Scarab Research

Scarab introduces shredder service for big data

Viktor — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:47:04 +0000

Leading personalization and analytics company Scarab Research Inc unveiled today a whole new class of big data solutions, called the Scarab Shredder Service (S3). The Shredder Service enables companies to securely erase data at an unprecedented scale, on-demand, and in the cloud.

Disposal of big data is an acute problem for large online organizations, requiring an ever growing retinue of staff and storage, problems that are made more complex by strict safe disposal and recycling regulations especially in the context of classified information as evidenced by Wikileaks.

The Scarab Shredder Service allows companies to easily get rid of all unwanted traffic logs, user profiles and histories, taking any structured or semi-structured information and converting it into perfectly unstructured data using a high-performance, fault tolerant cloud service. Scarab guarantees that data sent over to S3 is deleted safely, using the latest cryptographic techniques based on Bruce Schneier’s wiping algorithm. There is no way the data can ever be restored once it arrives in Scarab’s virtualized shredder.

“No more mucking about with slow SQL deletes, or the ambiguous rm command. With our convenient REST API businesses now have access to total and irrecoverable deletion of any and all data, regardless of size or format.” – said CEO Viktor Szathmáry.

As a first consumer application of the technology the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio, announced a new iPhone application, named simply Waste. Waste is the best way to access S3 from iPhones and iPads. Any text entered into Waste is immediately sent to the S3 cloud for effortless elimination. “We are excited to introduce a mobile app surpassing Angry Birds as the purest form of wasting users’ time.” – said Rovio CEO Mikael Hed. Waste is available for 99 cents in the App Store.

As a company dedicated to the concept of sustainable development, Scarab Research will also be offering the Remote Recycling and Randomization API (R3), which complements S3 by providing means to recycle and reuse the bits of data destroyed. The breakthrough Randomization API creates pure white noise from the 1s and 0s disassembled by the Shredder. Scarab Premium users can even configure the API to supply a filtered output, returning a perfect series of either 1s or 0s.

Scarab is accepting registrations for the service at shred.scarabresearch.com

Scarab Research triumphs at major news portal competition

maroy — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:05:27 +0000

In the summer of 2011, all major regional recommendation system companies, including Scarab Research, took part in a content recommendation system competition organized by origo.hu, a major Hungarian news portal. As part of the competition, Scarab engineers prepared for months, fine tuning the Scarab content recommender in anticipation of the two week long show-down. During the competition period, all competing systems were displaying their recommendations live on the origo.hu news portal, and key metrics were measured for each of them to determine which one provides the best results in a content-recommendation context.

To our delight, Scarab’s recommendation system provided the largest improvement for all key metrics.

The relative improvement compared to Origo’s baseline is plotted below:

During the two week show-down period Scarab’s recommender improved click-through ratio by 42.08% compared to the baseline of Origo’s existing content recommendations, with the second best solution reaching a 41.23% improvement. Scarab’s content recommender increased the number of page views by 4.5%, leading contenders by a thick margin with the second-best solution improving only 1.5% on this metric. Taking the combined results of these two key metrics, only Scarab’s content recommendation algorithm showed a significant improvement – competing systems could only improve one of these metrics to any significant degree on, but not both.

Why are these metrics important?

Click-through ratio

The click-through ratio metric shows the amount of people clicking on a particular link on a web page – for example a link leading to another news article on a news site. Improving on this metric shows the immediate effectiveness of a recommendation system.

Page views per session

The page views per session metrics shows how many pages or articles each visitor is reading on a news portal, when visiting the portal. This metric is vital in showing readers’ engagement and interest in a particular news portal. Improving on the page views per session metric is a strategic goal for all online news portals.

About Scarab Research

Scarab Research helps online merchants and media companies grow their business by applying intelligent behavior-based recommendations. Our technology is proving itself every day at some of the largest online retailers (eg. FreshDirect.com, New York). Our Scarab Cloud service brings recommendations to small/medium sized businesses in a cost effective way.

FreshDirect’s Secret Sauce

Viktor — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:49:44 +0000

“The customer data that we collect, is in my opinion, really our ‘secret sauce’. We know every single SKU every customer has bought with us on every one of their visits. On the cart page, as you’re checking out, we bring up what we call ‘Your Favorites’, which are the 5 items that you have purchased most frequently in the past but did not purchase on that visit. A second example is if you buy say a 2-inch thick steak, which is of course cut to order, we can look back at the last time you bought a 2-inch thick steak and bring up cross-sells of things you actually bought when you bought that last item and/or what customers like you bought when they bought a similar item. Those 2 items alone have increased our revenue by over 10%, on every single order,” said Braddock.

New York’s largest online grocer FreshDirect operates a fully customized version of the Scarab Enterprise recommender product to ensure their competitive lead with a cutting edge personalized recommender system.

Watch the full interview on CNNMoney.

Top Hungarian online retailers use Scarab technology

Viktor — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:22:55 +0000

Bookline.hu is the largest online retailer on the market based on the number of orders placed. The online bookstore was our first user, rolling out a fully customized version of our Enterprise product in 2009. Bookline.hu has snatched the top award at the competition for the past two years.

The second and third prizes were awarded to Extreme Digital (a retailer in electronics) and Jateknet.hu (a seller of toys and games) who are both users of our Scarab Cloud product, launched only 4 months ago.

The extremely rapid market penetration we’re seeing with Scarab Cloud is a clear sign that the cloud’s advantages – radically quick implementation and zero investment – are meeting the real world needs of online retailers. It is also an indication of the viability of our subscription model.

We want to congratulate the winners, and wish much success to the other competitors as well.

Google and Scarab exchanges researchers

Viktor — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:42:41 +0000

In a funny game of circumstances Scarab Research entered into an exchange of thinking talent with Google. Former Google project leader and software engineer Dániel Fogaras, Ph.D., recently joined Scarab Research to oversee research and development for Scarab’s cutting edge personalization and recommendation engine, a system using highly advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. At the same time István Hernádvölgyi, Ph.D., who has headed Scarab’s research department for the past few years, is taking a new step in his career, moving to Zürich, Switzerland to work with Google.

“We wish István the best with this new adventure, and are happy for what we feel is a fair swap,” commented Scarab Research CTO Ákos Maróy.

Dr. Fogaras holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. During his PhD training, he specialized in scalable data mining algorithms and introduced new techniques for retrieving related web pages from the hyper-link structure of the web. He started his professional carrier by joining Google Inc., Mountain View, California in 2006 and transferred to Google Switzerland in Zürich in 2008. He contributed to the AdWords and AdSense products as a software engineer, researcher and project leader. He developed new components and initiated projects for fighting click fraud and for targeting ads. He is experienced both in offline log-analysis infrastructure and online serving systems.

“I am very pleased to be joining Scarab at a time when it is making important strides in advancing its world class portfolio of innovative new products and technology,” stated Dr. Fogaras.

NY’s largest online grocer adopts Scarab recommender

Viktor — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:55:20 +0000

Scarab is extremely proud of this contract because FreshDirect is well known for its commitment to offering customers only the freshest and best. FreshDirect has spent almost a year finding the right technology, and has evaluated over a dozen competing recommender solutions before deciding to partner with Scarab.

Currently in the first phase of the roll-out, it is the starting point of a long-term commitment for Scarab Research, during which we will be dedicated to optimizing FreshDirect’s recommender model and eventually expanding the recommendations to all of FreshDirect’s customers.

“To have FreshDirect among our clients is obviously a source of pride for Scarab Research. As the largest online grocery operating in the New York area, FreshDirect provides us with a unique opportunity to showcase the superior flexibility and performance of our product. FreshDirect is a company that fully appreciates the importance of quality service, and we are very happy they think Scarab is the one that can best deliver.” – said Scarab CEO Viktor Szathmáry.

“When we started out on this project, our main criterion was that the recommender service should be able to provide the level of service and insight our customers are used to. So we spent time and effort on finding a solution that best displayed the qualities we would look for in our overall service offering: insight, usefulness, and a deep knowledge of each and every customer. And that is exactly what Scarab does for us.” – said Dean Marano, CIO – FreshDirect

Try out the Scarab recommender today

If you are interested in launching a cutting edge recommender service in your own webshop, you can sign up for a free trial of Scarab Cloud – the technology is offered in the form of Software as a Service. You can have Scarab Cloud up and running in just a few hours, at no initial costs.

Contact signup@scarabresearch.com.

Proudly presenting Scarab Cloud

csaba — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:17:05 +0000

Scarab Cloud is targeted at small and medium size webstores offering cutting-edge recommender technology in an extremely affordable package by leveraging the advantages of cloud computing services.

Our hope is that Scarab Cloud will help smaller online retailers to get back in competition with the biggest sellers by offering the possibility to use enterprise-grade technology at a fraction of enterprise-grade costs.

In that spirit, we have put together a series of subscription plans that will allow even the smallest startup to offer cutting-edge personalized recommendations to their customers. The subscriptions are defined to make certain a positive ROI right from the first month.
Scarab Cloud requires no extra hardware or software, and no maintenance. In fact, you can have it up and running in your webshop in just a few hours.

To top it all, we are offering a 30-day free trial so you can have Scarab Cloud start making money for you without even having to spend any.

To mark the event, we have indulged ourselves with a largely reworked website, which I now urge you to explore to learn more about the many great benefits of Scarab Cloud product.

Bookline.hu launches personalized recommendations

csaba — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:23:48 +0000

Personalized recommendations offer an exciting new way for returning customers to discover products that match their personal tastes, even though they may never heard of them before.

“It gives us great satisfaction to see the Scarab system running at Bookline.hu reach maturity,” said Viktor Szathmáry, Scarab Research’s CEO. “This system was launched almost exactly a year ago and during this period it has learned a great deal about the preferences of Bookline’s customers. Enough to now step up to the next stage and start offering precision-tooled personalized recommendations to returning customers.”

The personalized service primarily uses registered customers’ purchasing and browsing histories, which it combines with other information to identify the products that are most consistent with the given customer’s personal preferences.

“The real gain with personalized recommendations is the possibility to offer customers a variety of items that are in line with their personal tastes, although they have not searched for them, or even heard about them. Yet the recommended item will very likely be something the user likes. It’s a tool for discovering great new things without bothering to look for them.” – commented Ákos Maróy, Scarab Research’s CTO.

Bookline.hu’s personalized recommendations are displayed straight on registered users’ landing pages in a new box titled “Personalized Recommendations”, taking the place of the previously used Top Sellers box. The new service offers a quick shortcut for customers to find the things they really like, without needing to search or browse Bookline.hu’s growing catalogue of books, digital media, electronics and other products.

The new service is now available to all users, after completing a successful test period. Early statistics show a significant increase in sales performance compared to the previously used Top Sellers module, proving the high quality of the recommendations.

Study shows Scarab performance dwarfs competitors

Viktor — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:13:18 +0000

Indeed, Scarab was seen to dominate its closest (and much larger) competitor by almost 100% in the benchmark tests performed in a simulated environment controlled by the research group. In similar tests, Scarab was shown to top metrics based on human performance by a mind-boggling 114,285% – that’s onehundredfourteenthousand and some.

The study was published in the March 23 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Because of the unusual extremity of the metrics, major media outlets also picked up the story in the following days, to our greatest satisfaction.

Sources:
Daily Mail
The Guardian
Science Daily

Congratulations to Bookline.hu

Viktor — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:14:10 +0000

Scarab Research has come to know Bookline.hu as a highly engaged, reasonable and effective company managed by some excellent people, and we think they fully deserve the recognition. And of course, we also take some vain pride in this achievement, thinking that the successful introduction of the Scarab Platform to Bookline.hu’s storefront did contribute somewhat to their overall success. Indeed Bookline.hu launched its Scarab-powered product recommendation service a mere 5 months ago, and we are happy to report that the first results are spectacular. With the Scarab Platform, Bookline.hu realized a 54% growth in sales made through product recommendations and a 52% growth in the average order value of shopping carts containing recommendations. Furthermore, in this short period of time, Bookline.hu has managed to fully recoup its investment related to adopting the Scarab Platform – in these times of global recession, we consider this to be a major result.

The Online Business of the Year Award is sponsored by Hungary’s CIB Bank and was distributed for the fifth time this year. Nominees are selected through a public vote, and a selection of the top 10 nominees are judged by a panel of experts.