPEX is due at the Personalization Summit, a conference sponsored by Net Perceptions on the role of personalization marketing. Proponents of Web tracking like to call it personalization--the back-end applications that let Web users sign up for regular stock quotes, get the local weather and be greeted by name when they log onto a portal. It is even more useful for marketers, who can use the same collected information to target ads and promotions based on users' profiles. To do that, marketers and Web publishers rely on a variety of applications from a range of vendors, most of them providing only a piece of the puzzle. It is often difficult to merge the personal data collected when a user buys a product online, for example, with that collected as he or she clicks around from Web site to Web site. Vignette, an Austin, Texas-based software maker, got the CPEX ball rolling. The consortium is chaired by Siebel Systems, with marketing co-chaired by net.Genesis and Vignette. Working side by side will be several companies that are fierce rivals, such as Andromedia and net.Genesis, and Oracle and Siebel. "It will remain the decision support system that differentiates companies," said Brad Husick, vice president of standards and evangelism for Vignette. "We're saying we shouldn't argue over the language we speak, but over what we do with that information and the certain conclusions we derive." Aberdeen Group analyst Donovan Gow said the CPEX initiative appears to be strong. "One impressive thing they've done in the short time they've been around is signing up a stellar list of participants, getting traction pretty quickly," Gow said. "Next, they'll have to prove to the end user that it's in their interest to share the information, and hope it catches on." However, as those end users find out more about the tracking and data mining that is going on, some are starting to balk. "There's an old saying that if you automate a mess, you just get a bigger mess," said consumer advocate Jason Catlett, who operates a site called JunkBusters. "The sharing of personal information is a big mess in this country right now. That said, the CPEX developers are clearly thinking about privacy because they know it's a potential party-stopper." Catlett's site offers information on how consumers can hide from marketers online and off. Catlett said CPEX will make it much easier for marketers to trade consumer profiles, requiring infrastructure to ensure the fair handling of consumer information. He said he had been briefed by CPEX and is encouraged. "I think it's a good idea if standards provide a way for companies to easily abide by fair information practices," he said. The plan is to include a way to embed privacy controls in the CPEX standardized information. Forrester analyst Eric Schmitt says this is probably in response to the Federal Trade Commission's workshop on consumer privacy online, held on Nov. 8. "The most immediate benefits of a standard data model for a customer are clearly to the corporations, not to individuals," Schmitt said. "CPEX, by nature of the environment we're in now, is going to be under pressure to do more than develop this standard in an ethical vacuum. They'll be more sensitized to the privacy concerns."