eBay has acquired recommendation engine Hunch, with the aim of improving eBay’s personalized recommendations.
Hunch has been around for a couple years now. The company’s stated mission is to “build a ‘taste graph’ of the entire web, connecting every person on the web with their affinity for anything, from books to electronic gadgets to fashion or vacation spots.”
Here’s a video that it explains what it’s about:
Hunch Intro – Homepage version from Hunch on Vimeo.
“We’ll be tackling all kinds of interesting challenges as part of eBay including predictive merchandising, interpreting unstructured data and creating merchant insights,” Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon says on the company’s blog.
@cdixon
chris dixonThis happened: http://t.co/D63K77os Thanks to everyone at hunch and nyc tech community.
49 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto
“We are engaging consumers in innovative ways and attracting top technologists to shape the future of commerce,” said Mark Carges, eBay CTO and SVP, Global Products, Marketplaces. “With Hunch, we’re adding new capabilities to personalizing the shopping experience on eBay to the individual relevant tastes and interests of our customers. We expect Hunch’s technologies to benefit eBay shoppers as they browse and buy, and to bring sellers on eBay new ways to connect the right products with the right customers.”
Hunch.com will continue to operate as a standalone site, and the data that users have already shared will be governed by the company’s existing privacy policy.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Michael Arrington believes the price to be somewhere around $80 million.
