10 Cloud Startups That Are Driving e-Commerce

by Chris Preimesberger

BloomReach’s big data marketing applications drive e-commerce by identifying the most relevant products and services found on any platform. BloomReach contends that 80 percent of a site’s content is invisible to consumers. Its core technology, the Web Relevance Engine, captures demand by harnessing big data from across the Web to match the consumer’s intent and behavior with the customer’s content. It analyzes long-tail searches against billions of synonym pairs and semantic interpretation through continuously learning algorithms to understand the language of shoppers. Customers include Neiman Marcus, Guess, Williams-Sonoma, Meijer and Drugstore.com.

HubSpot’s stated mission is to create marketing that is not “annoying.” HubSpot provides software that helps companies improve buyer interaction, from keyword research and social media to content and email marketing to forms and offers. HubSpot claims more than 8,600 companies in 56 countries use the software to create in-bound marketing to attract, convert and close visitors, leads and customers.

TellApart provides marketing products that enable retailers to leverage their own customer data to drive revenue growth. The TellApart Shopper Intelligence Platform applies machine learning to big data, helping retailers identify their highest quality sales prospects and provide them with personalized, perfectly targeted display advertising. TellApart’s services include Transactional Retargeting and Audience Targeting. TellApart customers include eBags, CafePress, Diapers.com, HauteLook and Hayneedle.

Moovweb offers products and services that help companies take advantage of the move to mobile commerce. It’s a cloud-based platform that uses a patent-pending site virtualization and transformation approach for mobile. The Moovweb platform claims to have served billions of mobile page views for customers, including Macy’s, Chico’s, the American Cancer Society and Accenture.

Bazaarvoice is a social and e-commerce software company that helps clients leverage social data derived from online word-of-mouth content to increase sales, acquire new customers, improve marketing effectiveness, enhance consumer engagement across channels and increase the success of product launches. It also uses social data to help improve existing products and services, effectively scale customer support, decrease product returns, and enable retailers to launch and manage on-site advertising solutions and site monetization strategies.

The DataPop platform helps companies build millions of ads per day that are machine-generated but are supposed to read as if a person handcrafted each individual ad. DataPop’s patent-pending technology uses semantic algorithms and natural language processing systems to generate online ads that take advantage of what’s unique about a marketer’s brand and offerings. DataPop’s “Creative Science” platform is designed to figure out what’s important to consumers and use the insights to generate ads.

Rocket Fuel delivers the programmatic media-buying platform at big data scale. Its distributed computing engine currently screens billions of ads per day, and selects the best for its customers, via real-time bidding (RTB) relationships with major publishers and exchanges. Rocket Fuel was founded by online advertising veterans and rocket scientists from NASA, Yahoo, Salesforce.com and DoubleClick.

Kenshoo is a digital marketing technology company that engineers applications for search marketing, social media and online advertising. The Kenshoo Universal Platform delivers automation, intelligence, integration and scale to make marketing investments. Kenshoo clients include CareerBuilder, Expedia, Facebook, Kayak and Hitwise.

Adchemy produces advertising technology that helps advertisers leverage consumer intent to create more effective digital advertising experiences. Adchemy’s IntentMap software helps marketers standardize, automate and scale their SEM channel. Customers include From You Flowers, Macy’s, Newegg, Overstock.com and Native Remedies.

Branding Brand powers mobile commerce sites and apps for leading retailers, including American Eagle Outfitters, Crate & Barrel, Ralph Lauren and Sephora. The Branding Brand platform scales to different clients and supports all forms of smartphone and tablet output. It claims to require no IT resources, no systems integration and no Web development.