Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Sociocast Networks introduced this week its personalization and discovery technology, which will blossom first in a fashion site to be privately tested in October. Based on a combination of artificial intelligence and social network dynamics, the content delivery platform aims to leverage “associative memories” and “influencer networks” to help users find the information they want without having to create filters to encapsulate their desires.

“Sociocast is next-generation personalization,” says Ari Goldberg, co-founder and chief channel officer, an expert system providing content ranging from products to articles to persons to advertisements based on the understanding it gains of individual preferences. If making those kinds of recommendations sounds like what Amazon does, it is … but, says Goldberg, to a more advanced degree.

“We aren’t claiming we are smarter,” he says. “We just ask the same questions with a new set of tools for more accurate recommendations based on algorithms we have put together.”

It’s moving forward with its proprietary technology for standardizing data and creating attributes around content that enable Sociocast to create relationships among objects and with events, people or other content. “Everyone is talking about the semantic web and web 3.0 and the intelligent web, that it will all work once someone retags the entire web,” he says. “That’s a gigantic leap of faith, especially with exponentially more data coming online. We can’t be reliant on this, so we do it ourselves.”

Sociocast, he says, experiences your life, beginning with a registration process that starts the system off learning about you, then follows that up by capturing each click on the site as an event.

“Our brains don’t store data, they store associations,” Goldberg says in reference to the associative memory aspect of the technology. “So if I am on a fashion site and click on a Bottega bag — as a person you think this is pretty and I need this. But to our technology that is a collection of 300 attributes, the bag has certain weaving, leather, handles, etc.” Your passive experience looking at that item has enabled the site to accumulate information about certain characteristics that appeal to you, which helps it to curate your experience there and helps you discover the information you are most likely to want.

That information married with influencer networks is the secret sauce. “One of the real keys to the technology is Albert’s [Albert Azout, founder and chief executive] understanding that so much interesting information, expertise, and knowledge can be extracted from the way networks organize. Networks form organically,” says Goldberg. “We have created the world’s first influencer network in fashion.”

Unlike MySpace, for example, you don’t connect with someone in the virtual world because you are friends, but because you want that someone to influence your experience — in much the same way that, in the real world, you may be influenced to wear dark skinny jeans by seeing them on your favorite celebrity.

“Friendships as ratings are over-rated — we might not like our friends because of what they wear but because they’re funny or loyal or for many other reasons,” he says. Under Sociocast’s platform, a 21-year old may never be friends with Vogue editor Anna Wintour, but on the upcoming Sociocast fashion site, she can certainly be influenced by the fact that Wintour associates with certain products. “If Sociocast creates a memory for this fashion industry expert and for me, I can go about and be influenced by that person,” Goldberg says. For the debut of its platform in the fashion space, it has hand-picked 15,000 fashion influencers and invited them to join the system.

Goldberg sees this site as a step to the future, where, he says, consumers, brand retailers, content providers and expert influencers can all play together. That includes helping brands identify the next ‘tipping points,’ as consumers start to cluster around particular things their influencer networks are associating with. Or leading to a more personalized experience on the retailer’s own site.

“The future will be dominated by data and technology,” says Goldberg. “We can leverage data to help retailers and content producers while helping the consumer.” For example, if the best way to service a consumer is to send her to a brand’s own web site, why not personalize that experience using Sociocast’s ported memory from the start — so, for example, that a woman going to polo.com isn’t offered men’s clothes, or outfits in colors she hates. “That just makes you more efficient from a consumer perspective, and from a retailer perspective, it’s more likely that with a happy customer you’ll sell more products.”

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