Startup Of The Week: YouplusGo to the profile of Jennifer L. Schenker
Jennifer L. Schenker
Feb 22
Youplus has developed a search engine and neural network machine-learning tool that interprets and delivers consumer insights from videos on the Internet for marketers, researchers, and brand managers. It claims to be the first company to index « the world’s opinion » via video, with the aim of transforming the way consumer market research is conducted. Clients include Lenovo, Unilever, Pepsi , Samsung, BMW, Coca Cola and Volvo.
Today some 74% of traffic on the Internet is video. In video, people share information differently. This valuable but unstructured data appears in spurts. With machine cognition, important moments are separated and indexed for AI-powered processing, says the company. This allows Youplus to isolate, for example, millions of people’s opinion of a particular brand of mobile phone and to understand why people have a certain opinion : why they buy, how they feel and why they have a certain opinion.
« Human conversation is the best tool that anyone has to understand consumers, » says Shaukat Shamim, founder & CEO of Youplus. Until now companies have been using focus groups, polls and surveys to ask consumers what they think and rely on humans to interpret the results. « All of the techniques are the same, simulating human conversations. It usually takes one to three months or even longer and costs a lot of money, » he says. « We have changed that world forever. »
Shamim says Youplus can deliver the results in about 48 hours. « Today’s businesses don’t have the luxury of waiting for three months to know what consumers are thinking, » he says. « We are bringing the new world of AI and speed to offline businesses so that they know what their customers are buying in real-time, just like Amazon does.”
Youplus, which has offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London, Bangalore and Singapore, is working with big brands across a variety of industries, says Shamim, a serial entrepreneur. Prior to Youplus, Shaukat was the founder and CEO of Buysight, a performance marketing company that was acquired by AOL. He also founded Rhythm Newmedia, one of the first mobile advertising companies that merged with Blinx and subsequently went public as RhythmOne. And , he was an early member of the Yahoo! , where he led the creation of one of the first messaging platforms, Yahoo Messenger.
https://innovator.news/startup-of-the-week-youplus-be09fa2bc370?fbclid=IwAR3YmOFkgVErScW0dpxHal7zmRc8oiizmp8UkeRiJWi14_EOMq0Dh-Ra994
