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A new open-source API, Seldon, wants to remove the demand on data scientists by making it easy to plug-in algorithms which can recommend content to customers, offer app personalisation, and other complicated-but-powerful features. Aimed at media and e-commerce companies, it is available as a free self-hosted product or as a hosted cloud-based version.
“Our proven algorithms and scalable platform are already serving recommendations to hundreds of millions of people each month across some of the world’s leading media and e-commerce brands,” Seldon writes on their website.
Seldon started life as a Foursquare rival in the UK under the name of ‘Rummble’ in 2009. A couple of years later, the company decided to offer its recommendation engine to third parties under their slightly-tweaked name of Rummble Labs.
Demand for personalisation is increasing to help companies provide a better end-user experience
Although now having a complete re-brand, Seldon’s formula is similar to its product in 2011 but hoping to attract a wider-market. The company’s CEO, Alex Housley, wants to attract everyone from startups to giant multi-national corporations who wish to implement prediction algorithms into their products.
“We help the world’s leading media and e-commerce companies leverage cutting edge big data technologies, machine learning algorithms, and social data, to provide the most intelligent solution for personalisation, recommendation and targeting,” Seldon writes.
The demand for personalisation is increasing to help companies provide a better end-user experience and offer a differentiator from competitors. As a result of this, companies are hiring in-house data scientists at a growing rate who will be assisted by the use of tools such as Seldon rather than having to build new algorithms.
Seldon is currently taking requests for its private beta, before performing a staged-rollout in early-2015 over the next few months .As most commercial open-source projects, Seldon will charge for their hosted solution and for support packages of those using the free, self-hosted version of their platform.
You can take a look at Seldon’s offerings, find more information, and sign-up for the private beta if interested here.
What do you think about Seldon’s predictive API? Let us know in the comments.
