Jack Jia, CEO of Baynote, talks social interaction

I talked to Jack Jia, the CEO of Baynote, about the future of Web 2.0. The company provides social search and a recommendation engine for social networks.

1. What's the story on how the company started?

Three things drove the creation of Baynote: a disconnect between content creation versus consumption, the notion that the wisdom of crowds trumps expert opinion, and the need for so-called Web 2.0 engineering to incorporate social science. During my last couple of years at Interwoven, customers started to ask me why they should create more content when they didn't even know who was using it. For me, that signified a big gap between the way companies create and display content and how their customers consume it. I began pursuing and validating different market ideas, and in the process, the wisdom of crowds told me what to build. I did a blind survey of potential buyers, which included over fifty CTO's, CIO's, and CEO's. I presented several business ideas to these people, including one for Baynote. The question was simple: if I build it, would you buy it? On a scale of 1 to 10, the Baynote concept got 10 out of 10, except for one rank of 11, given by then eBay COO Maynard Webb, who is now on the Baynote board.

Believing that there had to be a way to tap the wisdom of website visitors led me to the door of Cliff Nass, a renowned Stanford professor, and Baynote co-founder Scott Brave, his post-doc protégée and lab manager for the CHIMe (Communication between Humans and Interactive Media) Lab.  The combination of Nass/Brave's social science expertise, my own engineering background and that of Rob Bradshaw, our other founding partner, led to the many breakthroughs of Baynote.

2. Please share 1-2 personal stories that explain what led to your involvement in Web 2.0.

We recognized a growing need in the market for a technology that would enable website users to find the content and products they were looking for and my instinct told me that algorithms weren't enough. The key insights come further from examining how people were getting information. The answer was simple - people talk to people who might know where the info resides. So the trick is to get into people's heads and automate the process. That inspired me to go after social science and brain science instead of traditional computer science and mathematical algorithms.  Stanford Professors Cliff Nass of CHIME and Rajeev Motwani (the founding professor of Google) played key roles for me to understand the deep and controversial scientific principles that help to predict people's needs on content and products on the web. For me, materializing these academic social and brain science discoveries became a fascinating challenge and an exciting endeavor.

3. Please provide some background on the project at Stanford Scott Brave was working on.

When I first met Scott Brave at Stanford, he was working on human-computer interaction, social responses to media technologies, and digitally-mediated collaboration. He was also writing a later award winning book examining how interactive voice technologies can readily and effectively tap into the automatic responses that speech evokes, regardless of whether it was coming from a person or a machine.  For example, he was looking at the reaction and interaction styles with female voices in e-commerce and customer reactions garnered by synthetic voices inside and outside of a call center. His findings revealed that human-interaction technology can benefit immensely from a deep understanding and application of social-psychological principles. Baynote was built by taking similar principles and applying them to the way people browse, search for and consume information on the web.

4. What have you learned about how users tend to visit and use Web 2.0 services that really stands out in your mind?

Crowd wisdom trumps any individual expert, and users care about privacy and usability on the web.  Targeting visitors based on their intent, which is validated by the collective wisdom of those before them with the same intent, is a natural way for visitors to interact with your website - it's the way humans have been programmed to work.  Most importantly it kills two birds with one stone: users get useful, accurate recommendations while still avoiding the whole privacy mess. 

5. What approach do other companies use that you feel takes the users' privacy for granted?

With such a glut of products and information online, the motivation behind behavioral targeting makes sense - it seems to be a good thing for Yahoo to get me a more relevant ad because they happen to know I checked out a Prius in my local dealership. For consumers, however, there is an obvious psychological aversion to behavioral targeting, as they feel they are being personally tracked and watched. In this age of identity theft and mounting concerns over privacy in general, a practice that proactively profiles a user will sound alarms even among the least conservative of us. In addition, with so much information about us on the web, an anonymous individual on one site can quickly become a known/named user on another site once targeting starts to compare and contrast user behaviors across multiple sites. So our private information can spread out very quickly without us even knowing it.

6. How does your service get around those issues?

Baynote provides an alternative approach by analyzing "fingerprints" users leave behind, without collecting any personal data.  It looks at how people enter and leave a Web site, how long they linger on a particular item, how many times they view a particular product in addition to over ten other factors; and from there it begins to compile meaningful recommendations, rather than the "you bought this last time, how about this" model, or misleading profile information such as your color preference, age group and income level etc.

7. What do you think is next for Web 2.0?

Web 3.0, if there is such a thing, should be about bringing businesses back to be in touch with their customers. When business was owned by mom and pop, they understood their customers through interaction and knowledge about their products. But with layers of organizational structures, and thousands of long-tail products, the experts are losing touch with the customers at an alarming speed. And even if you figure out what customers want on the popular product front, the inability to move and change your business in real-time is equally damaging.

The Web 3.0 winners will be those technologies and products that help websites to most efficiently and effectively crowd source their visitors and shoppers to work for them. Web 3.0 is all about connecting these invisible users and forming a community around their implicit behaviors, versus their explicit feedback - which is riddled with survey bias. With that, Web 3.0 is really about giving a voice to the silent majority and not the loud, outspoken minority.