Author Archive for: craigbassin

How to Drive Revenue Through the Roof

The first premise in this discussion is the enormous number of shoppers that start on their Smartphones, then abandon the search and finish later on their desktop. This is the ‘norm’ for mobile shoppers. This begs the question, ‘WHY?’ Why did they fail to purchase the first time?

Read More

Most analysts agree that the next big thing in IT involves Natural Language Processing (NLP), semantic search. It’s a big thing because it will allow non-subject matter experts obtain answers to questions using only natural language to pose their queries.

Read More

‘Cognitive’ is everywhere these days. IBM Watson is pushing the concepts of Cognitive Computing from cancer research to cooking recipes. VPAs (virtual personal assistants) are gaining acceptance and adoption. Just look at the explosion behind Amazon’s Alexa. Every technology show I attend has a few vendors now showing their Alexa interface and sometimes it even works. We’re all talking at boxes and we expect those boxes to understand. iPhones, Androids, PlayStations, TV remotes, HeySiri, OKGoogle, etc.

Read More

Without trying to be too dramatic here, everything has now changed.  The world has shifted.  We are in the midst of a technology paradigm shift.  Thank you, Siri.

Here’s the how and the why of it.  As CEO of EasyAsk, I’m certainly attentive to my company’s needs.  I have to confess, I’m one of those guys who checks on my business at the traffic light.  Yes, I know.  I’m sorry.  But, as one of those guys, I’ve also seen plenty of others driving down the road, weaving across the lanes, and working their smartphones while driving – an accident waiting to happen.

Siri fixes all of that.  Yes, there have been dictation products on the market for awhile, allowing you to press a button, dictate your text or email, send and done.   But what Siri can do goes beyond what you have seen on a smartphone before – it understands the intent of the question.  Why?  Because there’s a Natural Language engine embedded within Siri.

We all cheered when IBM Watson won on Jeopardy!  And we might see what Watson can do when applied to large problems like healthcare.  But Watson ran on a network of computers that could run the Starship Enterprise.  Siri sits in the very palm of your hand using the multitude of services available on the Internet.  Siri will be in the hands of a hundred million consumers.  Watson will cost a hundred million dollars.  Okay, maybe not that much, but you get my drift.

Back to the paradigm shift concept – With Apple Siri on every iPhone or iPad and eventually on your computers, EVERYONE will reap the benefits of voice recognition on top of natural language.  It will become the standard way we all communicate with our computers, tablets, smartphones, and more – interactively, intelligently, naturally.  Ask your question EXACTLY as you would to a live human being and you’ll get what you asked for.  This is the advantage of natural language.  THIS is the paradigm shift.

But how does this apply to the business world?  That’s where EasyAsk steps in. 

Want your customers to find products faster and easier?  Give them a better shopping experience no matter where they search from – iPhone, iPad, PC, Mac, Android, etc.  Allow them to ask for exactly what they want, ‘Ladies blue blouses under $50’.  Magically, blue blouses start appearing. EasyAsk gives your e-commerce site that, and so much more.

Now take it one step farther.  Apply this concept to your business..  You are walking into an investor meeting and want the latest sales figures.  Push a button on your smartphone and ask, ‘What was closed revenue versus forecast last month’? EasyAsk displays both the actual and forecasted sales figures!  You’ve got the answer and your investors know you are on top of things.  Now you’re talkin’! (Pun intended). 

We’ve now taken real business productivity and made it ubiquitous.  You can find the right information faster via the same natural language interface on your smartphone and your computer.  We’re interactive, we’re intelligent and it’s all natural.  Paradigm shift indeed.  Give us a call or send us a note.  We’ll help you get it done, naturally.

I heard the sad news an hour ago.  Steve Jobs passed away.  My reaction was immediate.  Loss.  Steve envisioned everything I love in our technology world.  He was brilliant.  He was fearless.  He had the courage of his convictions.  He took on the world and made no apologies. 

Think about it for a minute.  Apple competed with EVERYONE !  They competed with all the PC manufacturers back in the ‘80’s.  They competed with the largest software company in the world, Microsoft.  They competed with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell . . EVERY hardware manufacturer, almost every software company. 

APPLE did it their way, Steve’s way.  He had a vision and he never let go of it.  I loved (and bought) everything Apple ever built . . .  well, except for the Newton.  OK, no one’s perfect.  Good idea and they got it right decades later with the IPAD. 

I’ll never forget the 1984 ad introducing the Macintosh, (directed by Ridley Scott) that ran during the Super Bowl.  You could have knocked me over with a feather at the conclusion of that ad.  And it never ran again.  Are you kidding me?!

Who had the moxie, the chutzpah, the pure audacity to take on IBM like that?  One shot, but unforgettable.  Brilliant.

And, years later, after building Apple Computer into a $2 billion company, . . .  they fired him.  Maybe one of the most successful marketing moves since New Coke.  No, really.  New Coke was fabulously successful.  Not for the product, but for stimulating an unprecedented demand for Classic Coke.  The net effect was to propel Coca Cola back into first place vs. Pepsi.  Steve said his firing was one of the best things that could have happened to him.  Off he went to start NeXT Computer, then in his spare time, spun off the Graphics Group from Lucasfilm, creating Pixar.

Pixar !  What Steve had done for the PC world, he now did for the world of animation.  Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and many more.  26 Academy Awards,  7 Golden Globes, 3 Emmys.  He later sold it to Disney for a lousy $7.4 billion, becoming the largest single stockholder at Disney.  Astounding.

NeXT was, of course, acquired by Apple in 1997.  Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?  Steve rejoined the company and served as CEO from 1997 until a few months ago. 

Steve Jobs, thank you for my iPhone, my iPad, my Macintosh(s).  Thanks for iTunes, iBooks.  Thanks for defining ‘intuitive’ and building it into every Apple product.  Thank you for your commencement speech at Stanford, 2005.  If you haven’t had a chance to read the speech here is a link to it.

I sent this to everyone here at EasyAsk and to my 3 young adult children.  I’d strongly recommend you set aside a few minutes of your time.  It will touch your soul.

Most of all, thank you for being one hell of a role model as visionary, leader and CEO. 

And thank YOU for taking the time to read this. 

The world has lost a giant . . .

Endeca customers … when is the last time you looked at how much you are paying Endeca annually?

You might want to take a second look at that.  While it might have looked like the right decision at the time, you’re now drowning in the annual maintenance costs.  And for what?  A search box that really doesn’t work very well.  In fact, it’s hardly functional.  Frustrated visitors who leave your site because they could not find what they wanted?

EasyAsk has a radically new idea!  A search box that actually WORKS!  Plus you will have rich, easy to use analytics and tools that allow your team to tune your search faster and easier than you ever dreamed.  Add to that, we’ve have all the navigation and merchandizing features you’d ever want or need.

Most importantly, your shoppers can find what they want THE VERY FIRST TIME.  If they can find it quickly, they’ll probably buy it.  That’s called customer conversion and no one does it better than us.  Imagine giving your customers the ability to search for ‘ladies blue blouses under $50‘ and immediately delivering the exact product(s).  Try that with Endeca.  Good luck. 

We’ll bring you all the advantages of IBM/Watson to your e-commerce site, but we’ll deliver it NOW and we can get your site up and running in a couple of weeks.  Best of all, we can provide all the benefits that EasyAsk has to offer in an on-premise model or hosted SaaS from one company, with the very best search technology in the industry.

Switch to EasyAsk and you will get superior e-commerce search functionality and your annual Total Cost of Ownership will go down dramatically.  Best of all, you customer conversion rates will go up.  We guarantee it.

Give us a call or feel free to send me an email.  I’m [email protected].  We’ll dramatically cut your costs and increase your bottom line profits. 

Thanks for listening.  Craig

Watson, come here, I need you. (to be clear, Mr. is at the beginning of this quote) Famous phrase uttered by Alexander Graham Bell, the voice-over-wire transmission. 

Elementary, my dear Watson.  A famous Sherlock Holmes line, never written by Arthur Conan Doyle, by the way.  Straight out of the movies.

So, Watson has always been widely recognized.  But now Watson is EVERYWHERE , and with good reason.  We congratulate IBM for their impressive (and expensive) accomplishments in building a Natural Language solution designed to win at Jeopardy.  We understand the enormity of the challenge.  After all, we’ve been building Natural Language solutions for Ecommerce and Business Solutions for a decade. 

What IBM Watson did for Jeopardy, we do for you, our customers.  If you’re an EasyAsk ecommerce customer, we put the search results on the very first page.  Every time.  If you’re using EasyAsk for Business, we provide your end users instant answers to their complex questions like:  ‘who bought products last year, but not last quarter?’ 

 So we can be your own company ‘Watson’, except for one thing.  Watson got a few questions wrong.  When we deploy our solutions on your site:

. . .  we won’t put your business in jeopardy.