by Angela Guess
Scott Kirsner of Boston.com has written an article regarding a new startup, Quant5, that is working on “predictive analytics.” Kirsner writes, “The company has been working since last September on a new software-as-a-service offering that will perform ‘predictive analytics,’ and this summer, it is conducting beta tests with eight customers. The team includes Doug Levin, formerly CEO of Black Duck Software and Ayeah Games; Monster and HP veteran Todd Wildman; and Marcelo Ballestiero, founder of Spirits Tecnologia in Brazil. They’ve been collaborating with a group of PhD candidates at MIT’s Operations Research Center, Wildman says, ‘to take cutting-edge academic research and turn it into working solutions.’ (Wildman is on the left in the photo, Ballestiero on the right.)”
He continues, “Quant5′s first application will focus on helping companies analyze their customer base, looking for opportunities to cross-sell other products to existing customers, reduce customer churn, or identify products that should be priced differently. ‘We’ve been working with a bed and bath products retailer,’ Levin says, ‘and one thing they’d like to know is what is the next product they should offer to a customer who has just bought a set of bed sheets. We looked at 90 million records of purchases, and applied some very sophisticated math, to get at these really interesting relationships between one purchase and the next’.”
photo credit: Quant5
