Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Stephanie Newby, CEO of Crimson Hexagon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How does your technology correlate these products? Is this where your ability to do image analysis kicks in?

Stephanie Newby: Image analytics is still a little young. Most of the image analytics that’s currently being used in the platform is logo recognition. If you were in Starbucks and you took a photograph of yourself, we could identify that that was a Starbucks logo. Starbucks, as a company, can find all the places where their logo has been caught in a snapshot.

Without the logo, we are actually working on the ability to identify trends in fashion, for example, based on what people are wearing or what’s creating buzz at events like the New York Fashion Show. If a particular hairdo was worn, and if we can see that somebody has snapped a particular photograph of a model with a hairdo, that would be very interesting to know early on in an event like that because the designers could capitalize on it immediately, rather than having a wasted opportunity. That’s where we’re headed. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Stephanie Newby, CEO of Crimson Hexagon (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’m particularly interested in understanding the predictive part of it. Let’s understand how you predict stuff based on a use case.

Stephanie Newby: The best way to think of that is to start tracking things and look for correlation between things. Then test them out. Start with some hypothesis, test that out and adjust them based on other data that you’re getting. I find that this is more valuable to have than just one source of data.

One source of data might be predicting something but you’re not sure for how long it will apply. If you bring in other data, it enables you to refine that forecasting capability more accurately because now you can start to see the cause and effect more easily. If I’m tracking an advertising campaign for a new product launch, a new cereal, for example. I’ll be tracking the social media conversation. It could be just volume. It could also be sentiment or finding out what’s positive in the conversation versus what’s negative in the conversation. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Stephanie Newby, CEO of Crimson Hexagon (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a few different use cases and segments and understand how people are using your technology. You started about the movie and entertainment industry. You can pick a customer and talk about how, where, and how this is being used.

Stephanie Newby: I’m actually now sure which customers I can discuss from that industry.

Sramana Mitra: You can just talk about the use case without naming a customer. I’m interested, for instance, how film studios are using this.

Stephanie Newby: Five of the six movie studios have been our customers for many years. They use this to predict box office ratings by following movie trailer releases. A movie like Fast & Furious for example has a huge social media following because the actors themselves are very big users of social media. They will actually start the buzz about a movie while they’re filming because they will be talking about the stunts and the scenes they’re doing. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Stephanie Newby, CEO of Crimson Hexagon (Part 1)

Image and video analytics are at the frontier of mobile and social interactions currently. Read on to understand the use cases and open problems.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Crimson Hexagon.

Stephanie Newby: I’m the CEO of Crimson Hexagon. We are a big data, social media analytics company. We actually have a market leadership position in our market, which is very exciting. The reason is we have three things that’s very compelling from a customer’s point of view. Number one we have a huge base of data set of over 800 billion posted social media data since we started in this business, which was in 2008.

What that enables our customers to do is mine all of this data to get insight from consumers about what they’re talking about whether it’s a brand, or a customer service issue. Secondly, we have very deep data science that is patented and protected and therefore, we have aspects of our technology that enables customers to have the flexibility to ask any question of social media. It could be, “What are people saying about last year’s Super Bowl campaign?” >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why do I need to have a real estate agent with me? If I’m doing this on Trulia, for example, the listing should have all this information available right there. I can figure out the five properties that I’m interested in.

Josh Koppel: I completely agree with that. I think the same thing with the car. I agree that a lot of people are learning about what they want online. I think that people are mostly wanting to have a physical experience with something that is a big purchase like a car or a home.

Sramana Mitra: Eventually. Earlier to buy a house, you’d drive around all summer long. Every weekend, you’re going around with your agents to look at properties. I don’t think that’s necessary.

Josh Koppel: I completely agree with that, but I still think that at the end, the final experience is going to be one that has some human interaction. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The next question I have is that your assumption, it sounds like, this is going to be used by a human sales representative interacting with another human potential buyer around an iPad. Is that a correct observation?

Josh Koppel: That’s correct, yes. We think that that’s the most effective type of sell. When you think about all the other types of content, everything is vying for your attention. We think that a face-to-face interaction is the most successful.

Sramana Mitra: Not all products warrant, price point wise, that kind of sales. I don’t see why the experience that you’re describing cannot be done over a phone conversation as well.

Josh Koppel: It can. I’m leaning into the type of selling that we do. You’re right. There’s a ton of other ways in which you can have a conversation. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you would like to present any other use case or scenario, we could do that.

Josh Koppel: The last one is something that we recently just did for GM. GM has just launched a car called the Bolt. It’s a hugely exciting project because it’s the first $30,000 fully electric car. GM basically beat Tesla to the marketplace, which is a huge deal for GM. The problem is that it’s coming out in seven months. The four models they have are touring around the auto show. We were able to take assets that their agency had built to do a 3D VR of the interior of the car.

Now at the car show, people can not only look at the car but they can actually look inside it without really going inside it. This is a thing that was built in weeks, which is very rare for creating highly interactive content. It has just been a hugely successful thing for GM. It’s a brand new arrow in their quiver. That’s really what this is for. This is for having meaningful conversations with customers where you could use the iPad as the sales assistant. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Josh Koppel, Founder of ScrollMotion (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we do a couple of more scenarios and, specifically, highlight stuff that your technology can do that other ways of trying to achieve the same goals cannot deliver.

Josh Koppel: The first thing is paper.

Sramana Mitra: Brochures. You hand out brochures, and brochures are just not engaging and interactive.

Josh Koppel: Also, there’s two other big issues. There’s no analytics. Once you print it, you don’t know how it’s being used and the second thing is as soon as you print it, it’s outdated. Just the amount of money that these companies were spending on printing was outrageous because every time something changed, not only did they have to reprint everything but they actually also have to destroy the material because this is a totally regulated environment. It has to actually go away or there are consequences. Those two things were hugely valuable to pharmaceutical companies. >>>