by Angela Guess
Barry Levine recently wrote in MarketingLand, “Suppose that, someday in the future, a data-besieged marketer could use menu commands or plain English text to ask questions about any data. That future, according to a company called Equals 3, is here, and it’s called Lucy. Launched recently, she is the first marketing-focus portal built on services provided by IBM’s now-legendary cognitive supercomputer, Watson. ‘There is nothing in the marketplace like Lucy,’ Equals 3 Managing Partner Scott Litman told me. ‘She is a user interface for all my marketing systems.’ The name of his company, which was founded last year, derives from the idea that a person plus a computer can equal something bigger than their sum. Lucy’s name is taken from a grandchild of IBM founder Thomas Watson.”
Levine goes on, “Equals 3 doesn’t have an exclusive arrangement with IBM to utilize Watson for marketing, but Litman pointed out that his company has concocted a unique creature among the approximately 100 commercialized solutions based on the cognitive computing system. Lucy combines 10 computing services from Watson, including Retrieve and Rank, Natural Language Classifier, Personality Insights, a news aggregation service and Tradeoff Analytics. Litman said that these services have not previously worked together as they do in Lucy, plus Equals 3 created its own interface and layered on other unspecified custom software to focus on marketing.”
Photo credit: Equals 3