Saturday, March 28, 2009

Start Hunching!



Hunch.com is a website that I have been invited to by a genius friend, Volkan, from high school. I say genius, because he is really one (MIT Engineering, full scholarship) but maybe I should leave my praising of Volkan for another blog entry.
The email he sent looked like this: "What's Hunch? It's a new way to help you make decisions and solve problems. Because Hunch is powered by user input, it gets smarter each time someone contributes to it. But what decisions, what problems? You name it. Volkan Gurel thought you might be particularly be interested in: *Laptops. "So accepting my friend's personal invite (you can only log on with a personal invite from someone who is already registered and Volkan works for them), I actually went onto the website to try the test for laptops. It asked me a couple of questions, some are somehow related to laptops, some completely off. The final result it gave me was actually the laptop I had bought a year ago. I was pretty impressed!
However, I didn't restart thinking about this website till I was studying for the midterm and going over Web 2.0. The power of collaboration among people and high interactivity rates were the underlying roots of this website since it is designed to help you make decisions through asking you 10 questions or less powered by collective knowledge.
So what could be the implications for e-marketing? Could marketers utilize this service through asking you totally unrelated questions about a topic but still find out your views on it? It could be used for doing customer research on more sensitive topics that people be more reluctant to answer questions about. Limits on individual human intelligence may be traceable, but there are no boundaries for collective intelligence!

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