The secret of personalization technology is now open. Predictive technology offered by vendors like RichRelevance, Baynote, ExactTarget and Sailthru will no longer be a secret. These companies began to offer โ€œblack-boxโ€ solutions to e-commerce clients who lacked the in-house technology, while e-commerce businesses later started to hire data scientists in order to build a business advantage using data science. 

PredictionIO, the open source machine learning server, has released a suite of five e-commerce predictive engines, with a complete customizable source code and access to the algorithms. They cover a broad range of personalization applications. Instead of offering personalized prediction features by a blackbox, PredictionIO disrupts the industry by open sourcing all different prediction enginesโ€™ code for e-commerce businesses. Developers and data scientists in e-commerce and mobile commerce companies can use them at no cost. They can also customize the code to fit their own business needs.

โ€œThe IO in PredictionIO stands for Input/Output. We want to get developers making predictions in their products as simple as just inputting the data and getting the predicted output.โ€ CEO of PredictionIO, Simon Chan said. 

Founded in January 2014, the company raised US$2. 5M in seed funding last July from Stanford Universityโ€™s StartXQuestVP, Azure CapitalXG Ventures, Sood Ventures, Ironfire Capital, Kima Ventures, CrunchFund and 500Startups. The companyโ€™s Open Source Machine Learning server is empowering hundreds of applications with 6000 developers engaged in the project to enable developers and data scientists to build predictive applications in a fraction of the time. The Silicon Valley-based company has mainly US, Europe and India-based users, and has active users and an open source contributor community in China. 

Image Credit: PredictionIO

Editing by Mike Cormack (@bucketoftongues)

Eva Yoo is Shanghai-based tech writer. Reach her at evayoo@ovau.ip-ddns.com

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