NextUser Taps IBM Watson to Improve Marketing Strategies and Personalize User Experiences

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 9, 2015) - Today NextUser, an open marketing automation and analytics platform, announced it is leveraging IBM Watson's cognitive computing capabilities to help companies provide personalized digital marketing strategies. The NextUser software solution, powered by Watson, will give marketers the ability to better personalize communication to individual users via websites, emails, ads, social media and mobile devices.

"Applying IBM Watson to commerce represents a new opportunity for subscription and content websites to offer more personalized user experiences, which ultimately drives more business," said Matthieu Dejardins, CEO of NextUser. "IBM's strength in natural language processing and Watson's unrivaled cognitive computing technologies will help our business analyze and make sense of unstructured data to meet the increasingly sophisticated marketing needs of consumer websites. We believe that building knowledge about individual user preferences at scale will help revolutionize online consumer marketing."

Alibris.com, an ecommerce book seller, is working with NextUser to help users explore the writing style and specific traits of their top authors in order to discover new books and interests.

"Our mission at Alibris is for our users to find that perfect book they can't put down. We have millions of books, which makes the discovery process one of the most important, but also intriguing, challenges we face as a company," said Ben Bartels, eCommerce director at Alibris.com. "With NextUser, powered by IBM Watson, Alibris can now offer some of the best -- and most unique suggestions that will enhance our customers' reading experience based on their favorite authors' style of writing. The technology behind this is incredibly exciting, and you'll see us continue to evolve this experience." 

NextUser is an open platform that bridges the gap between analytics, discovery analytics, and marketing automation to enable user personalization that increases engagement, conversion and lifetime customer value. The platform utilizes the patent pending NextUser Decision Engine to integrate data and trigger interactions from channels including email, website, CRM and social media, and processes user activity with history, device, location, campaign, demographic and geographic data -- helping to ensure marketers are reaching consumers when and where they're most receptive to outreach.

By embedding Watson services and APIs from the Watson Developer Cloud, NextUser is strengthening the capabilities of its Decision Engine by adding natural language processing technology and deeper analysis in order to produce results with both cognitive and social characteristics, harnessing linguistic analytics to understand personality, writing style and social characteristics from text.

NextUser is gaining traction from consumer brands, political campaigns, advertisers, and other organizations that understand they must move beyond pure marketing automation to focus on user centricity.

IBM Watson continues to foster a growing ecosystem of developers, students, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts worldwide by placing the power of cognitive computing in their hands via more than 20 Watson services available on the Watson Developer Cloud, allowing them to discover, explore and create an entirely new class of apps and businesses fueled by Watson. The community is already generating up to 3 billion monthly API requests, demonstrating the growing interest and adoption of this open platform. Across industries and specialties, IBM and its more than 280 commercial partners, along with tens of thousands of tech enthusiasts, are working together to make cognitive computing systems the new computing standard.

About NextUser
NextUser is an open marketing automation and analytics platform that contextualizes the user experience through its patent-pending Decision Engine. Founded in 2013, NextUser's mission is to empower consumer websites to coordinate marketing across user channels to increase engagement, conversion and lifetime value of their customers. NextUser's open platform helps orchestrate communication across website, email, customer support, CRM, Ad Retargeting, social media, and more data collection points. NextUser was selected as a finalist from among 2,000 competitors for the Extreme Tech Challenge to pitch Sir Richard Branson at Neckar Island.

For more information, please visit http://www.nextuser.com. Follow NextUser on Facebook and Twitter.

IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
Watson is the first commercially available cognitive computing capability representing a new era in computing. The system, delivered through the cloud, analyzes high volumes of data, understands complex questions posed in natural language, and proposes evidence-based answers. Watson continuously learns, gaining in value and knowledge over time, from previous interactions. With the help of Watson, developers and partners are building apps and services that harness the power of cognitive computing to transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and solve important challenges.

For more information on IBM Watson, visit: ibm.com/watsonecosystem. Check out the IBM Watson press kit at: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27297.wss

To join the social discussion about Watson, include the hashtag #ibmwatson. Follow Watson on Facebook and see Watson on YouTube and Flickr.