This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Every Thursday, the program focuses on startups within the BizSpark program and what they’re doing to grow.
If the name Clever Sense doesn’t ring a bell, that’s likely because the nearly three year-old Mountain View-based startup has been operating under the radar for much of its existence, bootstrapped by co-founder Babak Pahlavan.
The company is applying artificial intelligence to location-based services and is readying a big release of its first product, Seymour, for iPhone and Android. It is expected toward the end of the first quarter. Clever Sense has also raised roughly $1.5 million in financing, is aggressively going after more funds, has four Ph.Ds on staff and has scored a renowned advisor in Stanford Professor Jeff Ullman, who was the Ph.D advisor to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. As such, Clever Sense is a name that you will know soon enough.
So, what is it and what does it do? “Clever Sense is an artificial intelligence-based, context-aware platform for location-based services. It’s the culmination of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data learning,” explains Pahlavan. “It’s a next generation Siri.”
In layman’s terms, Clever Sense has crafted technology to personalize your mobile experience. The technology will be used in company-built and third-party mobile applications that aim to harness data from your social graph and location in conjunction with place and time information to create serendipitous experiences in mobile.
Seymour, Your Personal Concierge
Seymour provides a first, appetite-whetting taste of how Clever Sense’s technology can be applied to real world, practical problems. Seymour recommends places based on where you are, who you’re with and what you want in the moment.
It resembles Siri, but goes further to discover what is good or bad about a place through sentiment analysis of Yelp and Citysearch reviews, and saves personal “Taste Cards” for you, based on your mood and preferences.
Ask Seymour for places that serve lunch or dinner and use descriptive words and phrase like “vegan,” “cheap” or “group-friendly” to narrow your query and the app will work to match your interests to nearby places. You can even further specify that you’re looking for something similar to place you know you like, say, Peet’s Coffee or The Cheesecake Factory.
Seymour is designed to process natural language commands, as opposed to queries, so you can ask it something nearly identical to what you’d ask a friend. It’s meant to be conversational and friendly. Pahlavan describes the overall experience as “searchless, search.”
Once Seymour recommends top places, you can teach it to better recognize your tastes by giving suggested places thumbs up or thumbs down reviews. Suggestions are revised as you rate places. Eventually, Seymour will learn from your Facebook Places and Foursquare checkins too.
The beta mobile application was recently released for Windows Phone 7. Pahlavan stresses that the application was released merely to solicit feedback, but he’s been impressed with the response so far. The startup also has its eye on hotter mobile platforms: iOS and Android. More sophisticated versions of Seymour are currently in the works for each platform.
The Road Ahead
A company like Clever Sense, which relies on the sophistication of its technology to stand out, is only as good as the people it employs. The current team is comprised of top engineers, AI and machine learning experts and Ph.D holders. But, once Clever Sense makes its big mobile push onto iPhone and Android, the startup will need to expand its team to support growth.
Finding quality talent will be Clever Sense’s greatest challenge, according to Pahlavan. There’s an ongoing talent war between Google, Facebook and Apple that makes it difficult for a lesser known startup like Clever Sense to find the best candidates and offer them a competitive-enough compensation package, he says. The startup will need to raise more funds should it wish to compete.
But Pahlavan has confidence in Clever Sense’s ability to carve out a new frontier in mobile. “There’s no else in mobile doing what we’re doing,” he says.
And he may be right. You may recall that Siri was acquired by Apple. Should Clever Sense’s technology be as good as Pahlavan describes, it too will have a bright future. But first it will have to find an audience.
“This is just the beginning of a long story,” Pahlavan says. We hope he’s right.
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