Babelmachine

Fil-Am Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake has hunch about new company

Sep 3, 2009 16:24

Can we teach a Web site to help us make better decisions? Caterina Fake has a hunch that this is, indeed, the case--and that it can be the basis for a profitable business.

American entrepreneur Fake is best known for being the co-founder of one of the world's most successful image and video-sharing sites, Flickr. What some may not be aware of, however, is Fake's Filipino roots.

"I have been to the Philippines, and still have many relatives living in Manila and Pampanga. Favorite Filipino dish? My mother makes great morcon (beef or pork rolls), yum," she shared.

Fake has now co-founded Hunch.com, a site that aims to make use of machine learning to help people in decision-making.

What's the story behind Hunch?

"I met my co-founders who were a bunch of brilliant MIT computer scientists working on machine learning and decision trees in 2008. With my background in user-generated content and collective knowledge systems, it was a great match of skills.

"I'd been working on social search at Yahoo!, and I felt like adding decision trees to the mix was a big step forward," Fake said.

Yahoo! purchased Flickr in 2005, and after the acquisition Fake ran the Technology Development group at Yahoo!, including work on Yahoo! Answers. She left Yahoo! last year.

Asked what makes Hunch different from sites that provide answers to questions from users, Fake replied: "On most 'Answers' sites, a person asks a question that other people answer. Hunch works differently--Hunch asks 10 questions and gives you a result that it wouldn't give other users. Using a decision tree model, it asks a series of follow-up questions and then gives you a result."

Theoretically, at least, this means that Hunch is tailored to your own decision making process. By teaching the site, it learns your preferences--how you arrive at your decisions--and the more you use it, the better it will be able to help you decide.

That's all well and good, but how does Hunch intend to generate revenue by helping people make practical decisions?

"Hunch will make money from sponsored links. When you get to a product result page, it will have a link to somewhere you can buy the suggested product. This has no effect on the results you receive, and works in a similar way to search engines," Fake shared.

Named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2006, apart from numerous other awards, Fake certainly brings a lot of credibility and experience to her latest start-up. Only time will tell, however, if her latest venture will turn out to be another great success like Flickr.

Asked what advice she would give to would-be technopreneurs, Fake replied: "Make sure you find some great co-founders for your company who have complementary skills, and keep iterating until you have something that people use and love."

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