创业偶像

    Clever Sense公司凭借“数字好朋友”应用程序获奖

    如果你幸运的话，你可能会有一位食客朋友，他知道城里所有热门的餐厅。更贴心的是，他还知道你对贝类过敏，喜欢南方菜。如果你没这么幸运的话，不要紧，你可以下载一款名叫Alfred的应用。它能了解用户的口味和偏好，向您推荐吃美食的去处。

    这款应用是一家名叫Clever Sense的公司研发的。头一次听到Alfred这个名字的时候，你可以会觉得它和其他推荐类应用没什么区别。但是这项技术的特别之处在于，它的推荐结果完全基于你的口味，（而且只需要不到一秒钟的时间）。它的潜力可不只限于告诉你下顿饭吃什么。正是由于Clever Sense的这项技术拥有广阔的前景，因而在本次峰会的“创业偶像”竞赛环节上，它获得了风投公司的最高票数。

    Clever Sense的共同创始人巴巴克•帕勒万和尼玛•阿斯加尔贝基是在2008年认识的，当时他们二人都在斯坦福大学学习数据挖掘和人工智能。经过两年的研发，他们在2010年创立了Clever Sense，并且聘请了诺伯托•吉马拉伊什作为产品主管。

    Alfred与亚马逊（Amazon）或网飞（Netflix）一样，也可以告诉你，你的同好都喜欢什么。而且就像其它移动应用一样，Alfred可以确定用户的地理位置，并能让用户根据价格和菜系对餐厅进行筛选。不过它的过人之处在于，它的搜索引擎可以不断地在网络上收集、组织和更新餐厅的信息，而且它的人机对话方式跟人与人之间的对话几乎没什么差别。然后系统会生成一份图表，将具有相同属性的餐厅汇总在一起。28岁的帕勒万解释道：“我们的系统甚至能理解‘Badass’这句脏话什么时候能用在正面的语境中。”用户提供的反馈越多，Alfred就会变得越智能，它会识别出用户的偏好模式，然后将用户的偏好与它的兴趣图谱进行比对，最后给出建议。

    Alfred登录苹果（Apple）的应用商店短短两周就已经挤进了iPhone最受欢迎的生活类应用的前20名。Alfred是Clever Sense的第一款产品，或许在未来的某一天，它的技术可以用来帮用户寻找最喜欢的电视节目，或是最喜欢的旅游胜地。如果你没有一个对各种美食餐厅都门儿清的朋友，那么Alfred也是一个不错的替代品。不过到目前为止，Clever Sense还没能把它打造成一个非常健谈的机器人。所以最好还是多交些人类的朋友吧。

    ——杰西卡•沙姆波拉

Startup idol

    Contest winner clever sense scores with a digital "BFF"

    If you're lucky, you have a friend who knows all the hot restaurants in town -- and also knows you're allergic to shellfish and like Southern food. If you're not that lucky, there's Alfred, an app that learns tastes and preferences and recommends venues for dining out.

    At first pass, Alfred, from a startup called Clever Sense, may sound like a raft of other recommendation apps out there, but the technology that powers it delivers results specifically for you (in less than a second), and has the potential to help you discover much more than your next meal. Indeed, Clever Sense's vast prospects helped it earn the most votes in Brainstorm Tech's Startup Idol competition for companies raising money.

    Clever Sense co-founders Babak Pahlavan and Nima Asgharbeygi met in 2008 when both were studying data mining and artificial intelligence at Stanford. After two years of research and development, they set to work building Clever Sense in 2010, and hired Norberto Guimaraes as head of product along the way.

    Like Amazon or Netflix, Alfred can show you like-minded customers' preferences. And as with other mobile apps, it can figure out where you are and allows you to filter by price or cuisine. But the real secret sauce is an engine that constantly crawls the web gathering, organizing, and updating information on places in the way that human beings actually talk about them. The system then creates a graph that connects those places based on similar attributes. "Our system understands that the word 'badass' is actually being used in a positive context," Pahlavan, 28, explains. The more feedback you provide, the smarter Alfred gets, recognizing patterns in your preferences and then matching them to its interest graph to come up with suggestions.

    After a couple of weeks in Apple's app store, Alfred has ranked among the iPhone's top 20 free lifestyle apps. And it is just Clever Sense's first product; the technology could someday help you discover TV shows or vacation destinations. But while Alfred is a good substitute for a friend who knows all the hot spots, Clever Sense hasn't figured out a way to make it a good conversationalist. Until then, you'd best keep cultivating human friends.

    --Jessica Shambora